Showing papers on "Semiosphere published in 1979"

Entering the Semiosphere: The Myth of the First Semiotic Relation

Abstract: I shall concern myself with two aspects of signs, one theoretical and one historical, and, hopefully, illustrate their conflictual interrelation. Certain general questions pertaining to semiotic theory will be discussed, and then a reading of part of a (pre)scientific text by Buffon will be proposed. I will attempt to show the dialectical relationship of these two aspects: modern theory elucidates the eighteenth-century text while this text both exemplifies and makes clear certain very important concerns of present-day semiotics. First the theoretical aspect. I shall begin by contrasting a French and an American way of doing semiotics. Emile Benveniste's criticism of Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of signs has resulted in a gap between the two positions. This gap, in effect, amounts to a total rejection of Peirce by Benveniste on the grounds that Peirce's sign theory is too general and, hence, not applicable to the field of linguistics. We must assume that either Benveniste totally misunderstands Peirce or, what is more probable, that the two semiotic theories are inconsistent since what Benveniste rejects in Peirce's theory is exactly that which is essential to it: its triadic model. The French linguist does not appear to be at all comfortable with a theory that Omits' determining a fixed, stable, and secure place for its author. After all, according to Benveniste, what kind of a theory can be constructed if one implies one's own theoretical activity, one's own act of building a theoretical model, in the object of one's endeavours: