A Semiotic Taxonomy of Human Thought and Behaviour: Towards a Peircean Theory of Life Trajectories (Version 1.0)

ABSTRACT This manuscript proposes a novel semiotic framework for mapping and classifying human thought and behavioural trajectories, grounded in Charles Sanders Peirce's triadic categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. We introduce the Semiotic Life Trajectory Model (SLTM), which operationalizes Peirce's interpretant theory to analyze how individuals and institutions navigate meaning-making across different life stages and aggregation levels. Using four foundational symbolic states, Fantasy (Firstness), Ideal (Secondness+Thirdness balanced), Delusion (Secondness pathological), and Obsession (Thirdness ossified), we exhaustively map 24 sequential permutations, 15 combinatorial subsets, and 16 atomic transitions. We further cross-reference these against five aggregation levels (individual to civilizational) and five mediating forces (greed, fear, love, faith, desire), yielding a formal taxonomy of 1,375 distinct behavioural cases. We introduce the Semiotic Health Index (SHI). This multi-dimensional diagnostic instrument evaluates trajectories across three core dimensions, Interpretant Community, Habit Responsiveness, and Fallibilism, plus auxiliary modifiers for mediating forces and aggregation levels. The SHI produces a 0-100 score and five trajectory classes (Open, Stable, Fragile, Closed, Terminal), enabling comparison, prediction, and intervention planning. We demonstrate the model's explanatory power through four extended case studies: The Utopian Fall (F to I to D to O), a trajectory of ideological corruption; The Mystic's Path (D to F to I to O), a trajectory of recovery and reintegration; the cinematic case of John Nash (A Beautiful Mind); and an anonymized clinical case of recovery from paranoid schizophrenia. We further contrast Nash's Nobel speech with those of Albert Einstein and Jean-Paul Sartre to reveal distinct semiotic architectures of meaning-making. The manuscript concludes with governance applications: a Governance Constitution that embeds Peircean safeguards, epistemic, institutional, cultural, and trajectory-specific, to keep systems aligned with Mystic's Path and structurally prevent descent into Ideologue's Collapse. Central Thesis: The health of any human or institutional trajectory is determined by its capacity to maintain open interpretant communities and responsive habits of action, in accordance with Peirce's pragmatic maxim and fallibilist ethics: Do not block the way of inquiry.