Semiotic and Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

Abstract

We have, in our first chapter, attempted to sketch what appeared to us as the characteristic attitudes of both rationalistic and empiricist schools of thought in their respective evaluations of the symbolic media of knowledge. In both, we pointed out, there was an either hopeful or painful realization that a great deal, if not indeed all, of human knowledge of reality was of a mediate and symbolic, rather than of an immediate or intuitive (perceptual), nature. At the risk of oversimplification, it could perhaps be said that recent and contemporary philosophy has neither completely shared the rationalist’s trust nor the empiricist’s distrust, but has, instead, become somewhat resigned to the scientific symbolisms which in our days have so successfully increased the scope of human cognition. With respect to “scientific knowledge”, there has, indeed, been hardly a doubt during the last few decades that it is best understood as a great feat of symbolic transformation. Bergson, Whitehead, Russell, Peirce, James, Santayana and Dewey, to name only the great and disregard all differences between them, provide eloquent commentaries for this contention. Hand in hand, however, with this pervasive realization there is also a very definite insistence that the “state of affairs”, the “facts” or “reality itself” to which all our symbols and constructions “apply”, could not also be of a symbolic nature but something other and more basic than human perspectives, conventions or symbolizations. Faced with the alternative of either having to hold staunchly to an otherwise suspect “commensense” reality or to be stamped as “idealists”, philosophers have sought non-symbolic anchoring grounds for the various linguistic and scientific symbolisms of knowledge in immediate intuitions, actual occasions, essences, prehensions or “experiences as had” over against “experiences as reflected upon”.