Saving Semiotics
Abusus non tollit usus.
“Semiotics”.
The word gets (ab)used by marketers, mystics, charlatans, “intellectuals”, and intellectual con-artists of every kind. It sounds dense and complicated, and as though anyone using it possesses a cognitive acuity that makes him worth hearing.
But what does it really mean? What is semiotics? What does it mean to describe something as semiotic?
The root of the word is from Ancient Greek; it comes into modernity through John Locke (1632–1704); and it becomes established as a distinctive study in Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). It is often associated—incorrectly—with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) and Roland Barthes (1915–1980), who both worked in a more limited field—namely, semiology.
Rather, the semiotic inquiry of Peirce is a revival and continuation of the Scholastic doctrina signorum, first brought into the cognizance of the Christian world by the works of Augustine of Hippo (c.350–430ad) and developed through the mid-seventeenth century, culminating in the work of John Poinsot, also known as John of St. Thomas (1589–1644). This doctrina signorum, a “doctrine [teaching] of signs”, sought to unveil the workings of sign action throughout not only the specifically-human environment (wherein it is principally through and consequent to the workings of language that we experience signification), but even in the non-human world of animals, plants, and the cosmos—even, in some sense, in angelic beings.
Semiotics, therefore, as a domain of study, in some sense encompasses everything—not everything as existing (which is the domain of metaphysics), but everything as communicable.
As a science, it is yet in its infancy. Peirce, deprived of any rich environment in which he could undertake its study, had to labor hard and alone in the recovery of the Scholastic insight—while trying to account for the advances made in modern science and the challenges rendered by alternative (modern) philosophical systems. A study of Peirce is remarkably difficult; his work is scattered, diffuse, never compiled into any book-length treatments, and a complicated jumble of what appears as ever-shifting jargon.
Thankfully, another giant of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, born 28 years after Peirce's death, has affected not only a clarification of semiotics but a synthesis of its Peircean and Scholastic teachings: John Deely (1942–2017). Educated by the Dominican Fathers at River Forest, IL, Deely was a careful student of the Thomistic tradition, a daring interpreter of Martin Heidegger, and the principal advocate for the thinking of John Poinsot in the latter half of the twentieth century. He authored dozens of books, hundreds of articles, and worked tirelessly to establish a firm philosophical footing for semiotics. His mammoth magnum opus, the Four Ages of Understanding, demonstrates the breadth and depth of his reading and study, and should be a text owned by every serious student of the history of thought
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John Poinsot and Charles Sanders Peirce may be, as Walker Percy once opined (in a letter to Deely), respectively the grandfather and father of semiotics—and indeed, in their works one finds all the most important doctrinal points. Yet it is in Deely that we find this powerful lineage protected from the onslaughts of modernity, and from his works that the tradition of genuine semiotic thinking will come to flourish.
(It is our pleasure to offer again our seminar on the thought and contributions of John Deely to the enterprise of semiotics. Learn more at the link.)