Tradition, Speculation and Cognition: A Prospective Investigation of Semiotic Terminology

Abstract

In the epistemological landscape of the second half of the XXth century, semiotics can be tentatively defined as an emerging paradigm or a science in its preparadigmatic staged.¹ The fact that there exist several competing schools of semiotics, each one having developed its own conceptual framework and “claiming competence for the same subject matter but approaching it in quite different ways” (Kuhn, 1977:460 ftn. 4) fits indeed rather well Kuhn’s famous description. One of the consequences of this state of affairs is that anyone who is not familiar with the sort of questions raised within these schools is confronted by forbidding and often conflicting terminologies that have been created to handle the problems posed by these schools. These terminologies are a mixture of redefined traditional concepts and neologisms, but some of their basic terms also belong to the common vocabulary in which they have meanings that are sometimes more specific and sometimes more general than in their semiotic uses (e.g., sign, message, information, noise, icon, symbol). Semiotics is associated, in the mind of many, with a gratuitous and prolific jargon, which they tend to consider as a protective dialect devised by the members of an academic minority struggling for disciplinary recognition. Such a contemptuous attitude on the part of established disciplines is not without precedents in the history of sciences, and it is in this case all the more understandable as semiotics tends, even in its most modest endeavours, to claim a domain of scientific inquiry which intersects with several disciplines and, in some instances, makes strong claims, in principle, of universal competence.

Some parts of this article were first presented and discussed at a colloquium on “In Search of Terminology” organized by the Central Institute of Indian Language Mysore (India), January 19–23, 1982.