Deely 2006 - Semiotics As Naming The Doctrine of Signs-Libre

John Deely
(Publication of 2006 )
ON SEMIOTICS
AS NAMING THE DOCTRINE OF SIGNS
Abstract [on p. 1 in Semiotica 152]: This article traces the comparative fortunes of the terms 'semiology' and
'semiotics,' with the associated expressions 'science of signs' and 'doctrine of signs,' from their original
appearance in English dictionaries in the 1800s through their adoption in the 1900s as focal points in
discussions of signs that flourished after pioneering writings by Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de
Saussure. The greater popularity of 'semiology' by midcentury was compromised by Thomas Sebeok's seminal
proposal of signs at work among all animals, and Umberto Eco's work marked a 'tipping point' where the
understanding associated with 'semiotics' came to prevail over the glottocentrism associated with 'semiology.'
On Semiotics as Naming the Doctrine of Signs, Semiotica 1521/4 (2004),

75139., is presented here in SSA Style (i.e., with footnotes instead of, endnotes and
with the references historically layered), but with the pagination of the published
version indicated in bold square brackets to enable the reader to make reference to
the published text. A small number of silent spelling corrections have been made.
Contents:
1. The Naming: Terminological Considerations Semiology or Semiotics?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

2. The Naming: Theoretical Choices Science of Signs or Doctrine of Signs?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2.a. Saussures option. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.b. The Option of Peirce and Sebeok. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.c. Ecos Dilemma: The State of the Question in the Middle Sixties. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. Theoretical Considerations at Play in the Name Semiotics as the 21st Century Opens. . . . . . . . . 6
4. What Does Semiotics Name?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5. Why Suitability Trumps Arbitrariness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
6. The Fullness of Time. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Semiotica 1581/4 (2006), page: [01]
On Semiotics as Naming the Doctrine of Signs

John Deely
On the afternoon of July 9, 2004, as part of the Lyons Congress of the IASS, we held a roundtable on
semiotic terminology.1 Since I had published in 2003 in Semiotica the Mouton DOr Award-winning essay
On the Word Semiotics, Formation and Origins, an essay subsequently slightly revised and expanded as
a book entitled Why Semiotics? (Deely 2004), I gave a report in the roundtable on the terms semiotics with
its variants (semeiotic, semiotic, etc.) and semiology with its variants (semeiology, etc.), tracing the
first appearance of these terms in English-language dictionaries along with their definitions in each of the
appearances.
Here I would like to recapitulate no more than the main points concerning those first dictionary appearances, in order to trace the main stages of discussion and doctrinal development2 of semiotics after the terms
parted company (as it were) under the very different influences that came into play after the term
semiology was appropriated by followers influenced especially by Saussure. Saussure introduced the idea
of a general science of signs that was determinately limited to the sphere of [02] cultural creations. By
contrast, and more diffusely, the term semiotics came more and more to be associated with the larger
notion of a doctrine of signs embracing both cultural and natural actions of signs according to a perspective
wherein culture itself appears as no more than a compartmentalization of that segment of nature speciesspecifically accessible only to semiotic animals but no more isolated from the rest of nature than that.
1
[24] Terminologie smiotique - Semiotic Terminology, the Friday, 9 July 2004 Roundtable held in the framework of the 8eme
Congres De LAssociation Internationale de Smiotique (AIS/IASS), Lyon, France, 7 12 Juillet 2004, under the theme Les Signes
du Monde: Interculturalite et Globalisation.
2
[24] For the readers convenience, I provide the following outline of the stages covered in this essay:
1.
The Naming: Terminological Considerations Semiology or Semiotics?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2.
The Naming: Theoretical Choices Science of Signs or Doctrine of Signs?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

2.a. Saussures option.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.b. The Option of Peirce and Sebeok. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.c. Ecos Dilemma: The State of the Question in the Middle Sixties. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.
Theoretical Considerations at Play in the Name Semiotics as the 21st Century Opens. . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.
What Does Semiotics Name?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5.
Why Suitability Trumps Arbitrariness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
6.
The Fullness of Time.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

1
[02]
[03]
[03]
[05]
[07]
[09]
[13]
[15]
[23]
8eme Congres De LIASS: Lyon, France 7/712/04 7/9/04 Table Ronde Semiotic Terminology
1. The Naming: Terminological Considerations Semiology or Semiotics?

The first time an entry appeared for Semiotics in this final s form, both with and without the e between
m and i, is in the dictionary of Porter 1870. This original entry makes clear that semiotics is not a plural
form of semiotic. But the definition accompanying this earliest entry is not as a name for the general
doctrine of signs but as a synonym for that specific branch of medicine concerned with one class of Greek
or Latin signa naturalia, namely, symptoms, the signs of diseases.
Semiology first appears, but with the same definition as semiotics, a full twenty years earlier, in
Goodrich 1850: relating to the signs or symptoms of diseases, and paired with semiotic without the final
s. In Ogilvie 1853 this pairing of semiology/semiotic occurs also in the form semeiotics/semeiology,
and all three terms are merged with symptomatology.
Godel (1957: 275) tells us that Saussures proposal to use the designation semiology for a general
science of signs is recorded in a note of Saussures bearing the date of November, 1894. However, a full
decade earlier, by 1883, this same linguistic move had already been made in English, not only for
semiology but also for semiotics, where both are defined no longer in exclusively naturalistic or
medical terms but more generally as the doctrine of signs, the very formula common to Locke 1690 and
Poinsot 1632. But note that semiotic still retains an emphasis on the natural signs, and semiotics includes
science of signs as an alternative to doctrine of signs. Here is the main entry (perhaps suggesting a
greater concern for correct Greek etymology on the part of the British dictionariasts than on the part of the
Americans) from Annandale 1883:
Semeiological, a. Relating to semeiology or the doctrine of signs; specifically, pertaining to the symptoms of
diseases.
Semeiology, n. [Gr. , a mark, a sign, and , discourse.] The doctrine of signs; semeiotics.
[3] Semeiotic, a. Relating to semeiotics; pertaining to signs; specifically, relating to the symptoms of diseases;
symptomatic.
Semeiotics, n. [Gr. , a mark, a sign] 1. The doctrine or science of signs; the language of signs. 2. In
pathol. that branch which teaches how to judge of all the symptoms in the human body, whether healthy or
diseased; symtomatology; semeiology.
All these entries also occur without the e between m and i: for Semiological Same as Semeiological; for Semiology Same as Semeiotics; for Semiotic Same as Semeiotic; and for Semiotics See
SEMEIOTICS.
So already by 1883 the game is afoot: semiotics or semiology? doctrine of signs or science of signs?
2. The Naming: Theoretical Choices Science of Signs or Doctrine of Signs?
Now, very important to note (and I will have to return to this point in remarks below) is that signs
natural in the sense of symptoms are signs rooted primarily in physical interactions, as are also such signs
On Semiotics as Naming the Doctrine of Signs John Deely
as smoke and fire, clouds and rain, milk and childbirth. In extending the meaning of semiology and semiotics
from this exclusive class to a general doctrine or science, what is being included additionally are those signs
rooted primarily in habits developed through social interactions, of which words are the most important
variety for semiotic animals, but not for any other animals (even though many other animals likewise develop
communication systems, even vocal ones, distinctive for local groups). All signs in this second group, by
virtue of owing their relation of signifier to signified to social rather than physical causality, are arbitrary
in the sense that Saussure will make the centerpiece of his proposal for semiology (even though, of course,
the signs in question are not at all arbitrary in the context of their use: but this is beside Saussures point).
2.a. Saussures option
Perhaps now we are in a position to see what was really radical about Saussures adoption of the term
semiology, and why his usage amounts to a pre-emption or indeed a neologism, a veritable original
coinage, rather than a continuation of a usage and intellectual development afoot, one whose time has
come. Whereas in the natural course of linguistic [04] development both the terms semiology and
semiotics began, as did philosophy itself in ancient times, with a consideration primarily of
ignoring , and then (by 1883) underwent an extension to include both and under
signum as a general rubric, Saussures proposal of 1894 and after (especially as spelled out in his
posthumously edited and published text of 1916) took instead a sharply different turn. This turn was as
radical in its own way (and equally incognizant) as was the early modern rejection of the Latin protosemiotic
development of the Way of Signs in favor of the Way of Ideas.
For with his semiology Saussure did not at all envision an inclusion of along with .
Not at all. By semiology Saussure proposed a science of signs that determinately excluded the whole
order of in favor of an exclusive concentration upon the realm of , something neither the
ancients nor the medievals but only the moderns have envisaged. Even though his proposal contains the
expression natural signs, Saussure does not at all mean by this signs natural in the sense of symptoms
(). He means natural in the sense of iconic, and specifically such as can be represented in social
behavior and interaction on the basis of convention, as he expressly says (Saussure 1916: 68):
One remark in passing: when semiology becomes organized as a science, the question will arise whether
or not it properly includes a mode of expression based on completely natural signs, such as pantomime.
Supposing that the new science welcomes them, its main concern will still be the whole group of systems
grounded on the arbitrariness of the sign. In fact, every means of expression used in society is based, in
principle, on collective behavior or what amounts to the same thing on convention. Polite formulas, for
instance (as in the case of a Chinese who greets his emperor by bowing down to the ground nine times), are
nonetheless fixed by rule; it is this rule and not the intrinsic value of the gestures that obliges one to use them.
Signs that are wholly arbitrary realize better than the others the ideal of the semiological process; that is why
language, the most complex and universal of all systems of expression, is also the most characteristic; in this
sense linguistics can become the master-pattern [le patron gnral] for all branches of semiology although
language is only one particular semiological system.
Saussures appropriation of semiology to name a science of signs, then, was actually to coin a
synonym for a quite distinctively modern notion, in the sense of notions in line with the modern mainstream
development of philosophy as critical philosophy and epistemology and, most recently, linguistic philosophy: he was proposing a science preclusively proportioned to the sphere of or culture and
exclusive of the sphere of or nature. As a science, what he was proposing was [05] to establish a new
modern science exclusively in the line of the Geisteswissenschaften.
This was not at all, was indeed a radical departure from, the doctrina signorum as it had developed
among the Latins from Augustine AD397 to Poinsot 1632. As Markus (1972),Todorov (1977), Eco,
Lambertini, Marmo, and Tabarroni (1984; 1986: 65), Manetti (1987), and perhaps others, have demonstrated
in detail, Augustines originality in the matter of semiotics lay in proposing that the sign, signum, is a genus
of which cultural signs and natural signs are alike equally species. Exactly this proposal was the whole point
of Poinsots theoretical justification of Augustines originally descriptive idea. What Poinsot did (1632: Book
I, Question 1, opening paragraphs) was to demonstrate that, by reason of consisting in relations (triadic in
nature: Book I, Question 3), signs require that the student of their action adopt a standpoint superior to the
division of being into mind-dependent and mind-independent, as also between inner and outer. While
semiotics and semiology were emerging in common usage side-by-side, according to the testimony of
Annandales dictionary of 1883, Saussure now, in 1894 and after, proposes, in effect (I say in effect, for
there is no reason to think he had an opinion on the point, or was aware of the terms dictionary emergence
as I have traced it), that wherever semiotics may be heading as some kind of synthesis or transcendence of
the modern philosophical division of sciences into Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften,
semiology should head in quite another direction of its own and establish itself completely within the
perspective of the Geisteswissenschaften. Within, but not beyond, that perspective semiology would constitute a general science.
2.b. The Option of Peirce and Sebeok
The other major thinker of the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century who first proposed a general study
of signs was Charles Sanders Peirce. He began to develop his proposal approximately at the same time that
Saussure was gestating semiology but, instead of veering the proposed development to line up with
mainstream modern epistemological and linguistic thought, Peirce did just the opposite. He picked up the
threads of the late Latin development of semiotic consciousness (Beuchot and Deely 1995) as having
established the being of signs to consist in a triadic relation, and he went on from there to focus on the action
of signs as the way of coming to understand the full scope of that being.
The Latins (summarized in Poinsot 1632: Book I, Question 6, 209/2332) had already realized and
shown explicitly why one and the same [06] rationale of signs obtains in the case of all animals, including
humans, because the rationale of sign does not depend on the way in which an animal organism employs
signs (by discoursing or by comparing or by a simple way of attaining the signified), but on the way in which
the sign represents to render something other than itself present objectively; and this rationale is the same
whether the cognitive organism knows in a simple manner or in a discursive one (perceptually only or
intellectually as well). The rationale is the same, for that matter, not only among organisms, but wherever
and whenever a sign works. So Peirce went a step further than his Latin forebears,3 and proposed that the
action of signs may well extend to the whole of the physical universe, a daring move in which, so far, only
a few have tried to follow.
Peirce had the deepest interest in the modern development of science. Yet he also saw clearly that
semiotics would not be a science of signs in the modern sense of a development of primarily ideoscopic
knowledge, but rather belonged to that more basic and embracing development of knowledge which science
presupposes and feeds into but cannot simply supplant, namely, cnoscopic knowledge, the knowledge
proper to philosophy. Later thinkers in the original line of semiotics (Sebeok 1976: Preface; Deely 1976,
1977, 1982, 1982a, 1986) pointed out that, while science in the modern sense is primarily and decidedly
ideoscopic and philosophy is primarily and decidedly cnoscopic, the Latins had a synonym for scientia in
the cnoscopic sense, namely, doctrina. Hence the expression doctrine of signs would be a better choice
for the semiotic development than would be the alternative expression science of signs that Saussure had
opted for, inasmuch as the Latin term scientia of the original scientia/doctrina pairing has been definitively
appropriated to the modern ideoscopic development, respecting which cnoscopic knowledge, however
indispensable and irreducible in its own right, can do no more than provide framework and passage. Whether
for this or for other reasons, thinkers in the Peircean line (e.g., Colapietro and Olshewsky 1986) by the 20th
centurys end have come more commonly to speak of semiotics as a doctrine rather than a science of
signs.
The first contemporary thinker seriously to undertake the inclusion of animals other than human beings
in the consideration of semiosis was Thomas A. Sebeok, beginning about 1963. To better focus this
development, Sebeok coined the term zosemiotics to stand alongside anthroposemiotics; and under his
editorship of Semiotica phytosemiotics appeared as well, then the umbrella term for all three,
biosemiotics. The intellectual steps leading to the doctrine of signs understood to embrace the whole of
living being was the most dramatic and important series of [07] developments in semiotics over the 20th
century. By the opening of the 21st century Sebeok had, so to speak, stolen the show in matters of
terminology, even from Peirce, who seems to have preferred (according to Fisch and Ketner: e.g., see Fisch
in Ketner and Kloesel eds. 1986) to call the doctrine of signs semeiotic rather than semiotics. For it was
indeed Sebeok who, from his 1963 entry on center-stage to his death in 2001, tirelessly promoted the doctrine
of signs under the label semiotics as inclusive of all signs, natural and cultural alike, in relentless
[25] This is the whole matter of Peirces Grand Vision (see Deely 1989) and the attendant controversies over, first, phytosemiotics (beginning with Krampen 1981), and then, further, physiosemiotics: see Deely 1990, 1993a, 1995, 1997 1998, 1999, 2001a,
2001b, for my own arguments so far; but see Nth and Kull eds. 2001 for the larger framework.
3
opposition to all who would propose what he called an exclusively glottocentric perspective of the narrowing
anthropocentric sort that Saussure had called for under the label or name semiology.
2.c. Ecos Dilemma: The State of the Question in the Middle Sixties
Although, as we have seen, already by 1870 the game was afoot between doctrine of signs versus
science of signs, semiotics versus semiology for naming the general theory, by the 1960s the
intellectual archeology uncovering the full scope of the Latin protosemiotic development as the period
wherein the relational being of signs as triadic was first demonstrated still lay some twenty years in the
future. Even so, the initiating role of Augustine respecting semiotics in the Latin Age had already become
known to all, and research into the Latin development of semiotic consciousness was well underway in many
quarters, with new discoveries coming as no surprise, although of course not foreseen in detail.
Thus, in 1968, when Umberto Eco came to discuss La Frontiera Semiologica, both by reason of his
own scientific interests and deep historical and philosophical background, and by reason of the increasingly
powerful figure of Sebeok championing a truly general, unglottocentric, and inclusive doctrine of signs
under the name of semiotics pure and simple, Eco framed his discussion in the following terms: Tanto per
cominciare, he wrote (Eco 1968: 383), esiste una discussione sul nome della disciplina in discussione.
Semiotica o semiologia? Semiologia, he went on to explain, si afferma quando si tenga presente la
definizione saussuriana; semiotica, si insiste, pensando all lezione di Peirce....
Well, the statement is a little oversimplified, for we now see clearly that the movement toward an
inclusively (rather than a preclusively) general doctrine of signs was underway in intellectual culture even
independently of Saussure and Peirce. In fact, in his manner of proposing semiology, Saussure was much
more original than was Peirce in simply taking up anew and advancing a line of thought already developed
from Augustine to the Conimbricenses and Poinsot, and destined to be named [08] semiotics (or at least
had been named semiotica already by Locke in 1690!).
But from another point of view, it was Peirce who was radical and Saussure conservative. For while the
development of a thematic doctrine or science of signs, either one, was a novelty in the modern context,
the development of that science in conformity with the epistemological and language-centered
preoccupations of post-Kantian thought fit right in with modern intellectual culture. In sharp contrast, the
development of a doctrine of signs conceived as able to penetrate everywhere in nature, including those
domains where humans have never set foot (Emmeche 1994: 126) did not fit in with modern philosophy
at all. What Saussure proposed was novel but comfortable in modernity. What Peirce took up was, within
modernity, anomalous and disconcerting.
In fact, such a doctrine of signs as the Latins had fashioned and Peirce resumed and undertook to extend
is impossible for anyone accepting, implicitly or explicitly, the Kantian Ding-an-Sich/Noumenon distinction,
or, for that matter, for that whole bevy of late modern philosophers who have bought into the linguistic turn
(originally Rorty ed. 1967; but cf. Das Gupta 1993, Lafont 1999). The point could not be made more plainly
than Todorov (1977: 40) has made it: As long as one questions oneself only on verbal language, one remains
within a science (or a philosophy) of language. Only the breaking up of the linguistic framework justifies the
founding of semiotics.
From this point of view, then, Peirce, in resuming the Latin cause, and Sebeok in pressing the case,
especially under the name now accepted on all hands for the doctrine of signs, semiotics, was much more
revolutionary than Saussure. Saussure, after all, did no more than propose a development from within the
well-established perspective of the Geisteswissenschaften. Peirce and Sebeok, considered together, did much
more than simply to re-establish and press for the further development of the protosemiotic line. They
proposed now the forging of a semiotics proper exploring the action of signs through the establishment of
a new paradigm altogether, a paradigm unheard of in either ancient Greek or modern national language
philosophy, and only nascently established by the end of Latin times, and this was to be the paradigm of the
sign itself understood as involving an action that cannot be restricted to either side of the nature/culture, ens
reale/ens rationis, Naturwissenschaften/Geisteswissenschaften, interior world/exterior world divide. The call
for and move toward such a paradigm accomplished nothing less than to define in positive terms the frontier
and threshold of a new age or epoch for philosophy, not only after but beyond the epistemologically defined
confines of modern thought. Faut de mieux, for the time at least, the new epoch can [09] only be thought of
as a postmodernity an idea terminologically that never occurred to Peirce in the early 20th century, and
that caught Sebeok even at centurys end in a kind of terminological lag as the epigones of ultramodern
idealists in the semiological camp tried vainly to appropriate for themselves and their heroes the epithet
postmodern.
3. Theoretical Considerations at Play in the Name Semiotics as the 21st Century Opens
The human being is an animal distinguished by a capacity to form representations of what might exist
that involve but do not reduce to biologically determined needs, and that involve but do not reduce to objects
of perception that can be instantiated in sensation prescissively4 considered. The human Innenwelt models
the world,5 but not simply the world as it is or might be related to me (consider a beaver contemplating a
stream for prospective dam sites), or even the world as it simply is, but the world rather as it might be in ways
[25] An important technical term needed today to rescue the good ship Philosophy for the service of Science from the hands
of the lawless rovers of the sea of literature (Peirce 1905: CP 5.449); definition and discussion in Deely 2001: 310n125.
5
[25] I am obliged to note here, in this felicitious conjunction of the notions of Innenwelt and modeling system, the seminal
contributions that intellectuals associated with the Tartu University in Estonia have made to the maturation of semiotics, both on the
side of the semiotics of culture (the origin of the notion of modeling system through the work principally of Juri Lotman) and on the
side of the semiotics of nature (the origin of the notion of Innenwelt through the work of Jakob von Uexkll), two major influences
which were brought together by Thomas Sebeok (esp. 1987, 1988) after visit to Estonia and meeting with Lotman in Tartu in the
1980s. See Anderson and Merrell 1990; Sebeok and Danesi 2000; Kull, Salupere, and Torop 2005.
Tartu: the oldest center of semiotics in the world, publishing the oldest journal of semiotics (founded in 1967 by Lotman, using
for the title originally, as in Locke, then corrected after three issues to , and best known today as Sign
Systems Studies) along with a prestigious monograph series, Tartu is well-positioned to assume a pre-eminent role in the 21st century
development of semiotics within intellectual culture, notwithstanding the recent blows suffered from evitable administrative choices
(I am thinking of the loss of the von Uexkll archives to Hamburg in 2004, followed by the loss of the Lotman archives to Tallinn
in 2005).
4
that cannot be perceptually instantiated (debates over God are a kind of limit case in the matter). Animals
other than humans have this same modeling capacity, except it is restricted to ways that can be perceptually
instantiated. Thus, the human modeling system is biologically underdetermined, and Sebeok (1984a) has
proposed that it is this aspect of the human Innenwelt that is the root sense of the term language.
The capacity to form representations of the surrounding environment is what generically distinguishes
animals from the realm of vegetative life, and as such is usually referred to in semiotics today (after Sebeoks
reading of Jakob von Uexkll) as the Innenwelt. The Innenwelt of animals as a modeling system differs from
the Cartesian world of mental representations in one very important way: the mental representations as
Descartes considered them were self representations, while the mental representations formed by the
Innenwelt are other representations, representations on the basis of which not the representations themselves
but the things of the surrounding environment are (if only partially and aspectually) transformed into objects
of apprehension, an Umwelt.
While Cartesian representations and objects are one and the same, by contrast the representations of the
Innenwelt are other than the objects represented. Using the terminology developed in a philosophical
tradition reaching as far back as Aristotle (the first to thematize the subject of relations), according to which
every relation involves three factors, namely, 1. a foundation or basis in an individual, 2. a terminus in
another individual, and 3. the relation itself connecting the two, we can say that the [10] other-representations
of an Innenwelt correspond to the first of these three factors and the objects of apprehension correspond to
the second factor, so that, in every case, objects are the terms, not the foundations or bases, of the relations
which link Innenwelt to Umwelt. The relations themselves differ from both their foundation and their
terminus in being suprasubjective, determinately over and above whatever subjectivities they link either on
the side of foundation or on the side of terminus.
Von Uexkll, philosophically, arrived at his basic conceptions from close study of Immanuel Kant, and
indeed the idealism of Kant in philosophy differed from that of his early modern forebears precisely in being
relational (details in Deely 2001: 555563): whereas the ideas of Descartes and Locke alike were identical
in being both the objects of direct apprehension and subjective qualities or characteristics of the knower,
Kant insisted that ideas as subjective representations had to be sharply distinguished from the objects of these
representations. But since the subjective representations and the objective apprehensions exist in correlation,
Kant had no way within his system to allow for objects apprehended being at one and the same time things
(or aspects of things) precisely as existing in the environment independently of the representations.
Precisely here the prescissive distinction between sensation, on the one hand (the semiotics of sensation,
to be exact), and perception and intellection (or understanding) together, on the other hand, proves decisive.
In the long history of human thought about the matter of signs, the first thinker explicitly to discuss the
uniqueness of sensation prescissively considered as an action of signs within the Innenwelt was John Poinsot.
If the object of sensation exists in an image produced by the sense itself as an effect, he pointed out
(Poinsot 1632: 310/37312/6), then that object even as sensed will not be cognized immediately, but as
contained in the image, while the image itself will be that which is seen.
Now there is little room to doubt that exactly that is the case both for perception as such and for understanding: the object perceptually or intellectually known is attained inescapably as contained in an image,
a mental representation, for two basic reasons: because perception and understanding are interpretations, and
because they are not restricted to apprehending what is present here and now as acting upon the organism.
Animals encounter objects that they remember and so recognize. Animals go in search of something they
want that is not present at hand at the beginning of the search but present only objectively. And when
recollection bears upon something present to us in sensation, we can not only recognize it but we evaluate
it, especially as desirable or undesirable to encounter. Thus, something sensed is not simply perceived as it
is sensed, [11] but what is sensed is interpreted (ofttimes rightly, but sometimes wrongly) in perception, and
the same in understanding.
But there is equally little room to doubt that exactly that is not the case with sensation as it occurs within
perception and understanding, for sensation considered as such is occasioned by something sensible and
present here and now in the organisms physical surrounding acting upon the sense organs of the animal
body, activating them, and thus providing the basis for the further activity of the animals forming mental
representations interpreting what the sensation presents.
Sensation itself is selective but not of itself interpretive: the sense organs are provoked by certain ranges
of stimulation only, and cannot help but respond within that range. In the sensation itself there is no interpretation: any physical element of the immediate surroundings that acts in a manner proportionate to the sense
organs of the animal will become apprehended objectively as it is relationally acting here and now.
Evaluation may occur simultaneously with the sensation in time, but the evaluation nonetheless logically
depends upon the presentation of the sensed, and is objectively additional to it. We enter a room, for
example, and see a blackboard: we perceive a blackboard, but strictly all we see is a certain pattern of
contrasting shapes and colors, and we cannot help but see those patterns, although in order to interpret them
as a blackboard we need mental representations on the basis of which those patterns we sense are recognized
and understood to be a blackboard. Given the prior knowledge and experience of blackboards only must we
perceive the given pattern of sensation as a blackboard; but any animal with our or sufficiently similar sense
organs of sight under the right conditions cannot help but see the pattern of sensation, even without knowing
that pattern as blackboard.
On this interpretation of the distinction between sensation and the higher cognitive activities, then,
though objects are always contained and presented within images (mental representations), they are not only
and wholly presented within a complex of mental imagery; they are also partially but always (whenever and
to whatever extent sensation is involved in the apprehension here and now) things or aspects of things
existing in the physical surroundings independently of the sensations which the aspects in question stimulate.
Whence sensation is selective but not interpretive, while perception and understanding alike are both
selective and interpretive.
Poinsot goes on to make the further point that, since other-representation is the essential feature of signification in its difference from objectification (for an object may or may not represent something other than
itself, but if it does not at least represent itself it cannot exist [12] as an object), even sensation prescissively
10
considered is an action of semiosis, an action of signs. For the various sense qualities are not attained
atomically, as came late in modernity oddly to be discussed, but are attained always in temporally
simultaneous patterns of logical priority and posteriority, as when a shape appears on the basis of a contrast
of colors, a position on the basis of a contrast of shapes and movements, and so on. Thus, inasmuch as the
essence of a sign is to present something other than itself to or for some other still, even sensation itself, no
less than and for the same reasons as perception and intellection, is inseparable from cannot occur except
as a semiosis.
So there is no question that the whole of human awareness, from it origins in sensation to its highest
flights of intellectual and speculative fancy, consists in a web of semioses, a semiotic web in which objects
are caught and presented to the human animal for and in its considerations and experiences. But there is this
great difference, if we interpret the signs of sensation la Kant or la Poinsot: in the former case, the only
relations of organism to object are those wholly created or produced by the cognition itself; in the latter case
these relations can be indifferently cognition-independent or cognition-dependent, depending upon
circumstances.
Take a simple case, the famous Galileo case: to the experience of all animals, the sun certainly appears
to revolve about the earth. If what appears to be true in this case really is true, then the objective relation of
the suns motion relative to earth will also be an intersubjective or real relation obtaining in the environment
independently of the appearance. Now we could never settle this if we had nothing but appearances to go on.
And if sensations within appearances did not give us something more than mental representations as such
give within objectivity, we would have nothing but appearances to go on, and hence no purchase on which
to develop considerations decisively resolving the question.
But the question has been decisively resolved, and insofar is prima facie evidence of the theoretical
superiority of the semiotic analysis of sensation provided by Poinsot over the idealist analysis provided by
Kant and modern philosophy both before and after him. Other examples could just as well serve: Karl Rove
discovered only after his father divorced his mother that the man in question was not the man who, in fact,
had begotten him. The objective relation father under which Rove had viewed his mothers consort in
growing up proved to be purely objective, while the unknown real relation connected Rove to another man
entirely. In other cases, the objective relation and the real relation are one and the same, and the modern
achievement of genetic testing, for example, enables us to resolve determinately in this matter what in former
times could not really move beyond firm belief. (Nor could this development [13] have taken place in science
if we were unable to attain to a knowledge, however partial and limited, of the subjective constitution of
genotypes as they are independently of our opinions of them.)
This is a fundamental point. If anything like the semiotic view of sensation first outlined by Poinsot is
a correct view, then semiotics itself cannot be fit within the confines of modernitys intellectual culture.
Semiotics belongs to a determinately postmodern consideration of knowledge and experience, one which
does not go back to some previous epoch (such as the various realisms of late modern thought proposed
in opposition to the modern idealist doctrine that the whole of human awareness is a construction of the
human mind). While the semiotic view fully incorporates the modern realization that experience is in many
11
respects a socially constructed reality, semiotics moves beyond that realization by also retrieving the original
past achievements of semiotic consciousness of the Latin Age. For the Latins had already shown that signs
consist not in related things but in the relations themselves by which things are interconnected objectively,
as they had also shown that these relations of signification are not just any and every relation but exclusively
and irreducibly triadic relations (even in those cases of so-called natural signs which experience and analysis
demonstrate involve indeed dyadic relations of cause and effect distinct from yet incorporated within the
triadic relation of a sign in its proper and constitutive being).
4. What Does Semiotics Name?
What are we trying to name? Signs? No, we have a name for those. We call signs all and only those
things which represent something other than themselves, and we have found that this can occur only when
and insofar as the other is represented to or for some other still. So it is always a question of three
elements, not two: there is the sign, that is, the element which represents some other; and there is the
significate, the other that is represented; and there is the one to or for whom the sign achieves this
presentation of its significate, which Peirce proposed that we should call interpretant, not interpreter,
so as to avoid begging the question of whether only cognitive organisms use signs.
But we have also found that what we thus call signs are not quite really the signs but only the
vehicles of the sign (the sign-vehicle), which Peirce, again, proposed that we should call representamens,
because, of the three elements necessarily involved in any signification, the one commonly called the sign
that is, the sign-vehicle is the one that stands in the foreground as performing the function of
representing another. But [14] what makes that element succeed in signifying is not finally anything
belonging to it in itself or subjectively but rather something belonging to it only suprasubjectively, namely,
the relation itself uniting at once sign to signified to interpretant. So what makes a sign vehicle be a sign
is the occupation of a certain one of the three positions involved in signification, while it is only the relation
itself as so uniting the three elements that constitutes the sign in its full or proper being.
This discovery, or realization, is quite surprising, and easily, I think, the most important achievement or
upshot of the many discussions and analyses of sign that were developed over the course of the 20th century.
Signs are not a particular kind of thing that can be pointed out, like tables and chairs, or rocks and stars, but
are rather the very triadic relations among things that can be pointed out (and also between things that
cannot be pointed out: pure objects as such, let us say). We now realize that it is as a consequence of this
suprasubjective character of the being proper to signs that anything, anything at all, can become a vehicle
of semiosis. All that need occur is that something come to occupy under some particular set of ever-changing
circumstances the position of representamen (sign-vehicle, or sign in the loose sense) respecting some
significate for some interpretant in order for renvoi, as Jakobson (1974) termed the effect distinctive of
semiosis, to result (see the discussion in Deely 1993a, with further qualification in 2002).
Equally important, but not yet equally generally realized, even among semioticians, is how misleading
has been the modern usage of the term object in modern intellectual culture (about equal and opposite to
12
Saussures befuddled misappropriation of the term signified, as I shall discuss below). Objects and
things are popularly considered as more-or-less but basically interchangeable terms, thus concealing the
profound difference between what is necessarily involved in a relation to some representamen (an object)
and what is only contingently involved in some such relation (a thing), which is also the underlying reason
why objects can be but need not be things, but must always and necessarily be the direct terminus of a
relation having also as indirect term an interpretant. But let us make this point only in passing, since the
argument for it is still too recondite to be taken for granted. Suffice to conclude only this much: if every
object as such, in its difference from a thing as such, is a product of semiosis, then the term object is a
synonym not for thing but for significate (a term which many dictionaries resist entering), in which case
significate says clearly and up-front what the term object heretofore has said only obscurely, if at all, and
has served mainly to gloss over, namely, the dependency of objectivity on semiosis.
[15]
So what we are trying to name are not signs but the knowledge that results from the thematic and
systematic study of and inquiry into signs as a distinct sort or type of being, a being which, through its action,
achieves renvoi produces in the interpretant its own proper significate outcome. And since any being
is knowable only from and through the way it acts, the knowledge of signs depends upon an apprehension
of the action distinctive of signs, the action by which a sign is revealed in its being as a sign (not in whatever
being it may further have as an object, or as a thing: prescissively its being as sign), what Peirce (again)
called semiosis.
What we are trying to name is the knowledge that results from observing and analyzing semiosis,
beginning with the realization that the subject of semiosis is the play of triadic relations without which
knowledge and experience quite disappear. So we have discovered that, just as what are commonly called
signs are rather called more properly sign-vehicles, so also the action of signs is involved in every activity
that results in the growth of experience and knowledge, exactly as Locke pointed out in his original 1690
proposal of a bastardized Greek term that transliterates into Latin as semiotica and thence to English as
semiotics.
Semiotics, however, as a term, has only relatively recently become conventionalized as the generally
accepted term to label the study of signs in their distinctive action. The key word here is conventionalized:
is this adoption of semiotics as a term simply an arbitrary decision that could just as well have gone
another way?
5. Why Suitability Trumps Arbitrariness
There is no doubt whatever that words are arbitrary in the sense that Saussure foregrounded in
originally proposing that the systematic study of signs ought to be labeled (named or called) semiology:
between armadillo as signifiant and armadillo as signifi, there is no intrinsic feature of either signifiant
or signifi which explains the connection between the two such that, in a linguistic exchange, when one
13
semiotic animal utters the sound armadillo the other semiotic animal thinks of an armadillo, that
remarkable animal common to the Southwestern United States and Mexico.6
Now Saussure was a great linguist, and his impact on the development of the doctrine of signs in the 20th
century was huge. Still, in some basic respects, this impact was also perverse. Let me give just two examples:
his use of the term arbitrary, and his use of the term signifi, which can hardly be expressed in English
other than as signified, or else [16] significate. But whereas a significate, semiotically, can be a physical
reality, and even when it is not often involves physical realities and real relations therein (for example, when
a state boundary is signified; or a public office awarded), not so a signifi semiologically construed.
So first the signified.
We have seen that semiotic discourse has come to a general consensus that every signification involves
three factors, 1. a sign-vehicle, 2. an object signified, and 3. an interpretant to or for whom the sign-vehicle
conveys its objective content. To which of these three does Saussures term signifi correspond? The answer
is that, while superficially it would seem to correspond to 2., in fact it corresponds to none of the three, but
is a conflation and worse, a confused conflation of 2. and 3. This needs to be sorted out, and depending
upon how the sorting out takes place depends also the long-term fate of the intellectual phenomenon of late
modern popular culture known as semiology. Either semiology is destined to go down as that part of
semiotics concentrated on the semiosis of conventional signs (the most favorable construal); or it will go
down as but another variant on the idealism of the modern philosophical mainstream which conceives
epistemology as the confinement of philosophy to products of the minds own making with no way through
or beyond. Only the former construal allows for participation in the postmodern essence of semiotics as
occupying a standpoint beyond the realist-idealist opposition definitive of the modern epoch in philosophy.
Personally I am confident that, while both construals apply, it is principally that former construal of semiology which will prevail, despite the entrenched idealistic stance of many of its practitioners. But it is quite
interesting to note that, had Saussure been better versed in the history of modern philosophy, he would not
have felt the need to propose semiology as the name for a general study of signs in their conventional
aspect, but would have seen from the start that what he deemed to be a more or less brand new proposal had
in fact already been proposed as sematology as early as Vico (see Trabant 2004; cf. Danesi 1993). In that
case, the contest in the 20th century would have been much more straightforward, and progress toward a
genuine semiotics in the full scale appropriate to a doctrine of signs might have been considerably more
rapid, for it would have appeared as a choice between sematology, on the one hand, a semiotics of culture
pure and simple, and semiotics, on the other hand, a doctrine of signs embracing the whole of nature,
including culture as but the development within nature species-specifically proper to human animals.
But let us consider Saussures second misnomer, his unqualified designation of conventional signs as
arbitrary.
[25] My choice of examples, of course, is completely arbitrary, though I do happen to have a collection of over three hundred
carved armadillos, quite possibly the largest such collection in the world.
6
[17]
14
Although, as I have already granted, the sense of the arbitrariness of words technically specified
by Saussure that nothing in the internal constitution of either signifiant or signifi explains their
correlation under the relation of signification is certainly correct, yet the established prior usage of the
term arbitrary has been sufficient to guarantee a great deal of intellectual mischief resulting in the wake
of Saussures proposal of a semiology having arbitrariness as its central feature, as, so to speak, its heart
and soul. For among the first dictionary meanings of arbitrary is depending upon individual discretion
and not restrained or limited in the exercise of power (the meaning that deconstructionists love to
implement regarding their construal of texts, for example) or coming about at random or as a capricious and
unreasonable act of will none of which considerations are appropriate as criteria to be applied in the
interpretation of texts systematically exposing the objective content of an authors thematically developed
thought. Whence, inevitably, a doctrine of linguistic signs as arbitrary suggests to many, even in spite of
themselves, and be it only on the fringes of consciousness, the view of the Mad Hatter in Alice of
Wonderland: Words mean just what I want them to mean, nothing more and nothing less. Do certain
practices (by no means all) of deconstruction perhaps come to mind?
I have always distinguished between deconstruction as an ad hoc technique for loosening up ossified
interpretations of text, which was a profound achievement and permanent contribution of the work of Jacques
Derrida to the development of semiotics, and deconstruction as a systematic technique for destroying responsibility in the interpretation of texts, which is a practice of postmoderns falsely so-called (cf. Deely 2001:
Part IV). For example, why should naming things contain the origin of violence, if not because the doctrine
that signs are arbitrary, developed in an unqualified way, has opened the door to a serious abuse of
language, the attitude that we can make signs, and words among signs, mean anything we please? The focal
doctrine of the arbitrariness of the sign has been seriously overextended and, so to put it, underunderstood.
There are fundamentally two kinds of signs, let us say, with some risk of oversimplification: those rooted
primarily in physical interactions, like smoke and fire, clouds and rain, milk and childbirth; and those rooted
primarily in habits developed through social interactions, of which words are the most important variety for
semiotic animals, but not for any other animals even though many other animals likewise develop communication systems (even vocal ones) distinctive for local groups. All signs in this second group, all signs which
have their origin in social interaction rather than physical interaction, are arbitrary in Saussures sense. But
they are not at all arbitrary in the context of their use. Only human [18] language, sometimes owing to
creativity respecting the critical control of objectivity which distinguishes semiotic animals, but sometimes
also only by abuse rooted in the wilfulness of the individual language user, is susceptible of being arbitrary
even in the context of use. When use is arbitrary but abusive as well, we should speak not of use but of
misuse.
So, some signs, namely, the signs of species-specifically human linguistic communication, owe their
origin to involvement in stipulations, and their meanings remain tied to that stipulative dimension (which
depends on the ability of animals which have available to them the means of linguistic communication,
semiotic animals, to grasp relations in their difference from related things), even though they acquire also
15
further meanings some of which are accessible zosemiotically independently of anthroposemiosis. In the
protosemiotic development (from Augustine to Poinsot), these signs as such were characterized as signa ad
placita, stipulated signs or arbitrary signs. But the arbitrariness is strictly limited, in that a word, to
succeed, needs not only to be stipulated, but also to have that stipulation accepted socially, by which process
it becomes further a signum ex consuetudine. A term proposed to designate some objectivity has no chance
of being accepted, and thus coming into general use, unless it appears in the ears of those hearing it and the
eyes of those seeing it as suitable or appropriate to what is being named or discussed.
Suitability trumps arbitrariness every time. For in itself, naming and all words, as Augustine (AD389)
early noted, are names before all else is a noble activity, properly exercised the highest achievement of
anthroposemiosis.7 This is exactly why semiology has lost out to semiotics as the more suitable name
overall for the development of a truly general doctrine of signs: because semiotics from the start but
semiology only as an afterthought gives consideration to all three of the elements or factors whose union in
relation constitutes the sign in its proper being. This development distinctive of semiotics as begun in late
modernity has matured and revealed itself, philosophically, as determinately postmodern, while semiology
as Saussure proposed it, by its very restrictive program has revealed itself as, after all, no more than
ultramodern a development, indeed, but one which, on its own, belonged heart and soul to, had not the
capacity to move beyond, the philosophical confines of modern epistemology.
Famously, ancient Greek philosophy considered the sign, or , only on the side of nature in the
nature/culture divide. On the side of culture there were , not signs. Augustine set the medieval Latin
Age of philosophy on another track entirely, the Way of Signs, with his proposal that the being proper to
signum transcended the divide between nature and culture,8 the distinction between and ;
and [19] the subsequent Latin development, which quite disappeared from view once the modern mainstream
in philosophy turned rather to the Way of Ideas, eventually showed that the being proper to signs transcended
as well the divide between inside and outside of consciousness.
But semiology came in the wake of modern philosophy, generally knowing nothing of Latin thought in
the matter of signs. And with Saussure the / distinction was reasserted with a vengeance,
but this time to drive the from the field of signs, and to accept only the . Quite ignorant of
[25] But because the use of verbal language is under the voluntary control of each individual who speaks, naming can be
arbitrary and embittering instead of suitable and considerate of the best that we can know of things and persons at any given time
under any given circumstances. By arbitrary, of course, Saussure did not in any way mean arbitrary in this sense of abusive. But
enough among his epigones have gone that way to signalize the inherent connotative problem, so to put it, inevitable in the context
of ordinary usage at this stage of linguistic development throughout the European languages, at least; and in any event there remains
the fact that the signifiant/signifi relation dyadically considered, unmotivated for sure in signs such as language determined
principally by social interactions, are indeed motivated when we take into account also the interpretant. Whence the unqualified
doctrine that signs are arbitrary depends for its force on ignoring or suppressing the third element the proper significate
outcome, no less, at that! without which there is no triadic relation, and hence no sign in its fully constituted being. And that point
semiotics demonstrates as essentially qualifying the semiological doctrine of arbitrariness, without even having to consider the further
case of signs natural in the sense originally characterized by Augustine (AD397: Book I, Paragraph 2, opening lines) as those
which, independently of any [26] will or desire whatever of signifying beyond themselves, yet make something other than themselves
able to be known, such as smoke or storm clouds or milk-filled breasts.
8
[26] On the saltations embodied in signum as a 5th century and later Latin term, see Deely 2002a and 2004a.
7
16
and uninterested in the Latins, thus, Saussures epigones took up their cause without a thought for the
victories so painfully won in the Latin protosemiotic line, in particular the careful Latin demonstration that
the real contrast between and is not at all not either way between what are and what
are not signs, but between signs which have their signifying origin in causal interactions versus signs which
have their signifying origin in social interactions. Just as causality (and so indexicality) grounds the former,
so habit (and so symbolicity, often complicit with iconicity) grounds the latter. Nor did these original
Saussureans have the intellectual means, as Sebeok would eventually demonstrate somewhat devastatingly
(e.g., Sebeok 1975, 1975a, inter alia),9 to recognize that symbolicity cannot be confined wholly to
anthroposemiosis.
The sign as restricted to the realm of convention, especially as defined in terms of the conventional and
arbitrary (as and ) is a conception as distinctively modern as was distinctively ancient the
restriction of to natural events and propositional contexts of inference concerning . Semiotics
contrasts both with the ancient view which omits , signs acting in the realm of , and with the
modern view which omits , signs acting in the realm of . By reason of this contrast, semiotics
is neither ancient nor modern.
Semiotics is medieval respecting ancient thought, but in the precise sense of post-ancient: it retains all
the insights of ancient thought from the discussions of , but renders those insights aufgehoben in its
discussion of signum as containing as well as . The Latin Age, thus, saw nothing less than
the original florescence of a semiotic consciousness. Yet semiotics, respecting medieval thought itself, is also
post-medieval, because, even though the first florescence of semiotic consciousness was a medieval development, semiotics renders that Latin protosemiotic development wherein the being proper to sign was identified
aufgehoben through the discussion of semiosis as the action of signs realized in the production of
interpretants as the proper significate outcome of sign-action. And again, respecting modern philosophical
thought, together with semiology as originally proposed (for I think it is clear by [20] this stage of the
discussion that the two are of a piece epistemologically within intellectual culture as a whole), semiotics is
post-modern. For while semiotics proper takes full account of modernitys demonstration that the world of
objects is neither equivalent to nor reducible to the world of things existing in themselves with their bare
physical interactions, it yet moves beyond modernity in showing how the physical environment through
semiosis is always partially included as such in the objective world or Umwelt of animals,10 and especially
in the further showing that objects and things alike presuppose semiosis in order to be distinguished and
known in their interconnections as well as in their differences of order.
[26] Thus Cassirers neo-Kantian definition of human being as symbolic animal fails to meet the requirement that a definition
be coextensive with the defined, and is not at all the same as the formula semiotic animal proposed as the postmodern definition
of human being to replace the modern formula res cogitans proposed for modernity: discussion in Deely 2005; see also Deely, Petrilli,
and Ponzio 2005.
10
[26] In their recent study of Sebeoks work, Petrilli and Ponzio (2001: 20) capture the postmodern essence of the way of signs
exactly: there is no doubt that the inner human world, with great effort and serious study, may reach an understanding of non-human
worlds and of its connection with them.
9
17
By being postmodern, then, semiotics is not only after each of the previous epochs of philosophy, but
more fundamentally it renders those epochs aufgehoben rather than pass. Semiotics captures the insights
into signs of each of the earlier periods, but raises those insights to a higher level and brings about a synthesis
of its own established on the basis of a paradigm never explicitated prior to semiotics itself. This paradigm
of the action of signs is the key to knowledge and experience and, if Peirces further step be sound, also the
key to the evolution of the universe as moving from less to more developed stages and regions, both in the
matter of stars, galaxies, and planetary systems, and in the matter of life itself and the development heretofore
considered almost exclusively in terms of dyadic physical interactions under the rubric of Darwinian
evolution.
So we see that, even if the doctrine of signs has finally established its self-identity in semiotics as its
proper name (and even if we wish for reasons of nostalgia and respect for our forebears in the area to
continue to speak of the semiotics of culture as semiology, that part of semiotics which is concerned with
anthroposemiosis in its uniqueness more than in its completeness), the implications of that doctrine are far
from fully realized. The future work to be done easily exceeds what has been so far accomplished.
We have established a good beginning, nothing more; but a good beginning is not a little! For the sign
as capacious enough to embrace both nature and culture in their constitution of and interpenetration within
the objective world of experience by contrast both to ancient and to modern philosophy may be (indeed
is) a conception of medieval Latin origin. But the turn (see Deely 1985: 404, 41011) to a study of the full
extent of the action consequent upon that unique mode of being surpasses the highest achievement of the
Latins in establishing the exact constitution of that being as unique in requiring the triadic relation beyond
the causal dyadic relations of physical interaction. That is a turn that requires and presupposes the being of
sign as established for what it is, to be sure, and this much the Latins accomplished. But it is a turn
nonetheless, [21] a further move conceptually that opens the way to the full development of semiotics, and
a turn that is (thanks in the first place mainly place to Peirce, and after him to Sebeok) a distinctively
postmodern development. That is why postmodern philosophy in its positive essence, by whatever name we
come eventually to call it in the future history of philosophy, is and will be for a long time to come,
semiotics.
And all those reasons are at play in the fact that semiotics has come to trump semiology (to say
nothing of sematology, probably the term Saussure should have adopted) in the growing consensus over
how the general study of signs ought best to be named. For a name that leaves out the heart of the doctrina
signorum, namely, that it has a standpoint proper to itself which cannot be restricted either to nature or to
culture, but allows us to follow the action of signs wherever it leads which has proved to be everywhere
in nature, including those domains where humans have never set foot, as Emmeche eloquently enunciated
the point (1994: 126) is hardly a suitable name for the development as a whole. And semiology is just
such a name, to wit, unsuitable to the whole of the study of signs for the very reason that in its stipulation
semiology applies only to a part of the whole in which signs reveal themselves at work, and even there not
according to the rationale proper to and distinctive of every sign in its proper being.
18
What semiology is suitable to name is that part of semiotics concerned principally with the world of
culture in its difference from the world of nature, as that difference is mediated by signs and dependent in
particular upon signs of a certain type. But the revolution implied in what the Latins showed and Peirce and
Sebeok emphasized in the contemporary recovery of semiotic consciousness lies in the realization that this
whole world of culture cannot adquately be regarded in simple opposition to nature but must instead be
seen much rather as (Sebeok 1984: 3) that minuscule segment of nature some anthropologists grandly
compartmentalize as culture.
There are semioses distinctive of culture, to be sure, and they merit by all means specialized study. But
for the general doctrine of signs we need a name that has embraced the whole from the start. We need a name
that has never been stigmatized by the intellectual myopia which set in when Descartes contracted human
being to res cogitans and the idea took root (theologians can hardly escape some of the blame in this matter)
that the human being is above and radically separated from lowly nature: this idea is one of the most deeply
engrained of the modern notions, strongly reinforced by modern epistemology and linguistic philosophy,
an idea profoundly wrong but embraced without reserve in the original proposal of semiology.
[22]
In this respect, we find among the latter-day adherents of the original late modern proposal for
semiology a faithful remnant clinging to anthropoisolationism. These thinkers see in the idea of the
arbitrariness of language a refuge from what has happened in the discussion of signs since the sixties. A
kind of would-be insurgency, these partisans see as their first task to discredit and dismantle everything that
has transpired in the European discourse under the alien influences of Peirce and Sebeok. An East European
academician modestly proposes the term Bankovs razor to emblematize the idea that semiotics should
cut and cast away everything that changes the playing field established by Saussures notion of the
arbitrariness of signs.11 Lost in the Sixties Tonight, reminiscent of an American popular song of recent
vintage, could well be adopted as the Marseillaise of this rear-guard movement.
The argument, for what it is worth, holds that semiotics and semiology are merely synonym words,
and what they are synonyms for is the field of inquiry established by the Saussurean notion of the arbitrary.
(Not at all, of course, that Saussure had the last word, since there is no last word on anything; just that
arbitrariness in Saussures sense is the essence of signs, and semiotics or semiology must be defined
[26] The choice of terms, inevitably connoting in the associative fringes of consciousness of any person even minimally
educated in the history of philosophy Ockhams Razor of universal fame, consequently suggests also a refined device intended to
promote theoretical sophistication and parsimony among theoreticians. This indeed is the manner in which I took and struggled to
interpret the expression for months during my stay in Bulgaria, as evidenced in the text of my four books published there while
teaching under the dual auspices of the American Fulbright Program and the Southeast European Center for Semiotic Studies at the
New Bulgarian University in Sofia. Only slowly did it dawn on me that the connotation of Ockhams razor was an empty connotation,
as conversations forced me to realize that my attempt at interpretation was wholly misguided. Imagine the incredulity I experienced
on being forced in the end to recognize that what was being proposed was not at all a maxim summarizing a requirement for or call
to theoretical sophistication, but, on the contrary, a naked shibboleth intended to promote an ideological position pure and simple
stopping the clock on the 20th century development of the doctrine of signs at that point when, in the early 1960s, the international
discourse on signs began to move decisively beyond the frontiers circumscribed by the Saussurean doctrine of arbitrariness indeed
beyond the frontiers circumscribed by that doctrine on any possible interpretation by taking account not only of the context within
which language operates but of the larger context as well in which language users operate as semiotic animals among other animals
within and dependent upon a physical universe of nature.
11
19
and understood accordingly.) Thus semiotics is semiology, just another word for the same thing; and
semiology is just what Saussure outlined: the playing field established by the notion of arbitrariness in signs.
The discussion of signs, then, as it stood (particularly in French and Italian circles) in the 60s should be
regarded as the Golden Age, the ne plus ultra of semiotics, and the lments of Barthes can well be taken
as the charter or manifesto of semiotics (that is, semiology: for whats in a name?). As Barthes is the
apotheosis of the Golden Age of semiotics, so Sebeok has become the nemesis for what really needs to be
done: and that is to cut away zosemiotics in particular and biosemiotics in general (to say nothing of
physiosemiotics and semioethics) as misguided developments, embarrassments to the profession, and
obstacles to semiology (= semiotics) assuming its rightful place among the Geisteswissenschaften.
On this view, irredentistly modern, let us call it, Sebeoks proposal that semiotics stands at the intersection of nature and culture has no more merit or relevance than does the Latin protosemiotics or the pansemiotics of Peirce. In fact, philosophy is one thing, but semiology quite another. Semiotics semiology: call
it what you will; makes no difference is a scientific specialization, one whose place among the sciences
is threatened by the philosophical pretensions of Peircean thought, and one which is simply embarrassed by
the Sebeokean pretensions of biosemioticians.
If nothing else, this rear-guard movement shows that there can be intellectual Luddites as well as working
class Luddites.
[23]
Unfortunately for these partisans of the arbitrary, words carry not only stipulations but histories, and
these histories carry the experiences of those who lived them. All of this echoes in the use of words and the
choice of names, often unconsciously but nonetheless at work, as Jacques Maritain (1938, 1943, 1956, 1957,
1986) so well pointed out in his writings on sign, not to mention other philosophers (Heidegger 1927, 1947;
Deely 2000). Seldom if ever (probably never) is it merely the question of a convention as proposed that
carries the day. Where the convention bears on active present concerns, especially among thinkers, the
weight of history, the burden of knowledge, will come to bear and tip the balance at crucial points. Just such
a crucial point in the study of signs was reached by the closing decades of the 20th century; and while at midcentury one heard and read only of semiology on all sides, slow by slow the forces of scholarship and
learning, active observation and creative analysis, took more and more of the relevant factors into account
and put the growing awareness of the requirements of the sign into play. There was no way that the
cumulative results of these discussions could be kept from influencing the naming of what the discussions
were about over-all!
6. The Fullness of Time
By the opening of the 21st century, the arbitrariness of Saussures proposal of semiology gave way
before the suitability of Lockes earlier proposal of semiotica. The official journal of the International
Association for Semiotic Studies bears the banner of the passage. Even Umberto Eco, emblem of the
discussion of signs to the popular culture of the new millennium, who spoke of his work in 1968 as an
Introduzione alla ricerca semiologica, even as he broached there the problem of the name, by 1975 published
20
rather a Trattato di semiotica generale. In fact, it was neither Saussure nor Peirce who triumphed as much
as it was Thomas A. Sebeok, for it was Sebeok alone who, from the very start of his involvement, promoted
the term semiotics as the general name (Peirce himself preferred semeiotic) for our new perspective.
But regardless of individuals, it is clearly around the name semiotics that a postmodern consensus has
coalesced, and we may regard the name (by very reason of that consensus and of the extensive discussion
that has gone into its making, especially over the second half of the 20th century) as conventional, yes, but
now anything but arbitrary: it is less a signum ad placitum at this point, an arbitrary proposal to be
considered (as it was in the text of Locke), than it is a signum ex [24] consuetudine, a proposal duly
weighed and considered and adopted as such.
Semiotics names the time of the sign, and the sign is something whose time has come. Intellectual culture
will never be the same, for it will never again be able to pretend that things are merely objects, objects mere
playthings of human creation, and reality no more than a social construction essentially arbitrary. Areas of
specialized inquiry are determined by the object being investigated; but objects come about through semiosis,
with the result that, while specialization is essential to penetrate deeply what objects are, particularly as they
involve also physical reality, semiosis is needed both to sustain those boundaries and to show where they are
crossable and when they need to be crossed.
Interdisciplinarity, so loudly called for in our universities today, is nothing more than an unwitting call
for the development of semiotics, for its integration into the fabric of our institutions of learning. Toward
this end, a renewal of intellectual culture around an increasing appreciation of the manner in which human
experience depends upon signs for its life, the arrival at a suitable name for the development as a whole is
no mean beginning. It will take another century before we see what the maturation of semiotics will really
mean, before we have in our purview something of the fullness of the implications of the various theoretical
considerations and choices that have gone into the naming so far of this postmodern perspective that
reveals signs as perfusing the universe, both in its development over time and in its unfolding for the
understanding of the animals who have come to realize that knowing, like the growth of experience and of
being in nature, is always by way of an involvement of signs. Signs are not the whole story, but they are the
whole of the storys coming to be told.
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John Deely

On Semiotics as Naming the Doctrine of Signs, Semiotica 1521/4 (2004),

1. The Naming: Terminological Considerations Semiology or Semiotics?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Semiotica 1581/4 (2006), page: [01]

On Semiotics as Naming the Doctrine of Signs

The Naming: Terminological Considerations Semiology or Semiotics?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

The Naming: Theoretical Choices Science of Signs or Doctrine of Signs?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

What Does Semiotics Name?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Why Suitability Trumps Arbitrariness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

The Fullness of Time.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

1. The Naming: Terminological Considerations Semiology or Semiotics?

On Semiotics as Naming the Doctrine of Signs John Deely

On Semiotics as Naming the Doctrine of Signs John Deely

On Semiotics as Naming the Doctrine of Signs John Deely

On Semiotics as Naming the Doctrine of Signs John Deely

On Semiotics as Naming the Doctrine of Signs John Deely

On Semiotics as Naming the Doctrine of Signs John Deely

On Semiotics as Naming the Doctrine of Signs John Deely

On Semiotics as Naming the Doctrine of Signs John Deely

On Semiotics as Naming the Doctrine of Signs John Deely

References, Historically Layered

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DAS GUPTA, Amitabha.

Semiotic as the Doctrine of Signs, Ars Semeiotica 1/3, 41-68.

1982a. On the Notion Doctrine of Signs, Appendix I in Deely 1982: 127130.

Postmodernism and the Perfusion of Signs, in SemiosisCEvolutionCEnergy. Toward a

On Semiotics as Naming the Doctrine of Signs John Deely

2001a. A Sign is What?, Sign Systems Studies 29.2, 705743.

Why Semiotics? (Ottawa, Canada: Legas).

2004a. to Sign by Way of Signum: On the Interplay of Translation and Interpretation in

DEELY, John, Susan PETRILLI, and Augusto PONZIO.

The Semiotic Animal (Ottawa, Canada: Legas Publishing).

DEELY, John N., Brooke WILLIAMS, and Felicia E. KRUSE, editors.

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Biosemiotics, Special Issue of Semiotica 127.

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On Semiotics as Naming the Doctrine of Signs John Deely

KETNER, Kenneth L., and Christian J. W. KLOESEL, Editors.

KULL, Kalevi, Guest-Editor.

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