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Twilight is many things. It’s a vampire story. It’s a love story. But it’s also a story of discovery. When Bella Swan learns that Edward Cullen is a vampire, she discovers a hidden world.

Like science fiction and fantasy authors, philosophers often write about hidden worlds. The philosophy of learning, discovering, and knowing is called epistemology. And semiotics is the part of epistemology that looks at the different kinds of clues used in discovering things hidden. Semiotics is ultimately the study of signs, because clues are signs that point beyond themselves and give us information. Bella, of course, learns to read the signs that point to vampire.

The Signs around Tyler’s Blue Van

In Twilight chapter 3, “Phenomenon,” Tyler Crowley’s dark blue van slides on the ice in the parking lot and almost kills Bella. Somehow Edward saves her, even though he was “standing four cars down from me, staring at me in horror.” ¹ This is a mystery: How did Edward manage to save Bella? Bella finds several clues to this mystery. She notes that Edward is cold: “My head cracked against the icy black-top, and I felt something solid and cold pinning me to the ground.”² “I tried to get up, but Edward’s cold hand pushed my shoulder down.”³ She sees the imprint of Edward’s hand on the side of the van that was hurtling toward her: “Two long, white hands shot out protectively in front of me, and the van shuddered to a stop a foot from my face, the large hands fitting providentially into a deep dent in the side of the van’s body.”⁴ “When they’d lifted me away from the car, I had seen the deep dent in the tan car’s bumper—a very distinct dent that fit the contours of Edward’s shoulders . . . as if he had braced himself against the car with enough force to damage the metal frame.”⁵ She hears Edward plead with her not to ask how he saved her: “The gold in his eyes blazed. ‘Please, Bella.’”⁶ She hears Tyler’s confusion when she tells him that Edward saved her: “Cullen? I didn’t see him . . . wow, it was all so fast, I guess. Is he okay?”⁷ These clues lead Bella to believe that Edward is not quite like the other kids. Eventually she learns that the coldness, the hand imprint, the words are all signs that point to vampire.

The coldness, the deep dent in the van, and Edward’s pleas are not random events. They are signs that point beyond themselves and give Bella information about a hidden world of vampires. Indeed, they follow an ordered pattern: one, two, and three.

These signs follow the triad of icon, index, and symbol. An icon is the simplest sign, the barest feeling: Edward is cold. An index is the result of physical interaction: the imprint of Edward’s hand on the van. A symbol is a sign that gets meaning because someone makes the connection to that meaning: the words of Edward and Tyler.

1. Icon: simple feeling—coldness.

2. Index: interaction between two things—Edward’s shoulder dents the van.

3. Symbol: words that get meaning from an interpreter—“Please, don’t.”

The Philosopher of Oneness, Twoness, Threeness

Perhaps the greatest theorist of semiotics is the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914).⁸ Peirce (pronounced “purse”) was a character who would have been more at home in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire than in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.⁹

Isabella Swan and Charles Peirce are as different as two people could be. For example, Bella seems to have little or no interest in clothing or parties (she doesn’t even want to go to the prom!). But Peirce dressed in “beautiful clothes” and traveled extensively in Europe even when he couldn’t afford it.¹⁰ Bella considers using cold medicine as a sedative to be a wanton misuse of drugs. By contrast, Peirce regularly used morphine, ether, opium, and cocaine (all legal at the time) to combat his various mental conditions, such as manic-depressive disorder.¹¹ Despite the supernatural events of her life, Bella has no problem conforming to the expectations of high school. But Peirce was regularly expelled, graduated near the bottom of his class, and could not keep a regular teaching job despite having family connections.¹² Throughout his life, Peirce had a difficult time conforming to conventional morality; and during the stuffy Victorian age, his reputation for “immorality” got him into trouble time and again.

Despite these differences, Peirce’s theory of semiotics is useful for describing Bella’s discovery. And thankfully a philosopher’s theory should be judged by itself and not by the life of the philosopher. So even though Peirce’s life wasn’t particularly together, his semiotics might be. If it’s a good theory of sign relations, it should apply to Bella’s reading of the signs, too:

• An icon is a oneness. It’s the simplest experience—the color, the smell, the taste of something. It is a feeling without any reflection. Peirce wrote that icons “serve to convey ideas of things they represent simply by imitating them.”¹³ It is the color of the sky, the smell of a rose.

• An index is a twoness—it involves the interaction between two things. A weather vane reveals the direction of the wind because the wind is pushing on it. A thermometer reveals the temperature because the temperature expands and contracts the mercury in the thermometer. Pointing at the moon is a connection between two things. Demonstrative pronouns (“this” and “that”) are, too. A black eye is a sign of a fight because of the—well, you get the idea.

• A symbol is a threeness. This time the sign (1) points to the object (2) because someone (3) has made that connection. An octagonal-shaped piece of metal painted red with the white letters S-T-O-P is meaningless until someone reads it and stops her car. You have to connect that sign to the meaning “stop.” A symbol must have a reader who connects the meaning to the sign. Words are the best examples, but there are others. If you see someone with pale skin wearing black clothing, bright red lipstick, and black fingernail polish, and her hair is combed over one eye, you would probably think, “Goth.” Why? Because you know to connect those signs (black clothes, pale skin, red lips, etc.) to that meaning (Goth). That mode of dress does not by itself mean Goth—you have to make the connection.

The Sign of the Cross

Sometimes the same object can be all three sorts of signs. The best example in Twilight is the cross that Edward shows Bella in the Cullen house. First, it is an icon—the distinctive color of the wood, “its dark patina contrasting with the lighter tone of the wall.”¹⁴ Second, it is an index—it points to the 1630s Anglican Church from whence it came. Third, it is a symbol—it is not just two pieces of wood. The cross is the symbol of Christianity. Peirce told us that “symbols grow,” and this is a great example.¹⁵ The Christian cross has multiple meanings and associations. Vampires are typically afraid of Christian crosses. So the fact that these vampires have a Christian cross displayed prominently in their home tells Bella that they’re not your typical vampires. Furthermore, the fact that this particular cross is from Carlisle’s father’s Church gives Bella even more information about these vampires—they have a Christian heritage.

The Signs of a Good Vampire

Peirce went crazy with triads. He divided his original triad (icon, index, symbol) into further triads. For example, a symbol can be further subdivided into word, sentence, and argument. The best word for Twilight is “vampire.” And the best sentence for Twilight is “Edward is a vampire.” The best argument for Twilight is Bella’s reasoning that Edward must be a good vampire because he tries to save her from harm.

But that’s not enough. Peirce went even further with triads. He wrote that an argument can be further subdivided into three kinds: hypothesis, deduction, and induction.¹⁶ A hypothesis is a guess—a possible explanation of strange events. Bella guesses that Edward is a vampire. More specifically, she guesses that Edward is a good vampire. This guess explains otherwise strange events. Bella’s hypothetical argument follows this form:

• Edward acts like a vampire, but for some strange reason he won’t attack me.

• If Edward were a good vampire, then it would not be strange that he won’t attack me.

• Therefore, there is good reason to guess that Edward is a good vampire.

Notice that this argument doesn’t inspire a whole lot of confidence. It’s just a guess. Your logic teacher would probably dismiss this as a bad argument because the premises don’t really support the conclusion. There could be other possible guesses: Maybe Edward just hasn’t been hungry enough recently. But, that’s okay. A hypothesis doesn’t have to be 100 percent accurate. It’s just a guess. It needs further evidence.

The second kind of argument, deduction, determines what that other evidence should be. You use a deduction to determine what follows from your hypothesis. We can think of Bella making the following deductions while on her trip to Port Angeles:

• If Edward is a good vampire, then he would save me from attackers.

• If Edward is a good vampire, then he will slow down his driving so I don’t get scared.

• If Edward is a good vampire, then he will feed me when I’m hungry and let me sleep when I’m tired.

These if-then claims follow from Bella’s guess that Edward is a good vampire. Now she knows what kind of evidence she’ll need to either confirm or deny that hypothesis.

The last kind of argument, induction, confirms or denies the deductions from the hypothesis. Edward does save Bella from attackers in Port Angeles. Edward does take Bella to a restaurant when she is hungry. Edward does slow down his driving when Bella says that she’s scared. Edward does let Bella sleep when she’s tired. All of these confirm the hypothesis that Edward is a good vampire.

Vampire Semiotics Are No Guarantee . . .

Notice that this confirmation doesn’t mean that the hypothesis is 100 percent accurate. There is always the possibility that other information can be found that will disprove the hypothesis. The evidence could have another explanation. It could all be a trick. Edward could just be toying with Bella, trying to get her guard down, so that he can eat her at another time. Bella could be wrong. Peirce calls this fallibilism: accepting the fact that even a well-confirmed hypothesis could turn out to be false.¹⁷

Bella learns this the hard way at the end of Twilight. While hiding in Phoenix with Edward’s siblings, she receives a phone call from the evil stalking vampire, James. The thought process follows the familiar one, two, three pattern of Peirce’s semiotics:

1. First is the icon: The voice sounds feminine.

2. Next is the index: It is the voice of her mother. Adding to that is the claim by the evil vampire that he has her mother. That brings Bella’s thoughts to her mother much like a finger pointing at an object.

3. Then there are the symbols, the actual words said. Bella hears the words from her mother. She understands the threatening sentences from the evil vampire. And she formulates an argument about what to do.

Her argument about what to do is further subdivided into three categories. First is the hypothesis: (1) My mother is in trouble. (2) If I give myself up, then my mother won’t be in trouble. So I must give myself up.

Next are the deductions. These are the if-then statements that follow from her hypothesis. If Bella is to save her mother, then she must go to the dance studio by herself. If she must go by herself, then she must evade Edward’s siblings. If she can evade Edward’s siblings and go to the dance studio by herself, then her mother will be saved. These deductions lead Bella into a course of action—now she knows what to do.

The inductions don’t go so well, however. While trying to confirm the deductions from her hypothesis (I must give myself up to save my mother), Bella discovers that it is a trick. Her mother’s voice was really just a recording. It was a trap! So the evidence disproves her hypothesis. It turns out that giving herself up won’t save her mother. Semiotics gives no guarantee of truth. Signs can lead you astray.

**The Semiotic Waltz: One, Two, Three, One, Two, Three, One, Two, Three**

Once you get the hang of the semiotic waltz, it’s easy to see the patterns of threeness in the world. Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Past, present, future. Mother, father, child. Location, velocity, acceleration. Human, vampire, werewolf.

But it’s hard to see the point in all of this. Can’t we just as easily divide the world up into fours? Or fives? The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) divided the world into twelve categories, and the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE) had ten. So what makes three the magic number?

Peirce himself struggled with this issue and repeatedly tried to prove that three was the magic number. I confess that I’m not impressed by those arguments, and I won’t restate them here. I suggest that we treat oneness, twoness, threeness as a hypothesis—it is just a guess. We must figure out the deductions and try the inductions. That is, from this guess we should figure out what should follow and then test whether it does actually follow. And we should be fallibilists willing to reject this hypothesis if the tests come out that way. Peirce would never want us to accept his theory blindly—he would want us to test it.

So try it out. Test it. I provided three examples here from Twilight. (Why three? Isn’t it obvious?) But there are three other books. Take a scene where Bella is discovering or learning and try to determine whether it fits the pattern of icon, index, and symbol.

NOTES

1 Stephenie Meyer, Twilight (Little, Brown and Company: New York and Boston, 2005), p. 56.

2 Ibid., p. 56.

3 Ibid., p. 58.

4 Ibid., p. 56.

5 Ibid., p. 59.

6 Ibid., p. 58.

7 Ibid., p. 60.

8 Since the 1980s, the Peirce Edition Project has been diligently working on a chronological edition with Indiana University Press that will serve as the standard for all Peirce scholars. But twenty years later, they have only published seven out of a proposed thirty volumes. That leaves out a great deal of good stuff from his later years. Fortunately, they published a smaller and easier-to-use two-volume collection. I’ll be using the second volume: The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings: Volume Two (1893-1913), edited by the Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), especially the 1894 essay “What Is a Sign?” on pp. 4-10.

9 The best biography of Peirce is Joseph Brent’s Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998). All the biographical material in this essay is from Brent’s book.

10 “He always dressed, as long as he could possibly afford it, very well, with a rakish elegance. Henry James expressed his opinion of Peirce’s personal style with a neat economy of phrase when he wrote his brother William from Paris, in 1875, that he had met ‘Mr. Chas. Peirce, who wears beautiful clothes, &c.’” Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce, p. 25.

11 Ibid., p. 14.

12 Ibid., pp. 19-20.

13 Peirce Edition Project, p. 5.

14 Twilight, p. 330.

15 Peirce Edition Project, p. 10.

16 Ibid., pp. 287-288.

17 “Thus, the scientific Inquirer has to be always ready at a moment to abandon summarily all the theories to the study of which he has been devoting perhaps many years.” Peirce Edition Project, p. 25.