Two intertwining characteristics form the basis of today's semiotics of law, especially in US legal semiotics. The first can be found in the work of Peirce who developed in the late 1860s a general theory in which he forwarded the view that "man is a sign"—an observation immediately relevant in law and legal discourse. The second is in the use of linguistic expressions such as "word", "community" or "discourse". The daring aphorism "man is a sign" was for Peirce an element of a more encompassing theory, which he called "evolutionary cosmology", and in which law seems to be almost naturally incorporated. It supports Peirce's idea that all knowledge results from a process of inference—from presumptions, deductions and conclusions, so that signs are always involved in epistemological questions, as they are in issues of legal theory.