Abstract
The present chapter undertakes to provide an overview of the twentieth century semiotic development, as well as to attempt a projection of the twenty-first century trajectory semiotics, is bound to follow in the transition (or transformation) from the modern Enlightenment intellectual culture between Descartes (1650††) and (1914†)Peirce to the truly postmodern intellectual culture within which the development of semiotics has proven to be the central positive force.
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Notes
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“Metasemiosis” consists in the awareness which the human animal, in using signs as every animal must, achieves with the intellectual realization that the being proper to signs consists in triadic relations, invisible as relations to sense perception, transcending every subjective boundary, and upon which every achievement of human knowledge depends. This is the realization identifying the human being, in order to be a “rational animal” (?animal rationale) or “thinking thing” (or res cogitans), as having to be, yet more fundamentally and integrally, a semiotic animal, the only such animal on earth, with the responsibility that imposes—semioethics, as we will have occasion below to mention. On this term (and on the oxymoronic internal contradictoriness—the simple illegitimacy—of the linguistic expression “metasemiotics”), see Deely (2009b, pp. iii–iv, xiv, 127, 194, 198, 199). (Of course, one can always try, Humpty-Dumpty style [“Words mean what I want them to mean; no more and no less”—see note 132 below], to stipulate a meaning for “metasemiotics” that overcomes the historicity of its oxymoronic baggage; but the arbitrariness of stipulation seldom trumps historicity (see Deely 2009c, Chap. 6), and what really would be the gain of success, anyway, in this case, even should it be achieved?)
- 4.
- 5.
Deely 1992a.
- 6.
It was in this geometrical sense of synchrony, as we will see, that Saussure (1857–1913) conceived the matter in his original “signifiant/signifié” model proposed for semiotic development in the early twentieth century. Jakobson (1896–1982), more than Lotman (1922–1993), in taking up Saussure’s model, yet qualified its “arbitrariness” sufficiently to leave an opening from Saussure’s own “geometrical synchronicity” to the actuality of “temporal synchronicity” which I employ in this chapter. Actual synchronicity, taken as beginning at any definite “present moment” (e.g., AD 1916), from that moment begins to “expand” by constituting a definite temporal cross section within the cultural and intellectual consciousness of a given community—in this case, the “community of inquirers” focused on the matter of signs at work in the world within and around us. The fact that such a community, as a community among the living, definitely formed in the twentieth century, as Petrilli remarks (2008, p. 3), is the synchronic view I want to present in these pages.
- 7.
Petrilli (2008, p. 3).
- 8.
Deely 2001a, subtitled “The first postmodern survey of philosophy from ancient times to the turn of the twenty-first century” (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press).
- 9.
- 10.
See “The Boundary of Time,” Preface to Deely (2001a, pp. xix–xxxiii).
- 11.
- 12.
Saussure 1916 ( = i.1907–1911): 16. But see the detail in note 21 below.
- 13.
Where Poinsot’s culminating Tractatus was published in 1632.
- 14.
Where Poinsot’s teachers, the Conimbricenses, had published their commentary De Signis in 1606, a work which never appeared outside the Latin language until Doyle’s English translation of 2001. This work was a crucial influence on both Peirce and Poinsot (see Beuchot and Deely 1995).
- 15.
See Deely 2009c: Augustine & Poinsot. The Protosemiotic Development.
- 16.
See the “Timeline of Semiotic Development” in Deely 2009c: Appendix E, 237–246.
- 17.
Ironically, the first systematic treatise fully to establish the semiotic point of view and triadic relation as constituting the formal being of signs, the Tractatus de Signis of John Poinsot (1589–1644), was published in the very year of Locke’s birth, 1632!
- 18.
- 19.
See the biographical account in Williams 2010; and the contrast between the two “semiotic manifestos” of Anderson et al. on one hand and Gardin et al. on the other hand, deliberately published by Sebeok back to face in the 1984 volume 52.1 of Semiotica. See Sect. 13. below, at note.
- 20.
- 21.
Saussure (1916, p. 16). As I noted in Deely (2001a, p. 673), however, Saussure’s proposed name for the general study, “semiology,” has been traced back (Godel 1957, p. 275) to November of 1894 in a note definitely from Saussure’s own hand; and Naville (1901, p. 104) reports an earlier version or outline for semiology essentially similar to what will appear in the Cours of 1916. Whether Saussure took over the term “semiology,” consciously or unconsciously, from some other source or, less probably, conceived it neologistically in his own mind, according to Meier-Oeser (1997, p. 315) the term has a history of its own among Protestant Latin authors of the late Latin–early modern period. The decisive feature of the proposal so named in Saussure’s writing lies in the advice that natural signs are to be treated within semiology, if at all, only through an assimilation to the model of signs as conventional or “arbitrary” (unmotivated by anything in the vehicle’s physical structure or subjectivity in their link between sign vehicle and object-signified).
Had some student of Giambatista Vico (13 June 1668–1744 January 23) entered the discussion of Saussure’s day, we might also have had to contend with “sematology” as well as “semiology” in the twentieth-century settlement upon Locke’s “semiotics” as the proper name for the new science (about as helpful as was Tycho Brahe’s contribution to the Copernican debate in Galielo’s day!). Perhaps just as well such a student did not seriously emerge in time, for the complication would not have been particularly helpful, especially when we consider that “sematology” carried much the same linguistic/cultural baggage of (mis)orientation for understanding semiosis that Saussure attached to “semiology.” See Eschbach and Trabant 1983; Trabant 2004.
- 22.
Saussure (1916, p. 16).
- 23.
Lotman (1990), inter alia.
- 24.
Beuchot and Deely 1995.
- 25.
See the memorial essay “Thomas A. Sebeok, Biologist Manqué,” at http://carbon.ucdenver.edu/~mryder/itc/idmodels.html.
- 26.
See Deely (2001a, Chap. 14, esp. 601–603).
- 27.
Sebeok (1991a, p. 2).
- 28.
Oddly, from a fully semiotic point of view (i.e., from within the major tradition), the crippling weakness of this omission within a patron général supposed as foundational is regarded by some as a core strength of semiology, the foundation of the “Autonomie du langage,” as Serra put it in her syllabus for a 2005–2006 “Introduction à la Linguistique Générale” (http://www.unil.ch/webdav/site/ling/shared/IntroductionLing/Serra/Intr.a_la_ling.Cours_n_8.pdf): “le signe linguistique a pour fonction de relier un signifiant (image acoustique) à un signifé (concept) et non de relier une expression à un objet du monde.”
- 29.
See Cobley 2009.
- 30.
Until someone pointed out that Locke’s spelling is syntactically deficient from the standpoint of Greek grammar, after which Sign Systems Studies adopted the spelling actually incorrect (as it turned out) for Locke’s purpose, namely, Σημε?ωτικ?: but that is another story (Deely 2004) we have not the space to retell here.
- 31.
Exactly here do we confront squarely the superiority of the semiotic approach Peirce shares with Poinsot as his main predecessor in uncovering the triadically relational character of semiosis. “What is the essential difference between a sign that is communicated to a mind, and one that is not so communicated? If the question were simply what we do mean by a sign, it might soon be resolved. But that is not the point. We are in the situation of a zoölogist who wants to know what ought to be the meaning of ‘fish’ in order to make fishes one of the great classes of vertebrates” (Peirce 1904: CP 8.332, italic added; cf. Poinsot 1632: TDS I.1, 116/1–13, 117/20–118/18, etc.). Where the semiologist wants to assert what a sign is, and proceed from there, the semiotician prefers rather first to determine what a sign is, and proceed from there. (It is one of those many and recurrent choices between nominalism and scholastic realism.)
- 32.
See following note.
- 33.
Less commendable was Fisch’s responsibility for the myth that Peirce’s preferred term for the doctrine of signs was “semeiotic” with no final “s” (pronounced “see-my-OH-tick”), a myth that cannot survive a full survey of Peirce’s texts, which shows rather a preference for “semiotic” or “semeiotics”: see Deely (2009, p. 62–65), “3. Clearing the Mists of a Terminological Mythology”; also available online through the Peirce-L archive: http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/deely/clearing.pdf.
- 34.
See “Pragmaticism is not pragmatism,” 616–618, and “Pragmaticism and the doctrine of signs,” 625–628, in Deely 2001a.
- 35.
See Deely 2001a: passim; and 2008a.
- 36.
Peirce died far too early to include the “pragmatism” of Richard Rorty (4 October 1931–2007 June 8). But it remains as one of history’s ironies that the nominalist-compatible version of late modern philosophical thought generally known as “pragmatism,” a current which prevails from James through Rorty, provides the Peirce-originated but later replaced name adhered to in presenting even Peirce’s distinctive thought among students who should well know better. Cf. Deely 1998a (at http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/papers/redbook.pdf) and Houser 2006.
- 37.
Jakobson—“one of the first Soviet scholars who became famous abroad,” as Voigt (1995, p. 201) noted—was certainly deeply schooled in the Tartu–Moscow line of semiotics, of which Lotman was the chief representative. But Jakobson, unlike Lotman, had not remained confined in that world of “nightmarish Soviet bureaucratic restrictions” for most of his career. Indeed, Sebeok had regularly visited with Jakobson at Princeton during his graduate studies, and considered Jakobson his actual if not official Ph.D. thesis director.
Lotman’s early critique of the Saussurean model in terms of the secondary indexicality necessarily entangled with the “arbitrariness” to which Saussure gave sole emphasis (see Deely 2009d), together with his growing interest in Peirce, were major influences on Sebeok over the many years of his close friendship and intellectual association with Lotman. It is perhaps a striking testimony to just how closed was the “world” of Soviet semiotics, lived from within, that Ivanov (2008) is able to present his “Semiotics of the 20th century” to a Moscow congress without a single mention of Sebeok or of the development of the major tradition outside that insular “Soviet” intellectual universe created on Saussure’s “arbitrary model.” (Ivanov’s survey makes a rather startling contrast with, for example, Sebeok 1998.) It is as if an inadvertent testimony that the originally Saussurean “Moscow–Tartu school” is indeed a thing of the past, especially if we compare it to the emergence after Sebeok of what should be called the “Tartu–Bloomington–Copenhagen school” of biosemiotics today, as will be discussed after Sect. 2.5. as an "appendix".
- 38.
Sebeok (1984a, p. 9).
- 39.
And even Poinsot’s work, which first laid the ground systematically for study of signs as triadically relational in being, would not be with us today as an independent study were it not for the initiatives of Sebeok (1986c).
- 40.
Unfortunately, while Sebeok’s campaign to demonstrate the inadequacy of the semiological paradigm (the purely cultural view of sign activity) did have the effect in the West of a virtual abandonment of the term “semiology” as a name for the semiotic enterprise, his program did not have equal success in persuading adherents of the semiological view of sign action to admit the partial and limited status their analytical approach to the codes of cultural phenomena occupied within the semiotic enterprise as a whole. More than a few Western authors adopted the term “semiotics” as a kind of mask for their work, while continuing to promote a purely semiological enterprise. An outstanding example of this shift from “pars pro toto fallacy” to “pars pro toto masquerade” is Chandler 2002, a book proclaiming to treat of Semiotics. The basics while treating in fact of Semiology. Some basics, inasmuch as the work considers nothing beyond the cultural side of anthroposemiotics (without even indicating that there is another side: see gloss on this book in References).
- 41.
Watt 2009.
- 42.
Deely 2001c was the first synthesis of Sebeok’s ideas on this point of reinterpreting Jakob von Uexküll’s work in explicitly semiotic perspective, and was delivered in an Imatra paper with Sebeok in attendance. After that session, Sebeok referred inquirers to the essay as “the best development of von Uexküll’s work in explicitly semiotic terms.” A further detailed synthesis emphasizing the Innenwelt side of the Umwelt/Innenwelt juxtaposition is set out in Deely 2007, online at http://www.augustoponzio.com/Critical/12._Deely.pdf.
- 43.
In conjunction with the private dinner mentioned above, Lotman’s public address (1987 publication) to that Norsk Forening for Semiotikk “Symposium on Semiotics in Theory and Practice,” organized by Dinda Gorlée and Sven Storelv, had also played a role in inspiring Sebeok’s idea for this remarkable Innenwelt/Umwelt + Semiosphere synthesis, toward which he hoped to directly enlist Lotman himself, as he tells us (Sebeok 1998, p. 31): “Lotman, in his introductory speech, righly underlined the contemporary emergence of syncretic tendencies…in semiotic investigations. ‘In the humanities’, he said, ‘different disciplines combine into a single science of man, centered around the semiotic study of culture.’ Commute science for the humanities, life for man, and nature for culture—and this great, charismatic thinker and I might have consummated a transcendental disputation. I had hoped to argue my case, and ancillary issues, at our next scheduled encounter, at the 25th Symposium of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics, held in Imatra, Finland, 27–29 July 1987 (Sebeok 1988), but, alas, Lotman could not attend, and I never saw him again.”
- 44.
See Sebeok (1987), his first presentation to the Semiotic Society of America subsequent to the Lotman meeting.
- 45.
- 46.
Sebeok and Danesi (2000).
- 47.
- 48.
See esp. note 117 below.
- 49.
- 50.
Deely et al. 1986.
- 51.
See Deely 1989a: “Peirce’s Grand Vision” concerning an action of signs throughout the universe. Sebeok, as far as I know, first proposed his coextensivity of sign science and life science in his address entitled “The Sign Science and the Life Science” to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on 1 October 1990, which I had the privilege to attend. In 1991, at Tom’s invitation, I published my argument against this thesis; at the time of his death a decade after, we were still in discussion of the issues.
- 52.
Sebeok (1984a, p. 9).
- 53.
Peirce 1904: cp. 8.332.
- 54.
Peirce (1906, EP 2.388).
- 55.
Emmeche (1994, p. 126).
- 56.
The argument for this “semiotic sign” notion (Deely 2004b) has now been presented in dramatic reading form on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=E9651802BCDC14BF.
- 57.
Deely 2009d.
- 58.
Peirce 1904: CP 8.332.
- 59.
Poinsot 1632: 154/25–29.
- 60.
Hoffmeyer 2008b.
- 61.
Notable in this regard is Gottlieb 2001, whose book is not for nothing described as “a stunning successor” to Bertrand Russell’s History.
- 62.
Sensation is to animals, we may say (I owe the analogy to Kalevi Kull), what root systems are to plants. When Barbieri says (2009, p. 164) that “single cells do not build internal representations of the world and therefore cannot interpret them,” he quite amply displays his lack of understanding of the distinction between interpretant and interpreter. Again when he says that “animals react only to representations of the world,” he manifests his tacit beholdenness to Kantian epistemology in exactly the sense that semiotics begins by surpassing. As early as Poinsot’s dazzling analysis in 1632 of why animal sensation prescissively considered within perception (“phantasiari,” actually, for which we have no full equivalent in the modern languages, though “perception” comes the closest) is already a web of semiosic relations, even though no mental representation is yet involved, the doctrine of signs had made clear that not only is representation not the whole story of mental life, much less of semiotics, but that other-representation is prior alike to the self-representation of things in sense-perception and to the self-representation of objects in experience more generally, including the cases of illusion or mistaken identity where the object self-represented is not what it seems.
- 63.
Peirce 1908: CP. 8.343.
- 64.
Peirce borrowed this cenoscopic/idioscopic distinction from Bentham (see Deely 2001a, pp. 618–21). Ashley (2006, pp. 85–87), giving a fine illustration of the applicability of this distinction as Peirce drew it, uses the variant spelling “ideoscopic,” which is therefore not to be confused with Peirce’s usage of the term “ideoscopic,” which concerns the phaneron rather than (as in Ashley) idioscopy proper. I am indebted to Ransdell (1989, note 2). Ashley’s spelling of “ideoscopic, ideoscopy” as synonymous with Peirce’s spelling as “idioscopic, idioscopy” is discussed in Deely 2003a and especially in 2014:253n11.
- 65.
In his “preface” to Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs; see in particular the entry that he later commissioned for the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, ed. Sebeok et al. (1st ed.; Berlin: Mouton 1986), Vol. 1 of 3, p. 214.
- 66.
Precisely for this reason, as we remarked in note above, Sebeok arranged to have published side by side, as it were, the two competing “manifestos” (as he referred to them privately) on this point concurrently developed in 1984: on the one side by Anderson, Deely, Krampen, Ransdell, Sebeok, and T. von Uexküll, and on the other side by Gardin, Bouissac, and Foote.
- 67.
- 68.
- 69.
Email of 3 July 2009.
- 70.
Another colleague, in an email of 9 July 2009, 11:38 h, called this “the single most misguided definition of ‘semiotics’ ever put to paper,” deserving to be “cited by semioticians of every stripe as an example of exactly the kind of ignorance that we are up against.”
- 71.
See Deely (2009c, 6.4.2). “To Capture Augustine’s Initiative in a Terminological Proposal,” 55–56, esp. the summary “Table.”
- 72.
Deely 1990, Basics of Semiotics, Chap. 6, “Physiosemiosis and Phytosemiosis”. The fifth edition of this work (2009e) contains in Chap. 12 (Sect. 12.4.1) a discussion of “Why Sebeok’s final view of semiosis as co-extensive with life is not broad enough”. On Peirce in this matter, my main comment so far is 1989a; on the prospect of physiosemiosis itself, see further 1993b, 1995, 1997, 1998a, 1999, 2001b, 2008a, and the first official SSA Session on the topic, “Adventures in Physiosemiosis” with papers by Coletta (197–202) and Newsome (203–207) in Deely and Sbrocchi eds. (2008).
- 73.
The particular passage I cite is from the c.330BC De Anima, Book I, the opening of Chap. 2, 403b20–23 in the Bekker pagination; but the content of this particular passage is found repeatedly throughout the whole of Aristotle’s works.
- 74.
The “udders of Kant,” as he put it: Peirce c.1902: CP 2.113.
- 75.
Principally in Deely 2001a: esp. Chap. 15; but also earlier, in Deely 2000b: The Red Book http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/papers/redbook.pdf and elsewhere.
- 76.
Esp. in Plato’s c. 399/390 BC middle dialogues “Parmenides,” “Phaedo,” “Theatetus,” but also in the c. 359–347 BC late dialogue, “Sophist.” Cf. Cavarnos (1975, pp. 18–19), and passim.
- 77.
For a full discussion of Aristotle on this point, see Deely (1985a, pp. 472–474), esp. fns. 112–114 for the Greek texts. See also Deely (2001a, pp. 73–78), esp. “The category of relation,” 73–74.
- 78.
- 79.
See Beuchot and Deely 1995: “Common Sources for the Semiotic of Charles Peirce and John Poinsot.”
- 80.
Poinsot 1632: Tractatus de Signis, Book I, Question 3.
- 81.
Thus, in 1964, the very year following Sebeok’s introduction of the notion of zoösemiotics expanding the understanding of signs beyond the artificial boundary of culture as set for the study by Saussure and his epigones, Juri Lotman established the first semiotics journal, using therefor the very name and spelling originally proposed by Locke:Σημ?ωτικ?. Ironically, this correct stipulation for the doctrine of signs after only three issues was “corrected” by later editors to read Σημε?ωτικ?—concerning which change it can only be said that “they knew not what they did,” as detailed etymological study of the terms in question (Deely 2003b, 2004a) amply reveals. But that is a side matter.
- 82.
See my preface, “A Global Enterprise,” to the 1989 corrected reprinting of Sebeok’s 1979 book, The Sign & Its Masters.
- 83.
Sebeok 1987.
- 84.
Sebeok 1998.
- 85.
As we will in this chapter later see (note 117 and Appendix below), the full realization of Sebeok’s aim in this matter would finally be achieved rather by the achievement of a “Tartu–Bloomington–Copenhagen school,” and only some years after his death.
- 86.
See “Peirce’s Grand Vision” (Deely 1989a).
- 87.
Cheng et al. 2009: http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx/t648096.htm.
- 88.
Emmeche (1994, p. 126).
- 89.
Aquinas (1266, Q. 79), Art. 11, sed contra. This insight Aquinas takes from Aristotle’s c. 330a bc book On the Soul. What has changed now—in our day—is only the realization that it is the whole of nature, not just the life of individuals on earth, that is subject to substantial change; whereupon speculative understanding becomes practically limitless in its extension of showing us further how the human animal can introduce into nature fundamental and far-reaching changes, touching the heavens themselves—thus demanding an “ethical understanding” not at all confined merely to the realm of human interactions within “society and culture.”
- 90.
Yet, here we may also note a curious parallel to the marginal status of Peirce in the original early-to-mid-twentieth-century formation of inquirers into sign as a “community,” i.e., as a commonly recognized focus within intellectual culture. As Peirce was marginal to semiotics in its initial phase as semiology, so his entry into the mainstream brought to general attention one of the principal correspondents of his later years, the British Victoria Lady Welby. Welby became known generally, however (outside the Netherlands at least), in the Sebeokean universe of transition from minor to major tradition semiotics mainly, almost exclusively, in terms of her 1903–1911 correspondence with Charles Peirce (see Hardwick 1977), and as coiner (in 1896) of the term “significs.”
In Italy, Welby’s emphasis on the “values” or ethical dimension in the action of signs at work among human animals—which is the central meaning of the term “significs”—naturally enough caught the attention of Susan Petrilli, one of Sebeok’s main collaborators on the international scene, and this led Sebeok to take an interest in the matter, reflected even in Chap. 13 of his last book (see Petrilli and Sebeok 1998). Now, as the twenty-first century completes its first decade, even as Peirce emerged in from the early twentieth-century “semiotic sidelines,” so we seem destined to witness a similar emergence on the part of his correspondent, Victoria Lady Welby. The first major stage of this emergence, no doubt, is that recorded in the classic turn-of-the-century synchronic survey of semiotics by Ponzio and Petrilli 2005, Chap. 2 “About Welby,” 80–137. But this “first glimpse” is as nothing by comparison with the just released volume, Petrilli 2009 Signifying and Understanding. Reading the Works of Victoria Welby and the Signific Movement, described by the editor of the series housing the 1048-page work (Cobley 2009b, p. ix) as a work exhibiting a “degree of scholarship coupled with theoretical expertise and a vision for the future” that is “seldom to be met with in academic life.” He concludes (ibid., x): “If you want to learn how important Welby’s writings will be, start with this book.” And he is right. (More than that, in my judgment, Cobley is the heir to the editorial genius within the semiotic community of Thomas Sebeok himself.)
It is indeed, as Cobley (ibid.) says, Petrilli and not Sebeok who “makes Welby mean much to both the present and the future;” yet this very fact makes equally clear that it will be a long time before the various “moves beyond Sebeok” do not do so while bearing seminal linings from the work of Sebeok’s own lifetime, which more than any other synchronicity of the twentieth century established what will be forever more semiotics “major tradition.” The main point of Welby’s significs (in line with what Sebeok established as the major tradition in semiotics, and similarly to Peirce’s approach to the life of signs) is that it transcends pure descriptivism, to study signs and meaning in their ethical, pragmatic, and even aesthetic dimensions, where semiotic theory intersects axiology. Thus, significs, neatly within the major tradition, moves (or even begins) beyond the strictly epistemological and cognitive boundaries of the sign sciences as first defined semiologically, including specifically those of language and communication studies. Leading beyond the specialism of semantics as proposed in her day, Welby’s proposal of significs arises from the assumption that the relation between sign, meaning, and value is of central importance in every possible sphere of human interest and behavior.
- 91.
Tarasti (2000, p. vii).
- 92.
- 93.
As is often, almost normally, the case with decisive terms, this term “semioethics” did not spring simply full blown from the mind of Zeus, but is the outcome of a long series of intellectual reflection. Augusto Ponzio summarized the gestation for me thus in an email of 4 January 2010: “Semioethics was born in early 80s in connection with the introduction to Italian translations by Susan Petrilli of works of Sebeok, Morris, Welby, and my introduction and interpretation of Bakhtin’s, Rossi-Landi’s, Giovanni Vailati’s, and Peirce’s works. Our problem was to find a term which indicates study of the relation between signs and values, ancient semeiotica and semiotics…. We coined terms and expressions such as ‘teleosemiotica’ ‘etosemiotica’, ‘semiotica etica’, in contraposition to ‘semiotica cognitiva’ (see the Italian edition by Bonfantini: Peirce, Charles Sanders, Semiotics. I fondamenti della semiotica cognitiva, a cura di Bonfantini et. al.; Torino: Einaudi 1980)….
“The beginning of semioethics is in the introductions by me and Susan Petrilli to Italian editions (in translation by Petrilli) of Sebeok, Il segno e i suoi maestri (Bari: Adriatica 1985), and Welby, Significato, Metafora e interpretazione (Bari, Adriatica 1985); in the essays we published in Essays in Significs, ed. H. Walter Schmitz (Amsterdam: John Benjamins 1990); in Susan’s books of the 80s such as Signifcs, semiotica, significazione (Pref. by Sebeok, Adriatica 1988), and my own of that period, such as Filosofia del linguaggio (Adriatica 1985).
“In a private note in the context of the International Colloquium ‘Refractions. Literary Criticism, Philosophy and the Human Sciences in Contemporary Italy of the 1970s and the 1980s’, Department of Comparative Literature of Carlton University, Ottawa, 27–19 settembre 1990 (in the discussion of my communication, Rossi-Landi tra ‘Ideologie’ e ‘Scienze umane’), I used the Italian term ‘Semioetica’, as displacement of ‘e’ in Italian word ‘semeiotica’: a play that indicates in Semiotics the ancient vocation of Semeiotics (of Hippocrates and Galen) for improving or bettering life. [See now Petrilli 2007.]
“But in the title of three lessons of Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia with Susan I used still ‘teleosemiotica’: ‘Teleosemiotics and global semiotics’ (July-September, 1999, Australia, lecture tour: Adelaide University, Monash University of Melbourne, Sydney University, Curtin University of Perth, Northern Territory University of Darwin).
“The book of 2003 by Susan and me, Semioetica, is the landing, or final achievement, of this long crossing of texts, conceptions, and words, as it results in bibliographic references.” See now Petrilli 2014: Sign Studies and Semioethics.
- 94.
- 95.
See Deely 2000a.
- 96.
See the treatment of nominalism in Deely 2008a.
- 97.
This notion indeed constituting a postmodern definition of the human being, one which transcends patriarchy and feminism alike, even as it supersedes the ancient and medieval notion of “rational animal” and (even more) the modern notion of “thinking thing,” thanks to semiotics’ bridging (as Baenziger remarks on the jacket of Deely 2010) “the chasm of modern philosophy.” For the most advanced “postmodern analysis” developing this notion to date, see Williams Deely 2015.
- 98.
Peirce 1901: CP, 1.134.
- 99.
Thus, semiotics provides the answer to Heidegger’s question (1927, p. 437), “Why does Being get ‘conceived’ ‘proximally’ in terms of the present-at-hand and not in terms of the ready-to-hand, which indeed lies closer to us?”—“closer” indeed generically as animals, but not at all closer species-specifically to semiotic animals, at least not once actively engaged analytically in metasemiosis.
- 100.
Aristotle c. 330 BC: ?εριEρμμνειασ (Latin: Perihermenias) 16a3–9 (Greek text from Bekker 1831):“?στι μὲν ?υν τὰ ἐν τἇ φωνἇτῶν ἐν τῇψυχῇ παθημάτων σύμβ?λα, καὶ τὰ γραφόμενα τῶν ἐν τῇφωνῇ. καὶ ὥσπερ ?ὐδὲ γράμματα πᾶσι τὰ αὐτά, ?ὐδὲ φωναὶ αἱ αὐταί· ὧν μέντ?ι τατα σημεα πρώτων, ταὐτὰ πᾶσι παθήματα τς ψυχς, καὶ ὧν τατα ὁμ?ιώματα πράγματα δη ταὐτά. περὶ μὲν ν τ?ύτων εἴρηται ἐν τς περὶ ψυχς, — ἄλλης γὰρ πραγματείας.”
Aristotle Perihermenias, 16a3–9, Latin trans. from Boethius c. AD 514: “Sunt ergo ea quae sunt in voce earum quae sunt in anima passionum notae, et ea quae scribuntur eorum quae sunt in voce. Et quemadmodum nec litterae omnibus eaedem, sic nec eaedem voces; quorum autem hae primorum notae, eaedem omnibus passiones animae sunt, et quorum hae similitudines, res etiam eaedem. De his quidem dictum est in his quae sunt dicta de anima—alterius est enim negotii.”
Aristotle On Interpretation, 16a3–9, English trans. from Edghill 1926: “Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images. This matter has, however, been discussed in my treatise about the soul, for it belongs to an investigation distinct from that which lies before us.”
- 101.
Poinsot 1632: “Remarks on Aristotle’s Perihermenias,” 38/1–2, and 11–19: “Libri Perihermenias sic vocantur quasi dicas ‘de Interpretatione’…. Sed tamen, quia haec omnia tractantur in his libris per modum interpretationis et significationis, commune siquidem Logicae instrumentum est signum, quo omnia eius instrumenta constant, idcirco visum est in praesenti pro doctrina horum librorum ea tradere, quae ad explicandam naturam et divisiones signorum in Summulis insinuata, huc vero reservata sunt.”
- 102.
This is the tale I have tried to recount in The crossroad of signs and ideas volume with Descartes & Poinsot as its main title (Deely 2008a), a volume which, fortuitously, was published in the very week that 33rd Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America opened in October of 2008 under the theme of “Specialization, Semiosis, and Semiotics.” See also Deely 2001a: Ch. 11.
- 103.
Sebeok (1984c, p. 21), in finem.
- 104.
Maritain (1959, p. 115 text and notes) terms the species, both impressae and expressae, as being “terms without counterpart in modern philosophy.” The reader interested in the full details of the question—actually quite important for semiotics—is referred to the Intentionality and Semiotics treatment in Deely 2007b: esp. Chap. 4, “Specifying forms, impressed and expressed—terms without equivalence in modern philosophy,” pp. 23–32.
- 105.
i.e., just as the phantasms as species expressae of memory, imagination, and estimation are terminative productively but not terminative cognitively, just so the species expressae of understanding are terminative productively but as produced serve only and further to provenate relations having objects as their termini. Thus, the characteristic of all thought (?species expressae), generically animal and specifically human equally, as Poinsot best and most clearly put it (1632: Book II, Question 2), is to present what is other than itself, and so to exist and function in the capacity of sign vehicles; but whereas generically animal thought terminates always and simply at objects as related to the animal, specifically human thought adds to this awareness as self-interested (transforming it without displacing it) the further dimension of awareness of these same objects as involving things in themselves.
- 106.
The earliest formulation I have found of this insight that will become central to the doctrine of signs in Poinsot’s work, to the Umwelttheorie of Jakob von Uexküll, and to contemporary semiotics through and after the work of Sebeok, is in Cajetan 1507: in I.1, art. 3: “aliae enim sunt divisiones entis in esse rei, aliae in genere scibilis” (cited by Poinsot 1632 at 149/44–46).
- 107.
An attempt to trace the complex origin of the “passions” in the interactions of the human body with surrounding bodies (perhaps in some contradiction with his more general res cogitans/res extensae metaphysics) without, however, particular regard to either Aristotle or his triangle, was made in the earliest days of modern philosophy by none other than Descartes himself (1649), in the last of his works to be published in his lifetime.
Interestingly, Descartes’ treatment of the “passions” concerns what we would today call cathectic psychological states no less than the cognitive ones. It is a kind of sketch of psychology with an eye to moral philosophy, more relevant to the understanding today of Umwelt theory (in the matter of how the animal organizes its cognized surroundings in terms of objects cathected as +/0/–) than it is to the question of the triangle now before us.
- 108.
This book, The Meaning of Meaning, without doubt made the triangular model much as Aristotle had long ago suggested a central focus in the twentieth-century semiotics development. See, e.g., “Working with Interpreters of the Meaning of Meaning. International Trends among Twentieth-Century Theorists,” Petrilli 2010: Essay #2, pp. 49–88.
- 109.
See details in Deely 2008b.
- 110.
Recall Sausure’s location of “semiology” as falling under “general psychology.”
- 111.
Poinsot 1632: Tractatus de Signis, Second Preamble “On Relation,” Art. 1, “Whether there exist relations which belong to the order of mind-independent being,” 85/11–12 and 8–11.
- 112.
Actually, Aristotle is thinking exclusively in terms of intersubjectivity, as the being relation has in the order of mind-independent το óν; only with Poinsot and the formal advent of semiotics will the focus shift to suprasubjectivity as the being singular to relation as transcending all subjective contrasts within the order of mind-independent being, including the contrast of ens reale as including both subjectivity and intersubjectivity to ens rationis and purely objective being as ontologically relative throughout, and hence suprasubjective in sign and signified whether or not intersubjective in any given case.
- 113.
On the general sense of σμμε??ν as sign specifically narrowed to σμμε??ν as symptom, see Baer (1986).
- 114.
Poinsot 1632: Tractatus de Signis, Appendix A, 345/9–10 and 349/37–351/8: “Voces unica significatione significant res et conceptus… principalius [autem] signficent… res, nisi forte ipsa res significata sit conceptus vel eius intentio.
- 115.
Lotman (1990, p. 5).
- 116.
- 117.
See the Appendix to the present work, “Sebeok’s Synthesis: The Tartu–Bloomington– Copenhagen School,” p. 69 below.
- 118.
The point of Sebeok’s synthesis is that any exclusive focus on language, whether in the root sense of the species-specifically human adaptation within the Innenwelt as generically animal, or in the sense of linguistic communication as an exaptation of that biologically underdetermined adaptive feature, distorts the place in nature and biosphere as a whole of the human as animal. Such a focus—precisely the focus of “semiology” as originally conceived to be the whole of the “new science of signs”—distortively glosses over generically zoösemiosis both as regards the dependency of language in its root sense upon those larger processes and as regards the overlap thereof within anthroposemiosis. For it is the zoösemioses with which anthroposemiosis is intertwined and interdependent even for the exercise of its species-specific communication as linguistic that constitutes that “primary modeling process” as a whole on the basis of which the biologically underdetermined feature of “language in the root sense” becomes accessible for exaptation in the first place. (See most recently Cobley 2014.) At the Innenwelt level, “language” is anything but an independent feature: language in this root and at that level is precisely that—a feature within the larger whole of an animal modeling system, just as is any species-specific Innenwelt adaptation of the animal modeling system as giving rise to communicative channels distinctive of this or that group of animal individuals. Details of Sebeok’s argument are laid out in Deely 2007.
- 119.
Broden (2009, pp. 20–21) puts it this way: Saussure’s “Course in General Linguistics seems to exaggerate the extent to which linguistics and its object of study can be defined as one, homogeneous, and neatly bounded and situated. The efforts deployed to this end effectively isolate language and its study from the rest of the social and natural world…. Similarly, while it founds its central ‘mechanism of language’ on fundamental cognitive processes, the essay describes both thought and sound as ‘amorphous’ before language as social convention constitutes each, thereby slighting the incidence of other sensory-motor processes and of mimetic learning.”
- 120.
Section 2.4.8.1 through 7, below.
- 121.
Section 2.4.8.8 through 12, below.
- 122.
Section 2.4.8.13 through 24, below.
- 123.
See note 37 above, and Sects. 2.4.8.21 through 2.4.8.23.
- 124.
The exception is the case of self-reflexion in a semiotic animal: see Poinsot 1632: ppendix A, The Signification of Language, “On the relations between words, ideas, and objects,” 342–351, esp. 349/37–351/14 (focused below at note 167).
- 125.
This is also discussed in Eco (1990, esp. Chap. 1).
- 126.
And, as I have elsewhere noted (Deely 2009f, 2009g, 2009h, 2009i), the “signified” in the expression “object signified” is tacitly redundant, made necessary only by sedimentation into late modern national language usage of the Cartesian reversal of the subject/object distinction as it had been developing toward thematic expression in the later Latin centuries, a reversal wherein “subject” acquired a dominant sense of “psychological” and object a dominant sense of synonymy with “thing”—in contrast to the semiotic sense where “object” means always the second of three terms under a triadic relation, whether or not the object also has a subjective existence along with its objectivity, and “subject” means always an individual unit here-and-now part of the physical universe.
- 127.
- 128.
By far the most extensive treatment of the traditional “history discipline” in relation to semiotics, including this “contemporary” historiographical problem, is to be found in the writings of Williams Deely, beginning as early as 1982. A collected volume of these writings is in preparation as a volume in the Mouton de Gruyter “Semiotics, Communication and Cognition” series (SCC) under the general editorship of Paul Cobley with Kalevi Kull.
- 129.
Exactly as when the Saussurean dyadic code model for sign is represented as “the whole story” of semiotics. In such cases, at this point in history, what started out as a “pars pro toto fallacy”—the idea that the cultural sphere of sign action is the whole sphere of sign action, the original claim of “semiology”—molts into a “pars pro toto fraud,” when an exclusively semiological approach to signs (mis)represents itself as semiotics without qualification, as in Chandler 2002. See gloss thereon in references.
- 130.
There are similar controversies along this line, but back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, over the translation of the Bible.
- 131.
But of course, were it true that the Koran “cannot be interpreted,” then it could not be read either or understood in any language, including its “original Arabic.” For there are sounds but no words without involvement of concepts, and concepts differ from sensations precisely in being interpretations, species expressae, as we saw in Sect. 2.4 above. To have a thought is to have an interpretation of that thought’s object, be it also a thing or “purely objective”—as in the case of a book “not subject to interpretation,” or a square circle, etc.!
- 132.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
- 133.
And here it is worth recalling Augustine’s profound point that all words, as items of linguistic communication, be they nouns or verbs, pronouns or adjectives, categorematic or syncategorematic—all items of linguistic communication taken in their distinctive and proper being are names.
- 134.
Broden (2009, p. 15), which echoes Saussure i.1907–1911: in the Baskin trans. p. 76. Poinsot, approaching this matter from the side of “ideas” as so-called formal signs (that is, psychological states which signify whether or not they are themselves objectified) rather than from the side of “words” as “instrumental signs” (that is, material realities of the physical surroundings which must be themselves objects of awareness in order to function also as signs), nonetheless echoes the point made much more straightforwardly by Saussure and Broden: see Tractatus de Signis Book III, Question 4, on the “Distinction inter conceptum ultimatum et nonultimatum”, 334/1–340/4. See note below.
The weakness in this aspect of Poinsot’s semiotic analysis appears precisely in the hindsight of our understanding of language as a secondary modeling system in the shaping of individual identity. Broden (2009, p. 27) well states the situation as it appears to us today: “From the foundational I-thou relation spring both speech and the subject; language no longer appears as an external instrument of communication which the individual freely manipulates, but rather as the symbolic and dialogic dimension in which subjectivity and especially intersubjectivity are constituted.”
- 135.
See the text from Poinsot 1632: Tractatus de Signis, Appendix A, 345/9–10 and 349/37–351/8, cited in note 114 above.
- 136.
Broden (2009, p. 11).
- 137.
And indeed they are no part of linguistics on any accounting, but rather the concern of the ideoscopic “hard sciences,” including biology, where, however, in zoösemiosis, as semiotics has made unmistakable, linguistic communication finds itself in an unavoidable overlap with nonlinguistic channels of animal communication. See Deely 1980.
- 138.
Poinsot 1632: Tractatus de Signis Book I, Question 3, 154/5–30: “Ut ergo non solum pure obiective, sed etiam significative respiciat potentiam, inquirendum restat, an illamet relatio, qua significatum respicit, et in ordine ad quod rationem signi induit, illamet etiam respiciat potentiam, cui signatum hoc manifestandum est a signo; an vero relationem habeat ad signatum purificatam et absolutam a respectu ad potentiam, alia vero relatione respiciat potentiam in ratione obiecti, et utraque concurrat ad rationem signi constituendam, vel etiam in ipsa ratione signi praeter rationem obiecti reperiatur duplex relatio, altera ad potentiam, altera ad signatum.
“Et consurgit difficultatis ratio, quia ex una parte signum non respicit solum signatum in se, sed in ordine ad potentiam, cum in definitione signi ordo ad potentiam includatur, scilicet quod sit manifestativum potentiae etc. Si ergo ratio signi respectum istum dicit ad potentiam, vel unica et eadem relatione respicit utrumque, et currunt difficultates infra attingendae, quia sunt termini omnino diversi, cum respectu potentiae sit solum relatio rationis: respectu signati sit ordo mensurati ad mensuram, respectu potentiae e contra potentia sit mensurabilis ab ipso signo ut ab obiecto cognito. Vel est diversa relatio signi ad potentiam et signatum, et sic non erit signum in praedicamento relationis, quia in ratione signi non est unica relatio, sed pluralitas relationum.
Sit nihilominus conclusio: Si potentia et signatum considerentur ut termini directe attacti per relationem, necessario exigunt duplicem relationem in signo, sed hoc modo signum respicit potentiam directe ut obiectum, non formaliter ut signum. Si vero consideretur potentia ut terminus in obliquo attactus, sic unica relatione signi attingitur signatum et potentia, et haec est propria et formalis ratio signi” (italic added).
- 139.
“Following Bréal,” Broden notes ((2009, p. 11), citing Saussure (i.1907–1911 pp. 99–100), with cross-references) “a natural language and the human ‘linguistic faculty’ that informs it represent not an external object but a cognitive phenomenon for a subject: ‘Synchronic linguistics will be concerned with the logical and psychological relations that bind together coexisting terms and form a system in the collective mind of speakers.’”
- 140.
We can see from this consideration how Boethius’ choice of a Latin term—nota, a synonym of signum but with the connotation of an “index,” closer to ?μ?ιώματα and σημε?α as “symptoms” than to σύμβ?λα—to designate all three sides of Aristotle’s triangle, whereas Aristotle himself had used σημε??ν both narrowly (in the sense of symptom) and for only one relation on one side of the triangle (see Boethius’ text in note above) threw Pedro da Fonseca into a fit when he read Aristotle’s own Greek text for himself, rather than through the eyes of the earlier Latins ignorant of Greek who had relied upon perforce the rendering of Boethius. It was one of the most dramatic moments in the whole Latin development of semiotics, one which had a shaping influence on Descartes’ college years and in its own time threatened to derail the Latin discussion of sign as it had developed independently of ancient Greek philosophy in the Latin centuries after Augustine and Boethius. See Deely (2001a, Chap. 9), “Three outcomes, two destinies,” pp. 411–446.
- 141.
“Realism,” for the ancients and medievals, had a much narrower focus than what that term evokes in modern and postmodern philosophy (see Deely 1992, the tenth reading in Cobley Ed. 2009d, for details; consult also relevant essays in Cobley Ed. 2009c). The term connoted and denoted purely and simply the role of the senses in knowledge. And indeed, true to the medieval heritage, this focus corresponded exactly to the manner in which experience was defined, both in the Thomistic line and among the Latins generally, as writers of the period testified (see, for example, the authoritative summary of Poinsot 1632: 306/13–307/4, in which the physical presence of a thing acting upon an external sense organ is described as “the paradigm case of experience”—“est ipsamet experientia”).
- 142.
Poinsot 1632: Tractatus de Signis, Book I, Question 6, 204/9–11 and 205/34–37: “Bruta proprie utuntur signis, tam naturalibus quam ex consuetudine;” et “non solum sensus interni, sed etiam externi in nobis et in brutis percipiunt significationem et utuntur signis.” The theoretical importance of this point has perhaps been best stated by another cryptosemiotician, in this case Josephus Gredt (1924, p. iv): “Scripto nostro tamquam unica via ad idealismum vitandum manifestatur realismus naturalis integralis philosophiae thomisticae, cujus cardo in doctrina consistit de sensuum externorum cognitione intuitiva excludente quamcumque speciem expressam.” But this implication too is anticipated in Poinsot 1632: 312/3–6: “If the object of external sensation [prescissively considered] exists in something produced by sense itself as in an image or effect, then that object will not be some thing sensed immediately but rather something sensed in the image, which image itself rather will be that which is sensed”—“Quodsi existat in aliquo sui ut in imagine vel effectu, non immediate videbitur, sed ut contentum in imagine, ipsa vero imago est, quae videtur.” Ah, if only Hume had read Poinsot on this point which he thought no one had ever considered in other than the modern perspective making of ideas themselves—species expressae—the direct objects of knowledge in sensation! Certainly, he could never have written as he did in 1748: Sect. XII, Part I. Hume in this regard is discussed in Deely 2009c, Sect. 12.7–8. Full analysis of “sensibles”—proper and common, primary and secondary—in Deely 2001a: 522–535.
- 143.
Poinsot discusses these differences quite pointedly in his 1632 Tractatus de Signis in Book III, Question 4e.g., 337/31–41: “we say that concepts signify the same thing for all when they are about the same object and have been formed in the same way, for they are natural similitudes. Thus, all non-ultimate concepts representing expressions (or voices) inasmuch as they are significative represent the same thing for all those among whom they are so formed. But if they are not so formed among all hearing them, owing to the fact that not all know the signification of the voices, then the concepts of the voices were not concepts of the same thing, and so will not signify the same thing for all.” So we can also say of the passions themselves at their most primary sentire level: even here there is more diversity among organisms within a species than was realized in the pre-evolutionary perspective of Aristotle and the Latins—so much so that it may even be said that, as Kalevi Kull remarked to me on the point, there is in some respects more uniformity at the level of words as governed by customs within culture than there is at the level of passions themselves as induced by the action of the sensible surroundings upon the sense organs of animals, working their way up through the species impressae first of internal sense and then of understanding.
- 144.
- 145.
Just this interaction is what is wanting in Poinsot’s analysis of “ultimate and nonultimate” linguistic concepts, mentioned in note 134 above. It is precisely to mark and to foreground the interdependence of words and ideas, Broden points out (citing Saussure i. 1907–1911, pp. 103, 111–117), that “Saussure introduces [his] pair of neologisms: the sign comprises the signifier (cf. sound) and the signified (cf. concept), such that the Janus linguistic entity resembles the sides of a single sheet of paper.” Adding the interaction of bodies as also subsumed into language through the passions of the soul is required, then, to complete the triadic structure of the linguistic sign in the web of experience, larger than language, which ties the human animal into the biosphere shared with every life-form, and not only into the semiosphere of culture within the biosphere. “Language is” indeed, as Saussure insists (i. 1907–1911, p. 122), “a form” constituted by relations “and not a substance”: but no dyad or combination of dyads make up a sign properly speaking, but only a triadic relation wherein one thing stands for another to or for some third. Dyads as such always reveal secondness, essential in the shaping of thirdness from firstness, indeed, but never itself the necessary vis a prospecto distinctive of semiosis.
- 146.
Saussure’s post-1907 “strategic move is to say that while cumulatively and over time, ‘analogy occupies a preponderant place in the theory of evolution’ of languages, analogical creations as such illustrate not so much linguistic change but rather the synchronic functioning of language conceived as a virtual system and as en-ergeia, as a complex of ‘generative forms’” (Broden 2009, p. 13). In this synchronic functioning, which is not a segment of any diachrony, but (Lotman 1990, p. 6) a homeostatic “bearer of the relationships which make up the essence of language” (“synchrony is homeostatic while diachrony is made up of a series of external and accidental infringements of it, in reacting against which synchrony re-establishes its integrity”), Saussure (i.1907–1911, p. 169) points out that “language never stops interpreting and decomposing the units given to it,” so that it becomes over time (ibid., 172) “a garment covered with patches cut from its own cloth.”
- 147.
On this point, see Deely (2009c, Sect. 6., pp. 35–56).
- 148.
Lotman (1990, p. 17).
- 149.
In Lotman’s (1990, pp. 17–18) summary of Jakobson’s argument against Saussure, italics added.
- 150.
See Deely 2009c for the most detailed treatment so far, but a treatment inspired above all by the work of Manetti 1987, which I first learned of through the work of Eco et al. 1984 and 1986, which Eco made me aware of in his opening lectures for our team-taught course on the “Historiographical Foundations of Semiotics” for the International Summer Institute for Semiotics and Structural Studies held in 1983 at Indiana University, Bloomington.
- 151.
Peirce 1908: CP 8.343, in a draft of a letter to Victoria Lady Welby. See Deely 2011.
- 152.
Useful to read in this connection is Eco 1986.
- 153.
Poinsot 1632: Treatise on Signs, Book II, Question 2, 240–253.
- 154.
- 155.
See Poinsot 1632: “Super Libros Perihermenias. Remarks on Aristotle’s Books on Interpretation, explaining the relation of the Treatise on Signs to the Aristotelian tradition, its philosophical justification, and its presuppositions within the Ars Logica,” 38/1–39/18, together with the “Fifth Semiotic Marker” immediately following (p. 40) in the 1985 first independent edition of Poinsot’s 1632 Tractatus de Signis.
- 156.
Paraphrasing Poinsot 1632: 38/11–19, and 39/5–7, “Super Libros Perihermenias”: “Sed tamen, quia haec omnia tractantur in his libris per modum interpretationis et significationis, commune siquidem Logicae instrumentum est signum, quo omnia eius instrumenta constant, idcirco visum est in praesenti pro doctrina horum librorum ea tradere, quae ad explicandam naturam et divisiones signorum in Summulis insinuata, huc vero reservata sunt. Nec enim tironum captui quaestiones istae de signis proportionatae sunt. Nunc autem in hoc loco genuine introducuntur…. Ut autem clarius et uberius tractaretur, visum est seorsum de hoc edere tractatum.”
- 157.
On this transition from cenoscopy to ideoscopy in the early modern period, see Deely (2008a: esp. Chapters. 1 and 2). The failure of philosophy within the modern universities successfully to adapt to the dominance of idioscopy in modern intellectual life has best been attested to in the recent magnum opus of Ashley 2006, reviewed in Deely 2009g.
- 158.
Broden (2009:, p. 31).
- 159.
- 160.
- 161.
Within “ordinary language,” that is exactly how “sign” tends to be conceived: we look up a term in a dictionary (sign as “word”) and find there its meaning (“what the word signifies”). Completely hidden in the background to success in such a case is precisely the interpretant, which in this case is the habit-structure of one who knows the language in which the term is expressed and the dictionary is written, completing the triad essential to every actual achievement of “signification.”
- 162.
Peirce 1904: cp. 8.332.
- 163.
1632: Tractatus de Signis Book I, Question 3, 154/28–29.
- 164.
Ketner (1995, p. 32).
- 165.
Poinsot 1632: Appendix A, “Whether vocal expressions primarily signify concepts or things,” 344/1–351/40. The fuller treatment, i.e., the general point that signification consists in a triadic relation in all cases, not just the case of linguistic communication as species-specifically human, remains of course Poinsot 1632: Book I, Question 3, “Whether the relation of sign to signified is the same as the relation of sign to cognitive power.”
- 166.
Ibid., 345/9–10.
- 167.
“nisi forte ipsa res significata sit conceptus vel eius intentio”—Ibid., 349/39–40. (the case of reflexion).
- 168.
e.g., Blunden 2005/2006: 4 of 14 (in PDF download from http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/semiosis.htm), where he rightly states that “The basic schema of semiosis is the triadic relation,” but then immediately diagrams it as a series of dyads in triangular formation, exactly as if to instantiate Merrell’s repeated objection to the triangle representation of what is not triangular but triadic. Both involve three terms, yes; but both cannot be constituted from some combination of dyads; only the triangular (mis)representation allows for that. My own frequent use of triangular representations throughout Basics of Semiotics (Deely 1990 and after) is material, rather than formal, in that the irreducible triadicity of the sign is the formal point of the text as a whole repeated throughout its parts. The triangle as a representation remains materially convenient, if formally inadequate on its own terms.
- 169.
As Floyd Merrell explained in the email accompanying the attachment of Fig. 2.1 as reproduced here (essentially the same as the Fig. 2.2 in his Sebeok Fellow Address 2006, p. 4): “I think tripod is necessary, since its three-dimensional and the dimensions of time we live in are three-dimensional, which is no mere coincidence, given the categories, three in number. The ‘psi’, as well as +, −, square root of the central point, the empty set, and zero, would require pages to account for. ... As for the ‘missing central connective’, that’s the reason for and the function of the square root at the central point of the tripod, about which the plus and the minus and the ‘psi’ symbols ‘oscillate’ (to create what you call a ‘spiral’), and it is fed by the empty set and zero, or what Peirce called ‘nothingness’, or Buddhist ‘emptiness’.”
- 170.
Merrell (2006 p. 4), and (2004, pp. 268–269). The situation of the sign as tripodically diagramed, as Merrell says, is “more complicated, infinitely more complicated,” than the bare diagram suggests; so let me share with the reader “a few sources of the gyrating, spiraling, swirling and swiveling ‘tripod’”: Merrell 2000, 2007, 2007a, 2008, 2008a, 2008b.
- 171.
- 172.
On the terminology here as I employ it, especially regarding this term “retroduction” used here in what amounts to a coinage, see Deely (2009c, p. 209) text and note 9. In brief summary: abduction = getting an idea from experience of things; deduction = seeing or drawing out the consequences of an idea; retroduction = returning to things to verify or disprove the consequences of a developed idea.
- 173.
- 174.
Cf. Williams 2009.
- 175.
On this last point, that “object signified” says redundantly what “signified” or “significate” says sufficiently, and that “object” is a disguised and, historically at least, normally misleading way to speak of signifieds, read Purely Objective Reality (Deely 2009d).
- 176.
As in the case of words to passions looked at one way as symbola, yet looked at another way as semeia symptoms; or of words to things as symbola, respecting which reciprocally the things themselves directly “say nothing.”
- 177.
As in the case of the things themselves, which “say nothing” to the words directly but speak loudly, indexically and iconically, in reciprocity with the passions.
References
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Deely, John N. 1985b. Semiotic and the liberal arts. The New Scholasticism LIX.3 (Summer), 296–322. The “second epsilon” mentioned in this work is a blunder, for the “first epsilon” in the Greek “semeiotic” is not an epsilon but an eta, thus: Σημειωτικὴ. Spiral on p. 321.
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Deely, John N. 1986b. “Doctrine”, terminological entry for the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, p. 214. Thomas A. Sebeok et al. eds., Berlin: Mouton.
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Deely, John N. 1989b. “A global enterprise”, Preface to Thomas A. Sebeok, the sign & its masters (= Sources in Semiotics VIII; corrected 2nd printing),vii–xivLanham: University Press of America.
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Deely, John N. 1992. “Philosophy and Experience”. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly LXVI (4): 299–319.
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Deely, John N. 2001a. Four ages of understanding. The first postmodern survey of philosophy from ancient times to the turn of the 21st century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Deely, John N. 2001b. Physiosemiosis in the semiotic spiral: A play of musement. Sign Systems Studies 29 (1): 27–46. (Publication of morning presentation made February 16 at the International Colloquium “The Semiotic Threshold from Nature to Culture” organized by Winfried Nöth at the University of Kassel, Wz II, February 16–17, 2001. Spiral on p. 28).
Deely, John N. 2001c. Umwelt. Semiotica 134 (1/4): 125–135. (Special Issue on “Jakob von Uexküll: A paradigm for biology and semiotics” Guest-Edited by Kalevi Kull).
Deely, John N. 2003a. The impact on philosophy of semiotics. The quasi-error of the external world, with a dialogue between a ‘Semiotist’ and a ‘Realist’. South Bend: St. Augustine’s.
Deely, John N. 2003b. “On the word semiotics, formation and origins.” Semiotica 146 (1/4): 1–49. (Winner of 23rd Mouton D’Or Award for best essay in the field published in the calendar year. See further 2004a).
Deely, John N. 2004a. Why semiotics? Ottawa: Legas. (An expanded monograph treatment of 2003a above).
Deely, John N. 2004b. “Dramatic reading in three voices: ‘A sign is what? ’” The American Journal of Semiotics 20 (1–4): 1–66. (edited version enacted by Chris Tennison and Jim Berhhard on YouTube under “semiotic sign”: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p= E9651802BCDC14BF).
Deely, John N. 2004c. From semiotic animal to semioethical animal and back. In Macht der Zeichen, Zeichen der Macht/Signs of Power, Power of Signs (Festschrift für Jeff Bernard; = Trans-Studien zur Veraenderung der Welt 3), ed. Gloria Withalm and Josef Wallmannsberger, 120–136. Wien: Lit. Verlag.
Deely, John. 2004d. “Dramatic Reading in Three Voices: ‘A Sign Is What?’,” The American Journal of Semiotics 20.1–4(2004), 1–66.
Deely, John. 2004e. “Thomas Albert Sebeok, ‘Biologist Manqué’,” memorial essay presened at the 2004 Lyon IASS World Congress, online at http://carbon.ucdenver.edu/~mryder/itc/sebeok.html; Accessed 01 Jan 2015.
Deely, John N. 2005. “The semiotic foundations of the human sciences from Augustine to Peirce”, Recherche Sémiotique/Semiotic Inquiry 22.1-2-3 (2003), 3–29. Presented on Friday, 26 March, at the International Congress “Semiotics and the Humanities” jointly organized by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and International Association for Semiotic Studies Beijing, China 25–29 March 2004.
Deely, John N. 2006a. Augustine, Saint, theory of the sign. In Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, 2nd ed. vol. 1, ed. Keith Brown, 574–577. London: Elsevier.
Deely, John N. 2006b. Semiotics, history of. In Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, 2nd ed. vol. 11, 216–229. London: Elsevier.
Deely, John N. 2006c. “On ‘Semiotics’ as naming the doctrine of signs.” Semiotica 158 (1/4): 1–33.
Deely, John N. 2006d. “The literal, the metaphorical, and the price of semiotics: an essay on philosophy of language and the doctrine of signs.” Semiotica 161 (1/4): 9–74.
Deely, John N. 2007. “The primary modeling system in animals.” In La Filosofia del Linguaggio come arte dell’ascolto: sulla ricerca scientifica di Augusto Ponzio/Philosophy of Language as the art of listening: on Augusto Ponzio’s scientific research, ed. Susan Petrilli, 161–179. Bari: Edizione dal Sud. (Online at http://www.augustoponzio.com/files/12._Deely.pdf). Accessed 12 Dec 2007.
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Deely, John N. 2007b. Intentionality and semiotics. A story of mutual fecundation. Scranton: University of Scranton Press.
Deely, John N. 2008a. Descartes & poinsot: The crossroad of signs and ideas. Scranton: University of Scranton Press.
Deely, John N. 2008b. “How to go nowhere with language”. Essay review of John O’Callaghan, Thomist realism and the linguistic turn (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82. 2(Spring 2008), 337–359.
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Deely, John N. 2009b. “A short farewell”, a brief rebuttal of short’s “response to John Deely” cited in the immediately preceding 2009 entry, published in Recherche Semiotique/Semiotic Inquiry (RS·SI), 27.1–2 (2007), in press (and, as was the case with the 2009 entry case, the actual publication was also to be in 2009).
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Deely, John N. 2009g. In the twilight neothomism, a call for a new beginning. A return in philosophy to the idea of progress by deepening insight rather than by substitution. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 83.2. (printed as local booklet.)
Deely, John N. 2009h. “Postmodernity and the Unmasking of Objectivity”, plenary lecture presented 7 June 2009 to the International Semiotics Institute (ISI) 2009 June 5–9 Summer School for Semiotic Studies in Imatra, Finland.
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Deely, John N. 2009j. The full vista of the action of signs. Chinese Semiotic Studies 1: 171–222.
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Deely, John. 2014. “The Cenoscopic Science of Signs. Reflections on Cornelis de Waal’s book Peirce: A Guide for the Perplexed”, in The American Journal of Semiotics 30.3–4, 249–349.
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Deely, John N., Brooke Williams, and Felicia E. Kruse, eds. 1986. Frontiers in Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (Preface on “Pars Pro Toto”, pp. viii-xvii; “Description of Contributions”, pp. xviii–xxii. See also Deely 1986a, above).
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Hoffmeyer, Jesper. 1996. Signs of meaning in the universe nature. The natural history of signification. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hoffmeyer, Jesper. 2000. “The Central Dogma: A Joke that Became Real”, the 3rd Sebeok Fellow address, delivered 29 September 2000 at the SSA Annual Meeting held at Purdue University; published in Semiotica 138-1/4 (2002): 1–13.
Hoffmeyer, Jesper. 2002a. The central dogma: A joke that became real (29 September October 2000 address as fourth Sebeok Fellow). Semiotica 138 (1): 1–13.
Hoffmeyer, Jesper. 2002b. Code duality revisited. http://www.library.utoronto.ca/see/SEED/Vol2-1/Hoffmeyer/Hoffmeyer.htm. Accessed 12 DEC 2014.
Hoffmeyer, Jesper. 2008a. Biosemiotics. An examination into the signs of life and the life of signs (= Approaches to Postmodernity, vol 2. Sccranton: University of Scranton Press. (trans. from the Danish Biosemiotik. En afhandling om livets tegn og tegnenes liv. Charlottenlund: Forlaget Ries, 2005) by Jesper Hoffmeyer and Donald Favareau, ed. Donald Favareau.)
Hoffmeyer, Jesper. 2008b. “Biology is immature biosemiotics”, Epilogue to the Semiotics 2008 Semiotic Society of America Proceedings volume, ed. John Deely and Leonard Sbrocchi (Ottawa: Legas, 2009).
Houser, Nathan. 2006. Pragmaschism? In Semiotics 2006, ed. Benjamin Smith and Terry J. Prewitt, 3–12, Ottawa: Legas.
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Jakobson, Roman Osipovich. 1965. Quest for the essence of language. Diogenes 13 (51): 21–37.
Jakobson, Roman Osipovich. 1974. “Coup d’oeil sur le développement de la sémiotique”, in Panorama sémiotique/A Semiotic Landscape, Proceedings of the First Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, Milan, June 1974, ed. Seymour Chatman, Umberto Eco, and Jean-Marie Klinkenberg (The Hague: Mouton, 1979), 3-18. Also published separately under the same title by the Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies as a small monograph (= Studies in Semiotics 3; Bloomington: Indiana University Publications, 1975); and in an English trans. by Patricia Baudoin titled “A Glance at the Development of Semiotics”, in The Framework of Language (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Studies in the Humanities, Horace R. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, 1980), 1–30.
Kerecuk, Nadia. 2006. Potebnja, Aleksander (1835-91). In Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, ed. Keith Brown, 2nd ed. vol. 9 , 798–800. Oxford: Elsevier.
Ketner, Kenneth L. 1995. Novel science: Or how contemporary social science is not well and why literature and semeiotic provide a cure. In Samway ed. 1995.
Krampen, Martin (1928-). 1981. Phytosemiotics. Semiotica 36 (3/4): 187-209. Reprinted in Deely, Williams, and Kruse, eds. 1986: 83–95.
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Kull, Kalevi. 2005. “Semiotics is a theory of life” (10 October 2003 address as fifth Sebeok Fellow). In Semiotics 2003, eds. Rodney Williamson, Leonard Sbrocchi, and John Deely, 15–31. Ottawa: Legas.
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Lotman, Juri. 1987. “On the contemporary concept of text”, in Livstegn: Tidsskrift for Norsk forening for semiotikk (Proceedings of the first symposium “Semiotics in Theory and Practice”, 2–3 Oct. 1986, Bergen, Norway: Norwegian Association for Semiotic Studies) 3, 159–163 (trans. from Russian by Jostein Bortnes).
Lotman, Juri. 1990. Universe of the mind: A semiotic theory of culture. London: I. B. Taurus.
Lovelock, James Ephraim (1919-). 1979. GAIA-A new look at life on earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lucid, David, Editor and Translator. 1977. Soviet semiotics. An anthology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Manetti, Giovanni (1949-). 1987. Le teorie del segno nell’antichità classica. Milan: Bompiani. (trans. by Christine Richardson as Theories of the sign in classical antiquity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
Maritain, Jacques (1882–1973). 1959. Distinguish to unite, or the degrees of knowledge, trans. from the 4th French ed. of Distinguer pour Unir: Ou, les Degrés du Savoir (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1932) under the supervision of Gerald B. Phelan (New York: Scribner’s).
Meier-Oeser, Stephan (1957-). 1995. Entry “Semiotik, Semiologie”. In The Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer , 601–608. Basel: Schwabe( Band IX, cols).
Meier-Oeser, Stephan. 1997. Die Spur des Zeichens. Das Zeichen und seine Funktion in der Philosohie des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Merrell, Floyd. 2000. Signs for everybody: Or, communication, quandaries, and chaos. Ottawa: Legas Press.
Merrell, Floyd. 2004. “Signs so constructed that they can know themselves”. The American Journal of Semiotics 22 (1–4): 3–26.
Merrell, Floyd. 2006. Chewing gum, ambulating, and signing, all at the same time: Or, the magical number three (6th Sebeok Fellow Address). The American Journal of Semiotics 22 (1–4): 3–26.
Merrell, Floyd. 2007a. Processing cultural meaning. Ottawa: Legas.
Merrell, Floyd. 2007b. Toward a concept of pluralistic, inter-relational semiosis. Sign Systems Studies 35 (1/2): 9–70.
Merrell, Floyd. 2008a. “Is the semiosic sphere’s center everywhere and its circumference nowhere?” Semiotica 169 (1/4): 269–300.
Merrell, Floyd. 2008b. Life before matter, possible signification before tangible signs: Toward a mediating view. Cosmos and History 4 (1): 99–112.
Merrell, Floyd. 2008c. “Lotman’s semiosphere, Peirce’s signs, and cultural processes”. Russian Journal of Communication 1 (4): 372–400.
Migne, J. P. (1800–1875), Editor. c.1844–1864. Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina (PL, customarily), (Paris), 221 volumes.
Naville, Adrien (1845–1930). 1901. Nouvelle classification des sciences. 2nd ed. Paris: Alcan.
Newsome, Jonathan. 2008. Chemiosemiotics. In Deely and Sbrocchi, eds. 2008: 203–207.
O’Callaghan, John. 2003. Thomist realism and the linguistic turn. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Ogden, Charles Kay (1889–1957) Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893–1979). 1923. The meaning of meaning. A study of the influence of language upon thought and of the science of symbolism. London: k. paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.; New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.
Peirce, Charles Sanders (1830–1914). i.1866–1913. The collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. I-VI ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–1935), Vols. VII-VIII ed. Arthur W. Burks (same publisher, 1958); all eight vols. in electronic form ed. John Deely with an Introduction “Membra Ficte Disjecta-A Disordered Array of Severed Parts” (Charlottesville, VA: Intelex Corporation, 1994). Dating within the CP is based on the Burks Bibliography at the end of CP 8. The abbreviation followed by volume and paragraph numbers with a period between follows the standard CP reference form.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1867–1893. The essential peirce (1867–1893), Volume 1, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Blooming ton: Indiana University Press. The materials in this volume are also found in the Collected Papers. Citations use the abbreviation EP followed by volume (1 or 2) and page numbers with a period between.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1893–1913. The essential peirce (1893-1913), Volume 2, ed. Nathan Houser, André De Tienne, Jonathan R. Eller, Cathy L. Clark, Albert C. Lewis, D. Bront Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. The materials in this volume are from previously unpublished manuscripts.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1901. “The idea of a law of nature among the contemporaries of David Hume and among advanced thinkers of the present day”; CP 1.133–134 are from it.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1902. From the uncompleted book, Minute Logic, Chap. 1 (Burks p. 293).
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1904. “On Signs and the Categories”, from a letter to Lady Welby dated 12 October, in CP 8.327–341 (Burks p. 321).
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1906. MS 283, “The Basis of Pragmaticism in the Normative Sciences”, in EP 2.371–397.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1908. Draft of a letter dated December 24, 25, 28 “On the Classification of Signs”, CP 8.342–379 except 368n23 are from it (Burks p. 321 par. 20.b). In Hardwick ed. 1977: 73–86; and EP 2.478–483.
Petrilli, Susan. 1988. Semioethics and responsibility. The American Journal of Semiotics 24.4 (2008), 3–48.
Petrilli, Susan. 2004. “Responsibility of power and the power of responsibility: From the ‘semiotic’ to the ‘semioethic’ animal”. In Macht der Zeichen, Zeichen der Macht/Signs of Power, Power of Signs (Festschrift für Jeff Bernard; = Trans-Studien zur Veraenderung der Welt 3), ed. Gloria Witthalm and Josef Wallmannsberger, 103–119. Wien: Lit. Verlag.
Petrilli, Susan. 2007. “Abduction, medical semeiotics and semioethics. Individual and social symptomatology from a semiotic perspective”, Model-Based Reasoning in Science, Technology, and Medicine, ed. Lorenzo Magnani and Ping Li (= Studies in Computational Intelligence, Vol. 64, based on papers presented at the international conference “Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Medicine”, held at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, P.R. China, 3–5 July 2006; Berlin: Springer), 117–130.
Petrilli, Susan. 2008. “Sebeok fellow plenary address: Semioethics and responsibility. Beyond specialisms, universalisms, and humanisms”, Essay #1 in the Sebeok Fellow Special Issue of The American Journal of Semiotics 24. 4, 3–48; now reprinted pagination unchanged in Petrilli 2010.
Petrilli, Susan. 2009. Signifying and understanding. Reading the works of Victoria Welby and the signific movement. Berlin: Mouton.
Petrilli, Susan. 2010. Sign crossroads in global perspective, monograph hardcover reprint of the Sebeok Fellow Special Issue of The American Journal of Semiotics 24.4 (2008), with the addition of a new “Editor’s Preface: In her own voice”, vii-ix, and comprehensive Index, 303–330.
Petrilli, Susan. 2014. Sign Studies and Semioethics (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton).
Petrilli, Susan, and Thomas A. Sebeok. 1998. Women in semiotics. In Interdigitations: Essays for Irmengard Rauch, ed. Gerald F. Carr, Wayne Harbert, and Lihua Zhang, 469–478. New York: Peter Lang.
Plato. (c.427–c.347bc). i.399–347bc. The dialogues of Plato, which I have consulted in the trans. of B. Jowett (4th ed., rev.; Oxford, 1953)and in the ed. of Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, including the Letters (Pantheon Books: Bollingen Series LXXI, 1961). References to translators of Plato other than Jowett will be found in this Hamilton & Cairns collection. The dialogues are chronologized as follows, on the general basis of Crombie 1962: I, 9–14:
Plato. c.399–390bc. Early dialogues presenting the life and teaching of Socrates: Apology, Charmides, Cratylus, Crito, Euthydemus, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias I (“Minor”) and II (“Major”), Ion, Laches, Lysis, Menexenus, Meno, Protagoras;
Plato. c.391–360bc. Middle dialogues presenting Plato's own thought through the vehicle of Socrates: Parmenides, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Republic, Symposium, Theatetus.
Plato. c.359–347bc. Late dialogues, treating sophisticated and ‘semi-professional’ issues: Laws, Philebus, Sophist, Statesman, Timaeus, Critias.
Ponzio, Augusto, and Susan Petrilli. 2003. Semioetica. Roma: Meltemi.
Poinsot, John (9 July 1589–1644 June 17). 1632. Tractatus de Signis, subtitled The Semiotic of John Poinsot, extracted from Poinsot’s Artis Logicae Prima et Secunda Pars of 1631–1632 (orig. ed. Alcalá, Spain; modern ed. by B. Reiser, Turin: Marietti, 1930) and arranged in bilingual format by John Deely in consultation with Ralph A. Powell (First Edition; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), as explained in Deely 1985: 445ff. Pages in this volume are set up in matching columns of English and Latin, with intercolumnar numbers every fifth line. (Thus, references to the volume are by page number, followed by a slash and the appropriate line number of the specific section of text referred to — e.g., 287/3–26.) Available in electronic form (Charlottesville, Virginia: Intelex Corporation, 1992).
Ponzio, Augusto, and Susan Petrilli. 2005. Semiotics unbounded: Interpretive routes through the open network of signs. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Potebnia, Aleksander (Oleksander O. Potebnia;1835–1891). 1862. Myslí’ i jazyk (Kharkov’: Mirnyj trud.); an annotated English and Portuguese translation by Nadia Kerecuk has been announced several years ago, but I have not been able to find it actually published. See, however, Kerecuk 2006.
Poinsot, John (9 July 1589–1644 June 17). 1632. Tractatus de Signis, subtitled The Semiotic of John Poinsot, extracted from Poinsot’s Artis Logicae Prima et Secunda Pars of 1631–1632 (orig. ed. Alcalá, Spain; modern ed. by B. Reiser, Turin: Marietti, 1930) and arranged in bilingual format by John Deely in consultation with Ralph A. Powell (First Edition; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), as explained in Deely 1985: 445ff. Pages in this volume are set up in matching columns of English and Latin, with intercolumnar numbers every fifth line. (Thus, references to the volume are by page number, followed by a slash and the appropriate line number of the specific section of text referred to — e.g., 287/3–26.) Available in electronic form (Charlottesville, Virginia: Intelex Corporation, 1992).
Russell, Bertrand (1872–1970). 1945. A history of western philosophy. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Samway, Patrick H., Editor. 1995. A thief of Peirce. The letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner and Walker Percy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. i.1907–911. Course in general linguistics. New York: Philosophical Librarytrans. (trans. Wade Baskins).
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916. Posthumous publication date of Saussure i.1907–1911, entry immediately preceding.
Sebeok, Thomas A. (1920–2001). 1963. “Book review article of M. Lindauer, Communication among Social Bees; W. N. Kellog, Porpoises and Sonar; and J. C. Lilly, Man and Dolphin”, Language 39, 448–466.
Sebeok, Thomas A., ed. 1968. Animal communication: Techniques of study and results of research. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1971. “‘Semiotic’ and its congeners”. In Linguistic and literary studies in honor of Archibald Hill, I: General and theoretical linguistics, ed. Mohammed Ali Jazayery, Edgar C. Polomé, and Werner Winter, 283–295. Lisse: Peter de Ridder. (reprinted in Sebeok 1985: 47–58, and in Deely, Williams and Kruse 1986: 255–263).
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1972a. Perspectives in zoosemiotics. The Hague: Mouton.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1972b. Problems in the classification of signs. In Studies for Einar Haugen, ed. Evelyn Scherabon Finchow et al., 511–521. The Hague: Mouton. (reprinted in Sebeok 1985: 71–81).
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1974a. Semiotics: A survey of the state of the art. In Linguistics and adjacent arts and sciences, vol. 12 of the Current trends in linguistics series, ed. by Sebeok, 211–264. The Hague: Mouton. (Reprinted in Sebeok 1985: 1–45: page references here are to this reprin)t.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1974b. “La dynamique des signes”, impromptu remarks and discussion reprinted in Sebeok 1985: 95–110.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1975a. The semiotic web: A chronicle of prejudices. Bulletin of Literary Semiotics 2:1–63; reprinted “with essential corrections and additions” in Sebeok 1976: 149-–88, to which reprint page numbers in the present monograph are keyed.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1975b. Zoosemiotics: At the intersection of nature and culture. In The tell-tale sign, ed. Sebeok T. A, 85–95. Lisse: Peter de Ridder.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1976a. Contributions to the doctrine of signs. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Lisse: The Peter De Ridder.
Sebeok, Thomas A., ed. 1976b. A perfusion of signs. Transactions of the first North American semiotics colloquium, University of South Florida, Tampa, 28–30 July 1975. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1977a. Zoosemiotic components of human communication. In How animals communicate, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok, Chap. 38, 1055–1077. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1977b. “The semiotic self”, discussion paper presented at the Werner-Reimers-Stiftung in Germany, and subsequently included as Appendix I in Sebeok 1979/1989: 187–207.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1979. “Semiosis in nature and culture”, as reprinted in The Sign & Its Masters (= Sources in Semiotics VIII; Lanham: University Press of America, 1989), 3–26.
Sebeok, Thomas A., and Robert Rosenthal, eds. 1981. The clever hans phenomenon: Communication with horses, whales, apes, and people. New York: The New York Academy of Sciences.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1982. “Foreword” to Introducing Semiotic by John Deely (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), pp. ix–xii.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1984a. “Vital signs”, Presidential Address delivered October 12 to the ninth Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America, Bloomington, Indiana, October 11–14; subsequently printed in The American Journal of Semiotics 3. 3, 1–27, and reprinted in Sebeok 1986: 59–79.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1984b. “The evolution of communication and the origin of language”, lecture in the June 1-3 ISISSS ’84 Colloquium on “Phylogeny and Ontogeny of Communication Systems”. Published under the title “Communication, Language, and Speech. Evolutionary Considerations”, in Sebeok 1986: 10–16.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1984c. “Vital signs”, Presidential Address delivered October 12 to the ninth Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America, Bloomington, Indiana, October 11–14; subsequently printed in The American Journal of Semiotics 3.3 (1985), 1–27, and reprinted in Sebeok 1986: 59–79.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1984d. Symptom. In New directions in linguistics and semiotics, ed. James E. Copeland, Chap. 10, 212-230. Houston: Rice University Studies.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1985. Contributions to the doctrine of signs (= Sources in Semiotics IV; reprint of 1976 original with an extended Preface by Brooke Williams, “Challenging Signs at the Crossroads” [Williams 1985], evaluating the book in light of major reviews). Lanham: University Press of America.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1985a. Il segno e i suoi maestri, trans. Susan Petrilli (Bari: Adriatica).
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1986a. I think I am a verb. More contributions to the doctrine of signs. New York: Plenum.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1986b. The doctrine of signs. In eds. Deely, Williams and Kruse, 35–42.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1986c. “A signifying man”, feature review of Tractatus de Signis in The New York Times Book Review for Easter Sunday, 30 March 1986, pp. 14–15; German translation by Jeff Bernard appears in Semiotische Berichte Jg. 11 2/1987: 234–239, with translator’s “Anmerkung” p. 240.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1987. Language: How primary a modeling system? In Semiotics 1987, ed. John Deely, 15–27. Lanham: University Press of America.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1988a. “In what sense is language a primary modeling system?”, Proceedings of the 25th Symposium of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics, ed. Henri Broms and Rebecca Kaufmann, 67–80. Helsinki: Artor Inc.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1988b. In what sense is language a primary modeling system? In World behind words, ed. F. Steurs. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1988c. “Foreword” to the Paperback Edition of Daniel P. Lucid, Soviet semiotics: An anthology (hardcover ed. 1977; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press), v–viii.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1988d. The notion of ‘semiotic self’ revisited. In Semiotics 1988, ed. Terry Prewitt, John Deely, and Karen Haworth, 189–195. Lanham: University Press of America.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1988e. “Preface” to Susan Petrilli, Significs, semiotica, significazione (Adriatica).
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1989a. The sign & its masters (= Sources in Semiotics VIII, ed. John Deely and Brooke Williams; Lanham: University Press of America). Corrected reprint with a new author’s Preface (Deely 1989a) of the original imprint of same title. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1989b. In what sense is language a primary modeling system? In worlds behind words: Essays in honour of Prof. Dr. F.G. Droste on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, eds. F. J. Heyvaert and F. Steurs, 25–36. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1989c. Preface. Semiotics, self, and society, ed. Benjamin Lee and Greg Urban, v. Berlin: Mouton de GruyterLanham: University Press of America.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1990. “The sign science and the life science”, Address of October 1 to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in “Symbolicity”, ed. Jeff Bernard, John Deely, Vilmos Voigt, and Gloria Withalm (Papers from the International Semioticians’ Conference in Honor of Thomas A. Sebeok's 70th Birthday; Lanham: University Press of America, 1993), 243–252. This volume is bound together with Semiotics 1990, ed. Karen Haworth, John Deely, and Terry Prewitt.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1991a. Semiotics in the United States. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1991b. In what sense is language a primary modeling system? In On semiotic modeling, ed. Myrdene Anderson and Floyd Merrell, 327–339. Berlin: Mouton.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1991c. In what sense is language a primary modeling system? published in Spanish translation, AdVersuS. Revista de Semiótica (August).
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1998. The estonian connection. Sign Systems Studies 26: 20-41. See http://www.ut.ee/SOSE/sebeok.htm
Sebeok, Thomas A. 2001. Global semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sebeok, Thomas A., and Susan Petrilli. 1998. Women in semiotics. In Interdigitations: Essays for Irmengard Rauch, eds. Gerald F. Carr, Wayne Harbert, and Lihua Zhang, 469–478. New York: Peter Lang. This essay is included as Chap. 13 in his last book, Sebeok 2001: 145–153.
Sebeok, Thomas A., and Marcel Danesi. 2000. The forms of meaning. Modeling systems theory and semiotic analysis (= Approaches to Applied Semiotics 1). Berlin: Mouton.
Sebeok, Thomas A., Paul Bouissac, Umberto Eco, Jerzy Pelc, Roland Posner, Alain Rey, Ann Shukman. 1986. Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, Vol 3. Berlin: Mouton.
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Tarasti, Eero. 2000. Existential semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Williams, Brooke. 1985b. History and semiotic (Toronto Semiotic Circle Monograph, No. 4; Victoria University of the University of Toronto).
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Williams, Brooke. 1986. History in relation to semiotic. In eds. Deely, Williams, and Kruse, 217–223.
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Appendix: Sebeok’s Synthesis (the Tartu–Bloomington–Copenhagen School)
Appendix: Sebeok’s Synthesis (the Tartu–Bloomington–Copenhagen School)
Juri Lotman (28 February 1922–1993 October 28), a suspect figure for the Russian authorities of the Soviet era, is the single most prominent figure of so-called Soviet semiotics, and the principal theorist of the Saussure-oriented “Tartu–Moscow School” of semiotics, with its idea of linguistic communication as the “primary modeling system” through which alone access is provided to the world of culture as the “secondary modeling system.”
In the purview of this school, biology has a background rather than a central role (see Ivanov 2008—still, that is a considerable improvement over Saussure’s own views, and perhaps explains Sebeok’s determined interest in meeting Lotman personally); so it must be said that the “Tartu–Moscow School” in its original formation and development belongs determinately to what Sebeok identified as the “minor tradition” of semiological analysis within semiotics as the complete doctrine of signs or “major tradition” (Deely 1986). (Kalevi Kull, in an email dated 12 June 2009, has pointed out to me an important detail concerning Lotman’s position within semiology: “a change can be dated to 1982, when Lotman read Vernadsky’s work on biosphere and as a result coined his term ‘semiosphere’. In the same year he attended a conference on theoretical biology, which also gave him ideas to turn toward a more organicist approach. This in its way has enhanced the following biosemiotic developments in Tartu.”) By “major tradition,” of course, Sebeok meant an understanding of signs in terms of their proper being as triadic and operative not only throughout the cultural world but also throughout the natural world as prior to, independent of, and influenced by culture.
However, there was an earlier Tartu scholar, a “cryptosemiotician” (that is, a late modern thinker involved with but not thematically aware of the doctrine of signs, still a prisoner theoretically of the solipsist epistemology of modern philosophy) named Jakob von Uexküll (8 September 1864–1944 July 25), who, with his theoretical and experimental explication of the Umwelt/Innenwelt distinction, Sebeok realized, had correctly identified what is truly the primary modeling system for the animal kingdom as including human beings. This primary modeling system, the animal Innenwelt, required only a distinctive adaptation to provide the root from which and basis upon which linguistic communication as an exaptation could be established as the species-specifically human avenue to the development of culture as yet a third-level modeling system transforming the animal Umwelt confined to awareness of objects in relation to the animal into a Lebenswelt open to an exploration of objects not only in relation to ourselves as animals but also as being “things in themselves” sometimes mind-dependent, sometimes mind-independent, but typically (and certainly initially) a combination of both.
With this remarkable synthesis, Sebeok achieved nothing less than a theoretical revolution within the development of the doctrine of signs, one which has proved to be the main foundation for the development of semiotics in the twenty-first century. Sebeok’s synthesis brings the minor tradition “Tartu–Moscow School” into the mainstream of semiotic development, but the old name fails completely to manifest the revolution.
In the first place, Jakob von Uexküll has no association at all with the original name, despite the fact that his Umwelttheorie was developed exactly while he was associated, as would later be Lotman, with the Tartu University. In the second place, the old name embodies a commitment to the Saussurean dyadic model of sign in exactly the sense that the Poinsot–Locke–Peirce tradition (the “major tradition,” as Sebeok pointed out, because it is the only tradition squarely based on the model of sign recognizing the irreducibly triadic character of semiosis as following upon the relational being of signs as such) had shown to be incompatible with the full extent of semiosis.
Beginning with Sebeok’s own introduction of the notion and term “zoösemiotics” in 1963, followed by Krampen’s proposal of “phytosemiotics” in 1981, semiotics by the turn of the century had definitively established the inadequacy of an exclusively linguistic or cultural model, and laid the foundations for the fuller development of today’s biosemiotics, centrally spearheaded by work of Jesper Hoffmeyer (1993, 1996, 2000, 2002a & b, 2008a & b), and the “epilogue” to this present volume), among others.
Thus, when we assimilate the work of von Uexküll to the name “Tartu,” and view the work of Lotman no longer in the exclusively semiological terms in which it was originally cast but as assimilated now rather to the mainstream Poinsot–Locke–Peirce development as distinctively postmodern in the synthesis achieved by Sebeok, and particularly when we take into account the biosemiotic development with its center in the work of Danish semioticians, we should speak now of the “Tartu–Bloomington–Copenhagen School” as the major development within the major tradition whereby the action of signs becomes conscious of itself and of its role in the universe as a whole through the metasemiosis species-specific to human animals as semiotic animals. These are the only animals which not only use signs but also recognize that the being of signs involves but does not reduce to anything sensible, consisting rather in the invisible spiral of interweaving triadic relations which turn things into objects and objects into signs in creating that path which “leads everywhere in nature” (Emmeche 1994, p. 126)—including where human beings have never set foot.
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Deely, J. (2015). Semiotics “Today”: The Twentieth-Century Founding and Twenty-First-Century Prospects. In: Trifonas, P. (eds) International Handbook of Semiotics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9404-6_2
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