Volume 2010, Issue 178

Semiotics is a theory of signs, beings whose whole identity is to be not a thing or idea in itself but to signify something else. Thomistic intentionality theory serves a similar purpose when applied to ideas and sense perceptions in the realistic theory of knowledge. Ideas and perceptions are not objects or things in themselves, but their whole identity consists in being “about” something else, in “intending” or “stretching out” to signify or be a sign of something else.

The histories of philosophy and semiotics constitute a continuum, as the separate historical treatments of both disciplines show, whether explicitly or implicitly. The first attempt to forge a link between the two disciplines goes back to John Locke, who claimed that it would allow philosophers to understand the relation between signs and knowledge. With the publication of the Four ages of understanding , a major treatise by the American philosopher John Deely, Locke's agenda for integrating the two modes of inquiry into one has finally received a workable theoretical framework. This essay takes a critical look at the framework. While some of the details of Deely's treatment may be discussible, it is difficult to argue against his overall case. Deely has, in effect, united philosophy and semiotics into one integrated approach to the study of human knowledge.

In Four ages of understanding , John Deely identifies four stages of progress toward a science of semiotics. The first of these ages is “preliminaries to the notion of sign.” This is the age of ancient classical and Hellenistic philosophy (600 BC–400 AD). A prominent figure in this age is Plotinus (205–270), the founder of the Neoplatonic school. A laconic description of Plotinus' philosophy is that it is a mystical monism. For a monist, to be real is to be one. A mystic, Plotinus asserts, is someone who knows ultimate reality in a way that is beyond being and intelligence. Central to unfolding Plotinus' mystical monism is the way he adopts the act (energeia)/potency (dynamis) distinction from Aristotle. This distinction explains that Plotinus is not an ontologist, because reality (unity) transcends being (unity-in-plurality). Ennead II, 5 (25) is Plotinus' definitive work on act and potency. Once one explains how these principles operate in Plotinus' metaphysics, one can suggest what a philosophy of signs or “semiotics” looks like in Neoplatonism.

As John Deely has suggested in his Four ages of understanding , philosophia in practice is semiotic process, an engagement in the world through the action of signs. But this observation leads us to a point of contention with Deely's treatment of semiotic process itself and its connection with the more widely understood notions about language in our time. Specifically, there are major difficulties with the treacherous formal and popular nomenclature about the phenomenon of language and its philosophical connection to the “semiology” of Saussure and sign theory of C. S. Peirce. Our issue is with the formal use of the term “language” centrally and often in its technical sense as an analytical system — a way of “seeing or looking at the world” that is prior to and removed from the communicative sense of “language” — while at the same time also informally employing the term in its common and practical sense as a system for information exchanges. In fact, Deely's comprehensive annotated index helps resolve some of the issue. But taken in the context of Deely's broader argument, the problem with the definition and use of the term “language” somewhat stifles the attempt to revise appreciation of our arrival at the “time of the sign” as a species-specific capacity.

The strange “forgetfulness of the notion of the sign” that John Deely puts as an emblem for the third of the Four ages of understanding (Deely, Four ages of understanding: The first postmodern survey of philosophy from ancient times to the turn of the twenty-first century, University of Toronto Press, 2001: xxx) may also be seen as an emblem for the so-called modern science that grew to unprecedented victories in that same historical period. This was the period where the Newtonian idealization of nature was, somewhat paradoxically, taken as a prime model for good materialistic science. One important consequence of this idealization was that the spectrum of acceptable causalities operative in nature was reduced to just one, the efficient causality of Aristotle. As a consequence the concept of relation disappeared from nature as autonomously existent. Departing from the bioanthropological critique of modern biology launched by Gregory Bateson, the paper reinstates “relative being” — and thus the notion of the sign — as a “unique, suprasubjective mode of being” (Deely, Four ages of understanding: The first postmodern survey of philosophy from ancient times to the turn of the twenty-first century, University of Toronto Press, 2001: xxxi). The scientific vision of a nature governed by natural laws is thus replaced by a vision of nature as an incessant semiotic emergence brought out by the ever increasing capacity of life for inventing new and more efficient kinds of “interpretance” or, in Peircean terms, a tendency to take habits.

In his Four ages , John Deely points to Peirce's 1905 Monist article, “What is pragmatism,” as a key text in the history of human intellectual development. It was there that Peirce famously kissed his child (the word “pragmatism”) good-bye and renamed his great contribution to philosophy “pragmaticism,” a word “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.” According to Deely, what Peirce did amounted to “disowning the most famous American development in all of philosophy's history”; and this, Deely says, has been an embarrassment to those Americans who “cherish the idea of a home-grown philosophy.” Deely claims that to attempt to dismiss Peirce's rejection of “pragmatism” as a mere verbal quibble misses the point that what Peirce did was to step from the third great age of philosophy, where pragmatism dwells, into the fourth great age, the proper home for pragmaticism. There is, indeed, something right about this way of looking at things. But in an attempt to draw clear boundaries Deely misrepresents a reality that is fuzzier than the picture he paints. Peirce never meant to separate himself entirely from pragmatism, any more than Martin Luther intended to separate himself entirely from Catholic Christianity. Peirce only wanted to stake out a more genuine doctrine, a more precise one, free from some of the errors the popular pragmatists had fallen into. Peirce's separation from the other pragmatists was more like a schism within a church than a paradigm shift: Peirce remained a pragmatist, of sorts, to the end. But the errors he sought to expose and avoid were rooted in the precepts of the Third Age and Peirce's way forward, as Deely recognizes, was indeed the Way of Signs.

This essay critically assesses John Deely's treatment of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology in the Four ages of understanding . First, it outlines Deely's compelling account of how the modern “Way of Ideas” confuses representation and signification. Second, it notes Deely's charge that Husserl is an idealist who thinks the mind constitutes what it knows. Third, it maintains that the early Husserl cannot be an idealist because he attacks psychologism, nominalism, and modern representational epistemologies. Fourth, discussing intentionality, the essay considers Husserl's account of how the mind discovers that mental contents are ideal, atemporal entities. Finally, it suggests that by labeling Husserl an idealist, Deely disregards valuable aspects of modernity.

In Four ages of understanding , John Deely considers (among many things) issues in the philosophy of mind rooted in the Aristotelian tradition. One specific item concerns perceiving the individual as an individual that is not reducible to an empiricist “bundle of sensations.” Deely, in discussing Poinsot on inner sense and perception through an intentio insensata , suggests that most modern and contemporary philosophers neglected Poinsot's insights, a partial exception being Thomas Reid. The present essay offers an explicatio textus of Aquinas's texts shedding light on the role the vis cogitativa with its intentio insensata plays in transcending classical empiricism. Deely's analysis brings to the forefront this philosophical discussion. Nonetheless, Deely's analysis omits discussing how late twentieth century analytic philosophy of mind has ventured nearer this set of epistemological concerns than his book appears to indicate. This essay covers that omission.

The purpose of this article is to present the genealogy of neomodernism, as it starts with the Saussurean linguistic turn and was further elaborated by Russian Formalism and the Prague Circle, as well as by the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen with its leading figure Hjelmslev. Deely points to an actual overlapping between Peircian semiotics and the French tradition (the quest for a general theory of signs), an overlapping that acts as the background for the operations of comparison and replacement he performs. From this common root or summit, the two paradigms split and follow two totally different directions. The strong position of Deely that it is the (discontinuous) tradition starting with Augustine and reemerging with the “high semiotics” of the later “Latin” age that leads to “postmodernity,” as well as his view that Peirce (to whom he adds secondarily Heidegger), who takes over from the “Latins,” opens the fourth age of human understanding and is the last modern but also the first postmodern philosopher, comes as a surprise, because of the divergence of Deely's genealogy of postmodernism from the actual historical continuities. This divergence becomes even more striking if we take into account the almost total indifference of neomodernism to Peirce's ideas: replacement of the historical with the normative leads to an historical anachronism, because Deely is obliged to recess postmodernism about a century back, with the result of creating a philosophical postmodernism that contradicts historical postmodernism. What should be emphatically stated is that neostructuralism / neomodernism is not a partial theory, as Deely believes, but a global one that, contrary to Deely's view, subsumes natural under cultural signs, thus proposing a different global theory of signs from the Peircian one; this different theory is the only theory inseparably linked to neomodernity as an historical condition.

The basic idea that makes John Deely's Four ages of understanding an innovative one is that the notion of the sign is at the center of philosophical development from the start, and proves basic to a postmodern development of thought as well. A full awareness of this notion of sign can be traced way back to the beginning of the fifth century AD, in the works of Augustine, where the two different theories of signs present in the Greek period — the semantic theory of the linguistic sign (following an “equational” model) and the logical-epistemological theory of non-linguistic signs (following an “inferential” model) — are amalgamated. The aim of this paper is to show that Augustine makes a move that is both symmetrical with and a mirror image of what Saussure does: the latter unites the two theories and two classes of sign, setting up the linguistic sign as the guiding principle, while Augustine subsumes all types of sign within the class of non-linguistic signs. But it is the Augustine's move that opens, as Deely also says, a link with the postmodern era, proposing a semiotic model that is homogenous with that of Peirce.

The present article focuses on the most significant instances of intrinsically semiotic philosophical reflections about animal cognition and communication. It ideally acts as a small complement to the massive treatise on anthroposemiotics provided by Four ages of understanding , and indeed deals only (if only is the word) with those scholars and thinkers mentioned in John Deely's work, selecting among them those, like Hume, Locke, and others, who approached zoösemiotic issues in diverse ways (theoretical, ethical, or explicitly proto-semiotic).

Bonaventure's thirteenth century symbolic theology anticipates the semiotic theories of Poinsot and Peirce, while their theories elucidate the expressio-impressio-expressio dynamic integral to the signum in Bonaventure. The integrally triadic nature of all reality fundamental to semiotics accounts for what is self-evidently true in human experience. Peirce's Semiotics explains What Is ; Bonaventure's Metaphysics of Manifestation reveals Why it is how it Is . “Every sign consists in the three-cornered relation itself connecting the sign at one and the same time to the mind and to the object signified”: this co-inhering relation makes the contuition (the simultaneous co-recognition of sign-vehicle and Object Signified) of God possible in, through, and together with the particular sensible expression of the sign-vehicle. On the occasion of sense experience, an “innate idea” of God is discovered and elaborated by the human intellect as it participates in the Divine capacitating model of its own thought processes.

Thinking of one's own thinking is not a favorable job even for philosophers. It seems natural for humans, unnatural for animals, and that is all. Hypotheses are used to explain the patterns of thinking, instead of the flow of thinking in different patterns. The usual approach is to attribute sense to phenomena, rather than to study them “as they are.” As for sense, it is indisputably present. This has been the way undertaken by philosophers over centuries. In his thousand-page “first postmodern survey of philosophy from ancient times to the turn of the twenty-first century,” John Deely traces the main paths of human thought but also examines a “road not taken” by thinkers. By following a mysterious “sign-notion,” abandoned in early modern times in favor of the “way of ideas,” he achieves a profound insight into the skeleton of the entirety of human thought.