Semiosis and the elusive final interpretant of understanding
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Göran Sonesson
Abstract
While the conceptual history of the sign, as recounted by John Deely in Four ages of understanding, is immensely enlightening, history is never enough. If, before Augustine, it had occurred to no one that such diverse phenomena as are covered by this term had something in common, and if, in the time of Aquinas, Fonseca, and Poinsot, different usages of the term were in competition, the reason is not simply intellectual confusion, but rather that meaning is of many kinds. In this essay, I have shifted the terrain from socio-history to phylogeny and ontogeny, suggesting that, in the child, as well as in the human species, perception is the primary type of meaning, whereas true signs are acquired much later, followed by signs systems and organism-independent artifacts. The whole point of having a semiotic theory, it is argued, is to be able to account for the differences, and not only the similarities, of different kinds of meaning.
© 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
Articles in the same Issue
- The concept as a formal sign
- Charles Peirce's understanding of the four ages and of his own place in the history of human thought
- Semiotics and philosophy: Working for a historical reconstruction of human understanding
- Is there purely objective reality?
- Platonic reflections upon Four ages of understanding
- Christian philosophy in John Deely's Four ages of understanding
- Semiotics or metaphysics as first philosophy? Triadic or dyadic relations in regard to Four ages of understanding
- After Deely: If I walk the “way of signs,” where am I going?
- Semiosis and the elusive final interpretant of understanding
- Semiotics and human nature in postmodernity: A consideration of animal semioticum as the postmodern definition of human being
- The history of philosophy conceived as a struggle between nominalism and realism
- From here to the Latin Age and back again: A four-cause category-based exploration of Adrian J. Walker's article on von Balthasar's concept of “love alone”
- The review essays in paraleipsis: Looking forward while looking back
Articles in the same Issue
- The concept as a formal sign
- Charles Peirce's understanding of the four ages and of his own place in the history of human thought
- Semiotics and philosophy: Working for a historical reconstruction of human understanding
- Is there purely objective reality?
- Platonic reflections upon Four ages of understanding
- Christian philosophy in John Deely's Four ages of understanding
- Semiotics or metaphysics as first philosophy? Triadic or dyadic relations in regard to Four ages of understanding
- After Deely: If I walk the “way of signs,” where am I going?
- Semiosis and the elusive final interpretant of understanding
- Semiotics and human nature in postmodernity: A consideration of animal semioticum as the postmodern definition of human being
- The history of philosophy conceived as a struggle between nominalism and realism
- From here to the Latin Age and back again: A four-cause category-based exploration of Adrian J. Walker's article on von Balthasar's concept of “love alone”
- The review essays in paraleipsis: Looking forward while looking back
