Signs and Ideas

Abstract

Eighteenth-century considerations of language share a certain concept of the linguistic sign and its representative role in signification as well as a concept of the way in which this representative capacity of signs establishes speech and thought in their theoretical possibility and in their actual genesis. Yet this fact, fundamental though it may be, requires a certain amount of careful attention. For if the sign system is dominant its presence is also unobtrusive.¹ Little consideration was given, for instance, to definitions of what was intended by a sign, something apparently not felt to be required as a point of departure when employing sign theory.² D’Alembert’s article “Signe” in the Encyclopèdie, which does provide a definition, simply pieces together two passages, one from the Logique de Port-Royal and the other from Condillac’s Essai sur I’origine des connaissances: