Academic Culture and the Science of Signs

Abstract

Today’s academy culminates in universities, the central institution of education feeding the intellectual culture of human kind. In historical context , philosophy (science in the ‘cenoscopic’ sense of critical control of objectivity unaided by instruments), along with literature, preceded university life, but came to form an integral part of university curriculum . But modern science (in the ‘ideoscopic’ sense, knowledge that could never be attained without instruments) began its distinctive development in the dawning years of the 17th century, and its acceptance within the university was anything but smooth. Intellectual advance depends on logic, but old habits have to be overcome, and such displacement is seldom easy within culture . It took more than two centuries for modern science to gain its standing—a standing so firm that students now think of the university in terms of science above all, as evidenced in the acronym STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) for early 21st century attempts at a core curriculum. Where is semiotics in such a scheme? The chapter presents semiosis as the subject matter of semiotic inquiry and elaborates on semiotics as a matrix of all sciences, social and natural notwithstanding. The chapter further specifies the features of semiotic consciousness and concludes by affirming the transdisciplinary as well as predisciplinary, rather than disciplinary, character of semiotics and edusemiotics .