A Pragmatist-Semiotic Approach to Digital Identity

Abstract

This chapter proposes a Peircean semiotic framework for understanding digital identity as an ongoing process of semiosis rather than a fixed property of the subject. Drawing on Peirce's categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, it examines how algorithmic mediation reshapes the qualitative, resistant, and mediating dimensions of identity. It introduces the concept of degenerate algorithmic Thirdness to describe mediations that imitate triadic semiosis while limiting its fallibilist openness. Generative identities and large language models are then analysed as configurations that intensify this tension and challenge models of human-AI complementarity. The chapter concludes by asking how interpretative openness, understood through Peircean vagueness, may be preserved within increasingly predictive and operationalised semiotic chains.