Showing papers in "The American Journal of Semiotics in 1983"

Peirce’s Demon Abduction: How to Charm the Truth out of a Quark

Abstract: It is apparent to the most casual student of Peirce that he was fascinated with, if not obsessed by, the ‘logic of discovery’, as he called it. In fact, a large part of his pragmatic philosophy and phenomenological speculation (5:195) was centred in this core problem of the study of logic. Deductive processes are fairly obvious once one recognises semantic relationships and syntactic operations, and inductive processes are the stuff of a good part of human experience; so analytic and synthetic propositions suggest themselves easily in a logician’s quest. But human experience also provides a not-so-neat process of information handling: the hunch, the guess, the intuition, the insight, the eureka, the revelation, the enlightenment, the inspiration, the Voice, the satori,1 and so on. Our sensory experience, although trained in cultural time, provides a whole range of data, appropriately called ‘raw data’, which must be processed by methods based on previous knowledge, on the already known, but how is it that one discovers what one does not know? If experience is our teacher (as Peirce and most of us seem to think), then how do we learn lessons which deal with new material and new experiences? How can we know about what we don’t already know? How do we gain new information when information is a matter of the sign’s perspective in the first place?

Five jakobsonian principles of poetics

Abstract: The painter Degas lamented the effort it took hinl to write poetry although he was "full of ideas". "Poetry is not made of ideas, my dear Degas," Mallarme replied, "but of words" (Yalery 1965: 1324). A more striking confirmation of the conception of poetry as propounded by Roman lakobson is hardly conceivable. Slovo a slovesnost was the title of the bulletin published by the Cercle linguistique de Prague. The use of the Russian term for literature, slovesnost, an abstractive with the root slovo ('word') in combination with this same root slovo, was meant to point out the radical connection between language-for which slovo was understood to be a synecdochic designation-and poetrylliterature and, in conse­ quence, between linguistics and poetics/theory of literature. This explains lakobson's descriptive rendition 'Word and Yerbal Art', of the title he had also originally suggested for the Prague bulletin. He uses this same expression 'verbal art' with conspicuous, indeed offensive insistence in several headings of his poetic analyses. 'Yerbal art' as weIl as the French art verbal are already becoming lakobsonian neologisms in literary studies. 'Yerbal art' is a program. lakobson takes the language of the poet seriously. His approach to poetry is the approach of the linguist. There are, in the main, five principles upon which this linguistic conception of poetry is based. 1.