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 152–1/4 (2004),

75–139., 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. Saussure’s option. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2.b. The Option of Peirce and Sebeok. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

2.c. Eco’s 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 158–1/4 (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 D’Or 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 appear-

ances, 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 species-

specifically accessible only to semiotic animals but no more isolated from the rest of nature than that.

1 [24] “Terminologie sémiotique - Semiotic Terminology”, the Friday, 9 July 2004 Roundtable held in the framework of the 8eme

Congres De L’Association Internationale de Sémiotique (AIS/IASS), Lyon, France, 7 – 12 Juillet 2004, under the theme Les Signesdu Monde: Interculturalite et Globalisation.

2 [24] For the reader’s convenience, I provide the following outline of the stages covered in this essay:

1. The Naming: Terminological Considerations — Semiology or Semiotics?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 [02]

2. The Naming: Theoretical Choices — Science of Signs or Doctrine of Signs?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 [03]

2.a. Saussure’s option. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 [03]

2.b. The Option of Peirce and Sebeok. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 [05]

2.c. Eco’s Dilemma: The State of the Question in the Middle Sixties. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 [07]

3. Theoretical Considerations at Play in the Name Semiotics as the 21st Century Opens. . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 [09]

4. What Does “Semiotics” Name?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 [13]

5. Why Suitability Trumps Arbitrariness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 [15]

6. The Fullness of Time.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 [23]

1

8eme Congres De L’IASS: Lyon, France 7/7–12/04 È 7/9/04 Table Ronde “Semiotic Terminology” 2

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

óçìåßá 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 Saussure’s proposal to use the designation “semiology” for a general

science of signs is recorded in a note of Saussure’s 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. óçìåßïí, a mark, a sign, and ëïãïò, 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. óçìåßïí, 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 Semeiologi-

cal’; 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” È John Deely 3

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 Saussure’s point).

2.a. Saussure’s option

Perhaps now we are in a position to see what was really radical about Saussure’s 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 óçìåßá

ignoring óýìâïëá, and then (by 1883) underwent an extension to include both óçìåßá and óýìâïëá under

signum as a general rubric, Saussure’s 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 óýìâïëá along with óçìåßá.

Not at all. By “semiology” Saussure proposed a “science of signs” that determinately excluded the whole

order of óçìåßá in favor of an exclusive concentration upon the realm of óýìâïëá, 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

(óçìåßá). 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

8eme Congres De L’IASS: Lyon, France 7/7–12/04 È 7/9/04 Table Ronde “Semiotic Terminology” 4

sense linguistics can become the master-pattern [le patron général] for all branches of semiology although

language is only one particular semiological system.

Saussure’s 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 philo-

sophy”: he was proposing a “science” preclusively proportioned to the sphere of íïìïò or culture and

exclusive of the sphere of öõóéò 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, Augustine’s 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 Poinsot’s theoretical justification of Augustine’s 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

Annandale’s 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 term’s 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 consti-

tute 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, 209/23–32) had already realized and

shown explicitly why “one and the same [06] rationale of signs obtains in the case of all animals, including

“On ‘Semiotics’ as Naming the Doctrine of Signs” È John Deely 5

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, cœnoscopic 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 cœnoscopic, the Latins had a synonym for scientia in

the cœnoscopic 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 cœnoscopic 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

century’s 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 “zoösemiotics” 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

3 [25] This is the whole matter of “Peirce’s Grand Vision” (see Deely 1989) and the attendant controversies over, first, phytosem-iotics (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 Nöth and Kull eds. 2001 for the larger framework.

8eme Congres De L’IASS: Lyon, France 7/7–12/04 È 7/9/04 Table Ronde “Semiotic Terminology” 6

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. Eco’s 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

“On ‘Semiotics’ as Naming the Doctrine of Signs” È John Deely 7

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 century’s 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

4 [25] An important technical term needed today “to rescue the good ship Philosophy for the service of Science from the handsof 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 seminalcontributions that intellectuals associated with the Tartu University in Estonia have made to the maturation of semiotics, both on theside of the semiotics of culture (the origin of the notion of modeling system through the work principally of Juri Lotman) and on theside of the semiotics of nature (the origin of the notion of Innenwelt through the work of Jakob von Uexküll), two major influenceswhich were brought together by Thomas Sebeok (esp. 1987, 1988) after visit to Estonia and meeting with Lotman in Tartu in the1980s. 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, usingfor the title ÓçìßùôéêÞ originally, as in Locke, then “corrected” after three issues to ÓçìåßùôéêÞ, and best known today as SignSystems Studies) along with a prestigious monograph series, Tartu is well-positioned to assume a pre-eminent role in the 21st centurydevelopment of semiotics within intellectual culture, notwithstanding the recent blows suffered from evitable administrative choices(I am thinking of the loss of the von Uexküll archives to Hamburg in 2004, followed by the loss of the Lotman archives to Tallinnin 2005).

8eme Congres De L’IASS: Lyon, France 7/7–12/04 È 7/9/04 Table Ronde “Semiotic Terminology” 8

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 Sebeok’s

reading of Jakob von Uexküll) 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 Uexküll, 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: 555–563): 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: 310/37–312/6), “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.”

“On ‘Semiotics’ as Naming the Doctrine of Signs” È John Deely 9

Now there is little room to doubt that exactly that is the case both for perception as such and for under-

standing: 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 organism’s physical surrounding acting upon the sense organs of the animal

body, activating them, and thus providing the basis for the further activity of the animal’s 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 interpre-

tation: 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 sig-

nification 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

8eme Congres De L’IASS: Lyon, France 7/7–12/04 È 7/9/04 Table Ronde “Semiotic Terminology” 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 à la Kant or à 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 sun’s 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 mother’s 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 modernity’s 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

“On ‘Semiotics’ as Naming the Doctrine of Signs” È John Deely 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

8eme Congres De L’IASS: Lyon, France 7/7–12/04 È 7/9/04 Table Ronde “Semiotic Terminology” 12

Saussure’s 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 signifié, there is no intrinsic feature of either signifiant

or signifié which explains the connection between the two such that, in a linguistic exchange, when one

“On ‘Semiotics’ as Naming the Doctrine of Signs” È John Deely 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 “signifié”, 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 “signifié” 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 Saussure’s term signifié 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 mind’s 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 sem-

iology 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 Saussure’s second misnomer, his unqualified designation of conventional signs as

“arbitrary”.

6 [25] My choice of examples, of course, is completely arbitrary, though I do happen to have a collection of over three hundredcarved armadillos, quite possibly the largest such collection in the world.

8eme Congres De L’IASS: Lyon, France 7/7–12/04 È 7/9/04 Table Ronde “Semiotic Terminology” 14

[17] 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 signifié 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 Saussure’s 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 author’s 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 respon-

sibility 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, “under-

understood”.

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 communi-

cation 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 Saussure’s 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

“On ‘Semiotics’ as Naming the Doctrine of Signs” È John Deely 15

further meanings some of which are accessible zoösemiotically 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 óçìåßïí, only on the side of nature in the

nature/culture divide. On the side of culture there were óýìâïëá, 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 óçìåßïí and óýìâïëïí;

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 óçìåßïí/óýìâïëïí distinction was reasserted with a vengeance,

but this time to drive the óçìåßá from the field of signs, and to accept only the óýìâïëá. Quite ignorant of

7 [25] But because the use of verbal language is under the voluntary control of each individual who speaks, naming can bearbitrary and embittering instead of suitable and considerate of the best that we can know of things and persons at any given timeunder any given circumstances. By arbitrary, of course, Saussure did not in any way mean “arbitrary” in this sense of “abusive”. Butenough among his epigones have gone that way to signalize the inherent connotative problem, so to put it, inevitable in the contextof ordinary usage at this stage of linguistic development throughout the European languages, at least; and in any event there remainsthe fact that the signifiant/signifié relation dyadically considered, unmotivated for sure in signs such as language determinedprincipally by social interactions, are indeed motivated when we take into account also the interpretant. Whence the unqualifieddoctrine that “signs are arbitrary” depends for its force on ignoring or suppressing the third element — “the proper significateoutcome”, no less, at that! — without which there is no triadic relation, and hence no sign in its fully constituted being. And that pointsemiotics demonstrates as essentially qualifying the semiological doctrine of arbitrariness, without even having to consider the furthercase of signs “natural” in the sense originally characterized by Augustine (AD397: Book I, Paragraph 2, opening lines) as “thosewhich, independently of any [26] will or desire whatever of signifying beyond themselves, yet make something other than themselvesable 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.

8eme Congres De L’IASS: Lyon, France 7/7–12/04 È 7/9/04 Table Ronde “Semiotic Terminology” 16

and uninterested in the Latins, thus, Saussure’s 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 óçìåßá and óýìâïëá 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 óýìâïëïí and ïíïìá) is a conception as distinctively modern as was distinctively ancient the

restriction of óçìåßïí to natural events and propositional contexts of inference concerning öõóéò. Semiotics

contrasts both with the ancient view which omits óýìâïëá, signs acting in the realm of íïìïò, and with the

modern view which omits óçìåßá, signs acting in the realm of öõóéò. 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 óçìåßá, but renders those insights aufgehoben in its

discussion of signum as containing óýìâïëá as well as óçìåßá. 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 develop-

ment, 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 modernity’s 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.

9 [26] Thus Cassirer’s neo-Kantian definition of human being as “symbolic animal” fails to meet the requirement that a definitionbe coextensive with the defined, and is not at all the same as the formula “semiotic animal” proposed as the postmodern definitionof 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 Sebeok’s work, Petrilli and Ponzio (2001: 20) capture the postmodern essence of the way of signsexactly: “there is no doubt that the inner human world, with great effort and serious study, may reach an understanding of non-humanworlds and of its connection with them.”

“On ‘Semiotics’ as Naming the Doctrine of Signs” È John Deely 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 passé. 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 Peirce’s 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, 410–11) 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.

8eme Congres De L’IASS: Lyon, France 7/7–12/04 È 7/9/04 Table Ronde “Semiotic Terminology” 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 “Bankov’s razor” to emblematize the idea that ‘semiotics’ should

cut and cast away everything that changes the playing field established by Saussure’s 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 Saussure’s sense is the essence of signs, and semiotics — or semiology — must be defined

11 [26] The choice of terms, inevitably connoting in the associative fringes of consciousness of any person even minimallyeducated in the history of philosophy “Ockham’s Razor” of universal fame, consequently suggests also a refined device intended topromote theoretical sophistication and parsimony among theoreticians. This indeed is the manner in which I took and struggled tointerpret the expression for months during my stay in Bulgaria, as evidenced in the text of my four books published there whileteaching under the dual auspices of the American Fulbright Program and the Southeast European Center for Semiotic Studies at theNew Bulgarian University in Sofia. Only slowly did it dawn on me that the connotation of Ockham’s razor was an empty connotation,as conversations forced me to realize that my attempt at interpretation was wholly misguided. Imagine the incredulity I experiencedon being forced in the end to recognize that what was being proposed was not at all a maxim summarizing a requirement for or callto theoretical sophistication, but, on the contrary, a naked shibboleth intended to promote an ideological position pure and simplestopping the clock on the 20th century development of the doctrine of signs at that point when, in the early 1960s, the internationaldiscourse on signs began to move decisively beyond the frontiers circumscribed by the Saussurean doctrine of arbitrariness — indeedbeyond the frontiers circumscribed by that doctrine on any possible interpretation — by taking account not only of the context withinwhich language operates but of the larger context as well in which language users operate as semiotic animals among other animalswithin and dependent upon a physical universe of nature.

“On ‘Semiotics’ as Naming the Doctrine of Signs” È John Deely 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 Éléments of Barthes can well be taken

as the charter or manifesto of semiotics (that is, semiology: for what’s 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 zoösemiotics 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, Sebeok’s proposal that semiotics stands at the intersec-

tion of nature and culture has no more merit or relevance than does the Latin protosemiotics or the pansem-

iotics 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 mid-

century 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 Saussure’s proposal of “semiology” gave way

before the suitability of Locke’s 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

8eme Congres De L’IASS: Lyon, France 7/7–12/04 È 7/9/04 Table Ronde “Semiotic Terminology” 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 story’s coming to be told.

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21

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“On ‘Semiotics’ as Naming the Doctrine of Signs” È John Deely 23

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8eme Congres De L’IASS: Lyon, France 7/7–12/04 È 7/9/04 Table Ronde “Semiotic Terminology” 26

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