On Semiotics As Naming The Doctrine of Signs PDF

On ‘semiotics’ as naming
the doctrine of signs
JOHN DEELY
Abstract
This article traces the comparative fortunes of the terms ‘semiology’ and
‘semiotics,’ with the associated expressions ‘science of signs’ and ‘doctrine
of signs,’ from their original appearance in English dictionaries in the
1800s through their adoption in the 1900s as focal points in discussions of
signs that flourished after pioneering writings by Charles Sanders Peirce
and Ferdinand de Saussure. The greater popularity of ‘semiology’ by mid-
century was compromised by Thomas Sebeok’s seminal proposal of signs at
work among all animals, and Umberto Eco’s work marked a ‘tipping point’
where the understanding associated with ‘semiotics’ came to prevail over the
glottocentrism associated with ‘semiology.’
On the afternoon of July 9, 2004, as part of the Lyons Congress of

the IASS, we held a roundtable on semiotic terminology.1 Since I had
published in 2003 in Semiotica the Mouton D’Or Award-winning essay
‘On the word semiotics, formation and origins’ (2003b), an essay sub-
sequently slightly revised and expanded as a book entitled Why Semi-
otics? (Deely 2004a), I gave a report in the roundtable on the terms ‘semi-
otics’ with its variants (‘semeiotic,’ ‘semiotic,’ etc.) and ‘semiology’ with
its variants (‘semeiology,’ etc.), tracing the first appearance of these terms
in English-language dictionaries along with their definitions in each of the
appearances.
Here I would like to recapitulate no more than the main points con-
cerning those first dictionary appearances, in order to trace the main
stages of discussion and doctrinal development2 of semiotics after the
terms parted company (as it were) under the very di¤erent influences
that came into play after the term ‘semiology’ was appropriated by fol-
lowers influenced especially by Saussure. Saussure introduced the idea of
a general ‘science of signs’ that was determinately limited to the sphere of
Semiotica 158–1/4 (2006), 1–33 0037–1998/06/0158–0001

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2 J. Deely
cultural creations. By contrast, and more di¤usely, the term ‘semiotics’

came more and more to be associated with the larger notion of a ‘doctrine
of signs’ embracing both cultural and natural actions of signs according
to a perspective wherein culture itself appears as no more than a compart-
mentalization of that segment of nature species-specifically accessible
only to semiotic animals, but no more isolated from the rest of nature
than that.
1. The naming: Terminological considerations — semiology or semiotics?
The first time an entry appeared for Semiotics in this final ‘s’ form, both
with and without the ‘e’ between ‘m’ and ‘i,’ is in the dictionary of Porter
1870. This original entry makes clear that ‘semiotics’ is not a plural form
of ‘semiotic.’ But the definition accompanying this earliest entry is not as
a name for the general doctrine of signs but as a synonym for that specific
branch of medicine concerned with one class of Greek shmeía or Latin
signa naturalia, namely, symptoms, ‘the signs of diseases.’
Semiology first appears, but with the same definition as ‘semiotics,’ a
full twenty years earlier, in Goodrich 1850: ‘relating to the signs or
symptoms of diseases,’ and paired with ‘semiotic’ without the final ‘s.’
In Ogilvie 1853 this pairing of ‘semiology/semiotic’ occurs also in
the form ‘semeiotics/semeiology,’ and all three terms are ‘merged with
symptomatology.’
Godel (1957: 275) tells us that Saussure’s proposal to use the designa-
tion ‘semiology’ for a general science of signs is recorded in a note of
Saussure’s bearing the date of November, 1894. However, a full decade
earlier, by 1883, this same linguistic move had already been made in En-
glish, not only for ‘semiology’ but also for ‘semiotics,’ where both are de-
fined no longer in exclusively ‘naturalistic’ or medical terms but more
generally as the ‘doctrine of signs,’ the very formula common to Locke
1690 and Poinsot 1632. But note that ‘semiotic’ still retains an emphasis
on the natural signs, and ‘semiotics’ includes ‘science of signs’ as an
alternative to ‘doctrine of signs.’ Here is the main entry (perhaps sug-
gesting a greater concern for correct Greek etymology on the part of the
British dictionariasts than on the part of the Americans) from Annandale
1883:
Semeiological, a. Relating to semeiology or the doctrine of signs; spe-

cifically, pertaining to the symptoms of diseases.
Semeiology, n. [Gr. shmeíon, a mark, a sign, and logov, discourse.]
The doctrine of signs; semeiotics.

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Naming the doctrine of signs 3
Semeiotic, a. Relating to semeiotics; pertaining to signs; specifically, re-

lating to the symptoms of diseases; symptomatic.
Semeiotics, n. [Gr. shmeíon, a mark, a sign] 1. The doctrine or science
of signs; the language of signs. — 2. In pathol. that branch which
teaches how to judge of all the symptoms in the human body, whether
healthy or diseased; symtomatology; semeiology.
All these entries also occur without the ‘e’ between ‘m’ and ‘i’: for
Semiological — ‘Same as Semeiological’; for Semiology — ‘Same as
Semeiotics’; for Semiotic — ‘Same as Semeiotic’; and for Semiotics ‘See
semeiotics’.
So already by 1883 the game is afoot: semiotics or semiology? doctrine
of signs or science of signs?
2. The naming: Theoretical choices — science of signs or doctrine of

signs?
Now, very important to note (and I will have to return to this point in
remarks below) is that signs ‘natural’ in the sense of symptoms are signs
rooted primarily in physical interactions, as are also such signs as smoke
and fire, clouds and rain, milk and childbirth. In extending the meaning
of semiology and semiotics from this exclusive class to a general doctrine
or science, what is being included additionally are those signs rooted pri-
marily in habits developed through social interactions, of which words
are the most important variety for semiotic animals, but not for any other
animals (even though many other animals likewise develop communica-
tion systems, even vocal ones, distinctive for local groups). All signs in
this second group, by virtue of owing their relation of signifier to signified
to social rather than physical causality, are ‘arbitrary’ in the sense that
Saussure will make the centerpiece of his proposal for semiology (even
though, of course, the signs in question are not at all ‘arbitrary’ in the
context of their use: but this is beside Saussure’s point).
2.1. Saussure’s option
Perhaps now we are in a position to see what was really radical about
Saussure’s adoption of the term ‘semiology,’ and why his usage amounts
to a preemption or indeed a neologism, a veritable original coinage,
rather than a continuation of a usage and intellectual development afoot,
one ‘whose time has come.’ Whereas in the natural course of linguistic

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4 J. Deely
development both the terms ‘semiology’ and ‘semiotics’ began, as did phi-
losophy itself in ancient times, with a consideration primarily of shmeía
ignoring súmbola, and then (by 1883) underwent an extension to include
both shmeía and súmbola under signum as a general rubric, Saussure’s
proposal of 1894 and after (especially as spelled out in his posthumously
edited and published text of 1916) took instead a sharply di¤erent turn.
This turn was as radical in its own way (and equally incognizant) as was
the early modern rejection of the Latin protosemiotic development of the
Way of Signs in favor of the Way of Ideas.
For with his ‘semiology’ Saussure did not at all envision an inclusion of
súmbola along with shmeía. Not at all. By ‘semiology’ Saussure pro-
posed a ‘science of signs’ that determinately excluded the whole order of
shmeía in favor of an exclusive concentration upon the realm of súmbola,
something neither the ancients nor the medievals but only the moderns
have envisaged. Even though his proposal contains the expression ‘natu-
ral signs,’ Saussure does not at all mean by this signs ‘natural’ in the sense
of symptoms (shmeía). He means ‘natural’ in the sense of iconic, and spe-
cifically such as can be represented in social behavior and interaction on
the basis of convention, as he expressly says:
One remark in passing: when semiology becomes organized as a science, the ques-
tion will arise whether or not it properly includes a mode of expression based on
completely natural signs, such as pantomime. Supposing that the new science wel-
comes them, its main concern will still be the whole group of systems grounded on
the arbitrariness of the sign. In fact, every means of expression used in society is
based, in principle, on collective behavior or — what amounts to the same thing
— on convention. Polite formulas, for instance (as in the case of a Chinese who
greets his emperor by bowing down to the ground nine times), are nonetheless
fixed by rule; it is this rule and not the intrinsic value of the gestures that obliges
one to use them. Signs that are wholly arbitrary realize better than the others the
ideal of the semiological process; that is why language, the most complex and uni-
versal of all systems of expression, is also the most characteristic; in this sense lin-
guistics can become the master-pattern [le patron général ] for all branches of semi-
ology although language is only one particular semiological system. (Saussure
1916: 68)
Saussure’s appropriation of ‘semiology’ to name a ‘science of signs,’

then, was actually to coin a synonym for a quite distinctively modern
notion, in the sense of notions in line with the modern mainstream devel-
opment of philosophy as ‘critical philosophy’ and ‘epistemology’ and,
most recently, ‘linguistic philosophy’: he was proposing a ‘science’ preclu-
sively proportioned to the sphere of nomov or culture and exclusive of
the sphere of jusiv or nature. As a science, what he was proposing was

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to establish a new modern science exclusively in the line of the

Geisteswissenschaften.
This was not at all, was indeed a radical departure from, the doctrina
signorum as it had developed among the Latins from Augustine AD397
to Poinsot 1632. As Markus (1972), Todorov (1977), Eco et al. (1984,
1986: 65), Manetti (1987), and perhaps others, have demonstrated in de-
tail, Augustine’s originality in the matter of semiotics lay in proposing
that the sign, signum, is a genus of which cultural signs and natural signs
are alike equally species. Exactly this proposal was the whole point of
Poinsot’s theoretical justification of Augustine’s originally descriptive
idea. What Poinsot did (1632: Book I, Question 1, opening paragraphs)
was to demonstrate that, by reason of consisting in relations (triadic in
nature: Book I, Question 3), signs require that the student of their action
adopt a standpoint superior to the division of being into mind-dependent
and mind-independent, as also between inner and outer. While ‘semiotics’
and ‘semiology’ were emerging in common usage side-by-side, according
to the testimony of Annandale’s dictionary of 1883, Saussure now, in
1894 and after, proposes, in e¤ect (I say ‘in e¤ect,’ for there is no reason
to think he had an opinion on the point, or was aware of the term’s dic-
tionary emergence as I have traced it), that wherever semiotics may be
heading as some kind of synthesis or transcendence of the modern philo-
sophical division of sciences into Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissen-
schaften, semiology should head in quite another direction of its own and
establish itself completely within the perspective of the Geisteswissenschaf-
ten. Within, but not beyond, that perspective semiology would constitute
a ‘general science.’
2.2. The option of Peirce and Sebeok
The other major thinker of the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century

who first proposed a general study of signs was Charles Sanders Peirce.
He began to develop his proposal approximately at the same time that
Saussure was gestating semiology but, instead of veering the proposed de-
velopment to line up with mainstream modern ‘epistemological’ and lin-
guistic thought, Peirce did just the opposite. He picked up the threads of
the late Latin development of semiotic consciousness (Beuchot and Deely
1995) as having established the being of signs to consist in a triadic rela-
tion, and he went on from there to focus on the action of signs as the way
of coming to understand the full scope of that being.
The Latins (summarized in Poinsot 1632: Book I, Question 6, 209/
23–32) had already realized and shown explicitly why ‘one and the same

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6 J. Deely
rationale of signs obtains in the case of all animals, including humans,

because the rationale of sign does not depend on the way in which an
animal organism employs signs (by discoursing or by comparing or by a
simple way of attaining the signified), but on the way in which the sign
represents to render something other than itself present objectively; and
this rationale is the same whether the cognitive organism knows in a sim-
ple manner or in a discursive one’ (perceptually only or intellectually as
well). The rationale is the same, for that matter, not only among organ-
isms, but wherever and whenever a sign works. So Peirce went a step fur-
ther than his Latin forebears,3 and proposed that the action of signs may
well extend to the whole of the physical universe, a daring move in which,
so far, only a few have tried to follow.
Peirce had the deepest interest in the modern development of science.
Yet he also saw clearly that semiotics would not be a ‘science of signs’ in
the modern sense of a development of primarily ideoscopic knowledge,
but rather belonged to that more basic and embracing development of
knowledge which science presupposes and feeds into but cannot simply
supplant, namely, cœnoscopic knowledge, the knowledge proper to phi-
losophy. Later thinkers in the original line of semiotics (Sebeok 1976:
Preface; Deely 1976, 1977, 1982a, 1982b, 1986) pointed out that, while
‘science’ in the modern sense is primarily and decidedly ideoscopic and
philosophy is primarily and decidedly cœnoscopic, the Latins had a syn-
onym for scientia in the cœnoscopic sense, namely, doctrina. Hence the
expression ‘doctrine of signs’ would be a better choice for the semiotic
development than would be the alternative expression ‘science of signs’
that Saussure had opted for, inasmuch as the Latin term scientia of
the original scientia/doctrina pairing has been definitively appropriated
to the modern ideoscopic development, respecting which cœnoscopic
knowledge, however indispensable and irreducible in its own right, can
do no more than provide framework and passage. Whether for this
or for other reasons, thinkers in the Peircean line (e.g., Colapietro and
Olshewsky 1986) by the twentieth century’s end have come more com-
monly to speak of semiotics as a ‘doctrine’ rather than a ‘science’ of signs.
The first contemporary thinker seriously to undertake the inclusion of
animals other than human beings in the consideration of semiosis was
Thomas A. Sebeok, beginning about 1963 (Sebeok 1963a, 1963b, 1968,
1977, 1978a, 1978b, 1980, 1983, 1988b). To better focus this develop-
ment, Sebeok coined the term ‘zoösemiotics’ to stand alongside ‘anthro-
posemiotics’; and under his editorship of Semiotica ‘phytosemiotics’ ap-
peared as well, then the umbrella term for all three, ‘biosemiotics.’ The
intellectual steps leading to the doctrine of signs understood to embrace
the whole of living being was the most dramatic and important series of

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developments in semiotics over the twentieth century. By the opening of

the twenty-first century Sebeok had, so to speak, ‘stolen the show’ in mat-
ters of terminology, even from Peirce, who seems to have preferred (ac-
cording to Fisch and Ketner: e.g., see Fisch in Ketner and Kloesel eds.
1986) to call the doctrine of signs ‘semeiotic’ rather than ‘semiotics.’ For
it was indeed Sebeok who, from his 1963 entry on center-stage to his
death in 2001, tirelessly promoted the doctrine of signs under the label
‘semiotics’ as inclusive of all signs, natural and cultural alike, in relentless
opposition to all who would propose what he called an exclusively glotto-
centric perspective of the narrowing anthropocentric sort that Saussure
had called for under the label or name ‘semiology.’
2.3. Eco’s dilemma: The state of the question in the middle sixties
Although, as we have seen, already by 1870 the game was afoot between
‘doctrine of signs’ versus ‘science of signs,’ ‘semiotics’ versus ‘semiology’
for naming the general theory, by the 1960s the intellectual archeology
uncovering the full scope of the Latin protosemiotic development as the
period wherein the relational being of signs as triadic was first demon-
strated still lay some twenty years in the future. Even so, the initiating
role of Augustine respecting semiotics in the Latin Age had already be-
come known to all, and research into the Latin development of semiotic
consciousness was well underway in many quarters, with new discoveries
coming as no surprise, although of course not foreseen in detail.
Thus, in 1968, when Umberto Eco came to discuss ‘La Frontiera Semi-
ologica,’ both by reason of his own scientific interests and deep historical
and philosophical background, and by reason of the increasingly power-
ful figure of Sebeok championing a truly general, unglottocentric, and in-
clusive ‘doctrine of signs’ under the name of semiotics pure and simple,
Eco framed his discussion in the following terms: ‘Tanto per cominciare,’
he wrote (Eco 1968: 383), ‘esiste una discussione sul nome della disciplina
in discussione. Semiotica o semiologia?’ ‘ ‘‘Semiologia,’’ ’ he went on to ex-
plain, ‘si a¤erma quando si tenga presente la definizione saussuriana;
‘‘semiotica,’’ si insiste, pensando all lezione di Peirce . . .’.
Well, the statement is a little oversimplified, for we now see clearly
that the movement toward an inclusively (rather than a preclusively) gen-
eral ‘doctrine of signs’ was underway in intellectual culture even inde-
pendently of Saussure and Peirce. In fact, in his manner of proposing
‘semiology,’ Saussure was much more original than was Peirce in simply
taking up anew and advancing a line of thought already developed from
Augustine to the Conimbricenses and Poinsot, and destined to be named

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8 J. Deely
‘semiotics’ (or at least had been named ‘semiotica’ already by Locke in

1690!).
But from another point of view, it was Peirce who was radical and
Saussure conservative. For while the development of a thematic ‘doctrine’
or ‘science’ of signs, either one, was a novelty in the modern context, the
development of that science in conformity with the epistemological and
language-centered preoccupations of post-Kantian thought fit right in
with modern intellectual culture. In sharp contrast, the development of a
doctrine of signs conceived as able to penetrate ‘everywhere in nature,
including those domains where humans have never set foot’ (Emmeche
1994: 126) did not fit in with modern philosophy at all. What Saussure
proposed was novel but comfortable in modernity. What Peirce took up
was, within modernity, anomalous and disconcerting.
In fact, such a doctrine of signs as the Latins had fashioned and Peirce
resumed and undertook to extend is impossible for anyone accepting, im-
plicitly or explicitly, the Kantian Ding-an-Sich/Noumenon distinction, or,
for that matter, for that whole bevy of late modern philosophers who
have bought into the ‘linguistic turn’ (originally Rorty ed. 1967; but cf.
Das Gupta 1993; Lafont 1999). The point could not be made more
plainly than Todorov (1977: 40) has made it: ‘As long as one questions
oneself only on verbal language, one remains within a science (or a phi-
losophy) of language. Only the breaking up of the linguistic framework
justifies the founding of semiotics.’
From this point of view, then, Peirce, in resuming the Latin cause, and
Sebeok in pressing the case, especially under the name now accepted on
all hands for the doctrine of signs, ‘semiotics,’ was much more revolution-
ary than Saussure. Saussure, after all, did no more than propose a devel-
opment from within the well-established modern perspective of the Geistes-
wissenschaften. Peirce and Sebeok, considered together, did much more
than simply to reestablish and press for the further development of the pro-
tosemiotic line. They proposed now the forging of a semiotics proper ex-
ploring the action of signs through the establishment of a new paradigm
altogether, a paradigm unheard of in either ancient Greek or modern na-
tional language philosophy, and only nascently established by the end of
Latin times, and this was to be the paradigm of the sign itself understood
as involving an action that cannot be restricted to either side of the
nature/culture, ens reale/ens rationis, Naturwissenschaften/Geisteswissen-
schaften, interior world/exterior world divide. The call for and move
toward such a paradigm accomplished nothing less than to define in pos-
itive terms the frontier and threshold of a new age or epoch for philoso-
phy, not only after but beyond the epistemologically defined confines of
modern thought. Faut de mieux, for the time at least, the new epoch can

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only be thought of as a ‘postmodernity’ — an idea terminologically that

never occurred to Peirce in the early twentieth century, and that caught
Sebeok even at century’s end in a kind of ‘terminological lag’ as the epi-
gones of ultramodern idealists in the semiological camp tried vainly to
appropriate for themselves and their heroes the epithet ‘postmodern.’
3. Theoretical considerations at play in the name semiotics as

the twenty-first century opens
The human being is an animal distinguished by a capacity to form repre-

sentations of what might exist that involve but do not reduce to biologi-
cally determined needs, and that involve but do not reduce to objects of
perception that can be instantiated in sensation prescissively4 considered.
The human Innenwelt ‘models the world,’5 but not simply the world as it
is or might be related to me (consider a beaver contemplating a stream
for prospective dam sites), or even the world as it simply is, but the world
rather as it might be in ways that cannot be perceptually instantiated (de-
bates over God are a kind of limit case in the matter). Animals other than
humans have this same modeling capacity, except it is restricted to ways
that can be perceptually instantiated. Thus, the human modeling system is
biologically underdetermined, and Sebeok (1979, 1984b, 1985a, 1985b,
1986a, 1986b, 1986c) has proposed that it is this aspect of the human
Innenwelt that is the root sense of the term ‘language.’
The capacity to form representations of the surrounding environment is
what generically distinguishes animals from the realm of vegetative life,
and as such is usually referred to in semiotics today (after Sebeok’s read-
ing of Jakob von Uexküll) as the Innenwelt. The Innenwelt of animals as
a modeling system di¤ers from the Cartesian world of mental representa-
tions in one very important way: the mental representations as Descartes
considered them were self representations, while the mental representa-
tions formed by the Innenwelt are other representations, representations
on the basis of which not the representations themselves but the things of
the surrounding environment are (if only partially and aspectually) trans-
formed into objects of apprehension, an Umwelt.
While Cartesian representations and objects are one and the same, by
contrast the representations of the Innenwelt are other than the objects
represented. Using the terminology developed in a philosophical tradition
reaching as far back as Aristotle (the first to thematize the subject of rela-
tions), according to which every relation involves three factors, namely,
1. a foundation or basis in an individual, 2. a terminus in another individ-
ual, and 3. the relation itself connecting the two, we can say that the

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10 J. Deely
other-representations of an Innenwelt correspond to the first of these

three factors and the objects of apprehension correspond to the second
factor, so that, in every case, objects are the terms, not the foundations
or bases, of the relations which link Innenwelt to Umwelt. The relations
themselves di¤er from both their foundation and their terminus in being
suprasubjective, determinately over and above whatever subjectivities
they link either on the side of foundation or on the side of terminus.
Von Uexküll (1899–1940, 1934, 1940), philosophically, arrived at his
basic conceptions from close study of Immanuel Kant, and indeed the
idealism of Kant in philosophy di¤ered from that of his early modern
forebears precisely in being relational (details in Deely 2001a: 555–563):
whereas the ‘ideas’ of Descartes and Locke alike were identical in being
both the objects of direct apprehension and subjective qualities or char-
acteristics of the knower, Kant insisted that ideas as subjective repre-
sentations had to be sharply distinguished from the objects of these repre-
sentations. But since the subjective representations and the objective
apprehensions exist in correlation, Kant had no way within his system to
allow for objects apprehended being at one and the same time things (or
aspects of things) precisely as existing in the environment independently
of the representations.
Precisely here the prescissive distinction between sensation, on the one
hand (the semiotics of sensation, to be exact), and perception and intellec-
tion (or understanding) together, on the other hand, proves decisive. In
the long history of human thought about the matter of signs, the first
thinker explicitly to discuss the uniqueness of sensation prescissively con-
sidered as an action of signs within the Innenwelt was John Poinsot. ‘If
the object of sensation exists in an image produced by the sense itself as
an e¤ect,’ he pointed out (Poinsot 1632: 310/37–312/6), ‘then that object
even as sensed will not be cognized immediately, but as contained in the
image, while the image itself will be that which is seen.’
Now there is little room to doubt that exactly that is the case both for
perception as such and for understanding: the object perceptually or intel-
lectually known is attained inescapably as contained in an ‘image,’ a men-
tal representation, for two basic reasons: because perception and under-
standing are interpretations, and because they are not restricted to
apprehending what is present here and now as acting upon the organism.
Animals encounter objects that they remember and so recognize. Animals
go in search of something they want that is not present at hand at the be-
ginning of the search but present only objectively. And when recollection
bears upon something present to us in sensation, we can not only recog-
nize it but we evaluate it, especially as desirable or undesirable to en-
counter. Thus, something sensed is not simply perceived as it is sensed,

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but what is sensed is interpreted (ofttimes rightly, but sometimes wrongly)

in perception, and the same in understanding.
But there is equally little room prescissively to doubt that exactly that
is not the case with sensation as it occurs within perception and under-
standing, for sensation considered as such is occasioned by something
sensible and present here and now in the organism’s physical surrounding
acting upon the sense organs of the animal body, activating them, and
thus providing the basis for the further activity of the animal’s forming
mental representations interpreting what the sensation presents.
Sensation itself is selective but not of itself interpretive: the sense or-
gans are provoked by certain ranges of stimulation only, and cannot
help but respond within that range. In the sensation itself there is no inter-
pretation: any physical element of the immediate surroundings that acts in
a manner proportionate to the sense organs of the animal will become ap-
prehended objectively as it is relationally acting here and now. Evaluation
may occur simultaneously with the sensation in time, but the evaluation
nonetheless logically depends upon the presentation of the sensed, and is
objectively additional to it. We enter a room, for example, and ‘see’ a
blackboard: we perceive a blackboard, but strictly all we see is a certain
pattern of contrasting shapes and colors, and we cannot help but see those
patterns, although in order to interpret them as a blackboard we need
mental representations on the basis of which those patterns we sense are
recognized and understood to be a blackboard. Given the prior knowl-
edge and experience of blackboards only must we perceive the given pat-
tern of sensation as a blackboard; but any animal with our or su‰ciently
similar sense organs of sight under the right conditions cannot help but
see the pattern of sensation, even without knowing that pattern as
blackboard.
On this interpretation of the distinction between sensation and the
higher cognitive activities, then, though objects are always contained and
presented within images (mental representations), they are not only and
wholly presented within a complex of mental imagery; they are also par-
tially but always (whenever and to whatever extent sensation is involved
in the apprehension here and now) things or aspects of things existing in
the physical surroundings independently of the sensations which the as-
pects in question stimulate. Whence sensation is selective but not inter-
pretive, while perception and understanding alike are both selective and
interpretive.
Poinsot goes on to make the further point that, since ‘other-
representation’ is the essential feature of signification in its di¤erence
from objectification (for an object may or may not represent something
other than itself, but if it does not at least represent itself it cannot exist

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12 J. Deely
as an object), even sensation prescissively considered is an action of

semiosis, an action of signs. For the various ‘sense qualities’ are not at-
tained ‘atomically,’ as came late in modernity oddly to be discussed, but
are attained always in temporally simultaneous patterns of logical prior-
ity and posteriority, as when a shape appears on the basis of a contrast of
colors, a position on the basis of a contrast of shapes and movements, and
so on. Thus, inasmuch as the essence of a sign is to present something
other than itself to or for some other still, even sensation itself, no less
than and for the same reasons as perception and intellection, is insepara-
ble from — cannot occur except as — a semiosis.
So there is no question that the whole of human awareness, from its ori-
gins in sensation to its highest flights of intellectual and speculative fancy,
consists in a web of semioses, a semiotic web in which objects are caught
and presented to the human animal for and in its considerations and ex-
periences. But there is this great di¤erence, if we interpret the signs of
sensation à la Kant or à la Poinsot: in the former case, the only relations
of organism to object are those wholly created or produced by the cogni-
tion itself; in the latter case, these relations can be indi¤erently cognition-
independent or cognition-dependent, depending upon circumstances.
Take a simple case, the famous ‘Galileo case’: to the experience of all
animals, the sun certainly appears to revolve about the earth. If what ap-
pears to be true in this case really is true, then the objective relation of the
sun’s motion relative to earth will also be an intersubjective or real rela-
tion obtaining in the environment independently of the appearance. Now
we could never settle this if we had nothing but appearances to go on.
And if sensations within appearances did not give us something more
than mental representations as such give within objectivity, we would
have nothing but appearances to go on, and hence no purchase on which
to develop considerations decisively resolving the question.
But the question has been decisively resolved, and insofar is prima facie
evidence of the theoretical superiority of the semiotic analysis of sensation
provided by Poinsot over the idealist analysis provided by Kant and
modern philosophy both before and after him. Other examples could
just as well serve: Karl Rove discovered only after his father divorced his
mother that the man in question was not the man who, in fact, had begot-
ten him. The objective relation ‘father’ under which Rove had viewed
his mother’s consort in growing up proved to be purely objective, while
the unknown real relation connected Rove to another man entirely. In
other cases, the objective relation and the real relation are one and the
same, and the modern achievement of genetic testing, for example, en-
ables us to resolve determinately in this matter what in former times
could not really move beyond firm belief. (Nor could this development

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have taken place in science if we were unable to attain to a knowledge,

however partial and limited, of the subjective constitution of genotypes
as they are independently of our opinions of them.)
This is a fundamental point. If anything like the semiotic view of sensa-
tion first outlined by Poinsot is a correct view, then semiotics itself cannot
be fit within the confines of modernity’s intellectual culture. Semiotics be-
longs to a determinately postmodern consideration of knowledge and ex-
perience, one which does not go back to some previous epoch (such as the
various ‘realisms’ of late modern thought proposed in opposition to the
modern idealist doctrine that the whole of human awareness is a con-
struction of the human mind). While the semiotic view fully incorporates
the modern realization that experience is in many respects a socially con-
structed reality, semiotics moves beyond that realization by also retriev-
ing the original past achievements of semiotic consciousness of the Latin
Age. For the Latins had already shown that signs consist not in related
things but in the relations themselves by which things are interconnected
objectively, as they had also shown that these relations of signification
are not just any and every relation but exclusively and irreducibly triadic
relations (even in those cases of so-called natural signs which experience
and analysis demonstrate involve indeed dyadic relations of cause and ef-
fect distinct from yet incorporated within the triadic relation of a sign in
its proper and constitutive being).
4. What does ‘semiotics’ name?
What are we trying to name? Signs? No, we have a name for those. We
call signs all and only those things which represent something other than
themselves, and we have found that this can occur only when and insofar
as the ‘other’ is represented to or for some other still. So it is always a
question of three elements, not two: there is the ‘sign,’ that is, the element
which represents some other; and there is the ‘significate,’ the other that is
represented; and there is the one to or for whom the sign achieves this
presentation of its significate, which Peirce proposed that we should call
‘interpretant,’ not ‘interpreter,’ so as to avoid begging the question of
whether only cognitive organisms use signs.
But we have also found that what we thus call ‘signs’ are not quite ‘re-
ally’ the signs but only the vehicles of the sign (the ‘sign-vehicle’), which
Peirce, again, proposed that we should call ‘representamens,’ because, of
the three elements necessarily involved in any signification, the one com-
monly called the ‘sign’ — that is, the sign-vehicle — is the one that stands
in the foreground as performing the function of representing another. But

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14 J. Deely
what makes that element succeed in signifying is not finally anything be-
longing to it ‘in itself ’ or subjectively but rather something belonging to it
only suprasubjectively, namely, the relation itself uniting at once sign to
signified to interpretant. So what makes a sign vehicle be a ‘sign’ is the
occupation of a certain one of the three positions involved in significa-
tion, while it is only the relation itself as so uniting the three elements
that constitutes the sign in its full or proper being.
This discovery, or realization, is quite surprising, and easily, I think,
the most important achievement or upshot of the many discussions and
analyses of sign that were developed over the course of the twentieth cen-
tury. Signs are not a particular kind of thing that can be pointed out, like
tables and chairs, or rocks and stars, but are rather the very triadic rela-
tions among ‘things that can be pointed out’ (and also between things
that cannot be pointed out: pure objects as such, let us say). We now re-
alize that it is as a consequence of this suprasubjective character of the
being proper to signs that anything, anything at all, can become a vehicle
of semiosis. All that need occur is that something come to occupy under
some particular set of ever-changing circumstances the position of repre-
sentamen (sign-vehicle, or ‘sign’ in the loose sense) respecting some sig-
nificate for some interpretant in order for ‘renvoi,’ as Jakobson (1974)
termed the e¤ect distinctive of semiosis, to result (see the discussion in
Deely 1993b, with further qualification in 2002a).
Equally important, but not yet equally generally realized, even
among semioticians, is how misleading has been the modern usage of
the term ‘object’ in modern intellectual culture (about equal and op-
posite to Saussure’s befuddled misappropriation of the term ‘signified,’
as I shall discuss below). ‘Objects’ and ‘things’ are popularly considered
as more-or-less but basically interchangeable terms, thus concealing the
profound di¤erence between what is necessarily involved in a relation
to some representamen (an object) and what is only contingently in-
volved in some such relation (a thing), which is also the underlying
reason why objects can be but need not be things, but must always
and necessarily be the direct terminus of a relation having also as indi-
rect term an interpretant. But let us make this point only in passing,
since the argument for it is still too recondite to be taken for granted.
Su‰ce to conclude only this much: if every object as such, in its di¤er-
ence from a thing as such, is a product of semiosis, then the term ‘object’
is a synonym not for ‘thing’ but for ‘significate’ (a term which many dic-
tionaries resist entering), in which case significate says clearly and up-
front what the term ‘object’ heretofore has said only obscurely, if at all,
and has served mainly to gloss over, namely, the dependency of objectiv-
ity on semiosis.

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So what we are trying to name are not signs but the knowledge that
results from the thematic and systematic study of and inquiry into signs
as a distinct sort or type of being, a being which, through its action,
achieves ‘renvoi’ — produces in the interpretant its own ‘proper signifi-
cate outcome.’ And since any being is knowable only from and through
the way it acts, the knowledge of signs depends upon an apprehension of
the action distinctive of signs, the action by which a sign is revealed in its
being as a sign (not in whatever being it may further have as an object, or
as a thing: prescissively its being as sign), what Peirce (again) called
semiosis.
What we are trying to name is the knowledge that results from observ-
ing and analyzing semiosis, beginning with the realization that the subject
of semiosis is the play of triadic relations without which knowledge and
experience quite disappear. So we have discovered that, just as what are
commonly called signs are rather called more properly ‘sign-vehicles,’ so
also the action of signs is involved in every activity that results in the
growth of experience and knowledge, exactly as Locke pointed out in his
original 1690 proposal of a bastardized Greek term that transliterates into
Latin as semiotica and thence to English as ‘semiotics.’
‘Semiotics,’ however, as a term, has only relatively recently become
conventionalized as the generally accepted term to label the study of signs
in their distinctive action. The key word here is ‘conventionalized’: is this
adoption of ‘semiotics’ as a term simply an arbitrary decision that could
just as well have gone another way?
5. Why suitability trumps arbitrariness
There is no doubt whatever that words are ‘arbitrary’ in the sense that
Saussure foregrounded in originally proposing that the systematic study
of signs ought to be labeled (named or called) ‘semiology’: between ‘ar-
madillo’ as signifiant and ‘armadillo’ as signifié, there is no intrinsic fea-
ture of either signifiant or signifié which explains the connection between
the two such that, in a linguistic exchange, when one semiotic animal ut-
ters the sound ‘armadillo’ the other semiotic animal thinks of an arma-
dillo, that remarkable animal common to the Southwestern United States
and Mexico.6
Now Saussure was a great linguist, and his impact on the development
of the doctrine of signs in the twentieth century was huge. Still, in some
basic respects, this impact was also perverse. Let me give just two exam-
ples: his use of the term ‘arbitrary,’ and his use of the term ‘signifié,’
which can hardly be expressed in English other than as ‘signified,’ or else

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16 J. Deely
‘significate.’ But whereas a significate, semiotically, can be a physical

reality, and even when it is not often involves physical realities and real
relations therein (for example, when a state boundary is signified; or a
public o‰ce awarded), not so a ‘signifié’ semiologically construed.
So first the ‘signified.’
We have seen that semiotic discourse has come to a general consensus
that every signification involves three factors, 1. a sign-vehicle, 2. an ob-
ject signified, and 3. an interpretant to or for whom the sign-vehicle con-
veys its objective content. To which of these three does Saussure’s term
signifié correspond? The answer is that, while superficially it would seem
to correspond to 2., in fact it corresponds to none of the three, but is a
conflation — and worse, a confused conflation — of 2. and 3. This needs
to be sorted out, and depending upon how the sorting out takes place
depends also the long-term fate of the intellectual phenomenon of late
modern popular culture known as ‘semiology.’ Either semiology is des-
tined to go down as that part of semiotics concentrated on the semiosis
of conventional signs (the most favorable construal); or it will go down
as but another variant on the idealism of the modern philosophical main-
stream which conceives ‘epistemology’ as the confinement of philosophy
to products of the mind’s own making with no way through or beyond.
Only the former construal allows for participation in the postmodern es-
sence of semiotics as occupying a standpoint beyond the realist-idealist
opposition definitive of the modern epoch in philosophy.
Personally I am confident that, while both construals apply, it is princi-
pally that former construal of semiology which will prevail, despite the
entrenched idealistic stance of many of its practitioners. But it is quite
interesting to note that, had Saussure been better versed in the history of
modern philosophy, he would not have felt the need to propose ‘semiol-
ogy’ as the name for a general study of signs in their conventional aspect,
but would have seen from the start that what he deemed to be a more or
less brand new proposal had in fact already been proposed as ‘sematol-
ogy’ as early as Vico (see Trabant 2004; cf. Danesi 1993). In that case,
the contest in the twentieth century would have been much more straight-
forward, and progress toward a genuine semiotics in the full scale appro-
priate to a doctrine of signs might have been considerably more rapid, for
it would have appeared as a choice between sematology, on the one hand,
a semiotics of culture pure and simple, and semiotics, on the other hand,
a doctrine of signs embracing the whole of nature, including culture as
but the development within nature species-specifically proper to human
animals.
But let us consider Saussure’s second misnomer, his unqualified desig-
nation of conventional signs as ‘arbitrary.’

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Although, as I have already granted, the sense of the ‘arbitrariness of

words’ technically specified by Saussure — that nothing in the internal
constitution of either signifiant or signifié explains their correlation under
the relation of signification — is certainly correct, yet the established
prior usage of the term ‘arbitrary’ has been su‰cient to guarantee a great
deal of intellectual mischief resulting in the wake of Saussure’s proposal
of a ‘semiology’ having ‘arbitrariness’ as its central feature, as, so to
speak, its heart and soul. For among the first dictionary meanings of
‘arbitrary’ is ‘depending upon individual discretion’ and ‘not restrained
or limited in the exercise of power’ (the meaning that deconstructionists
love to implement regarding their construal of texts, for example) or
‘coming about at random or as a capricious and unreasonable act of
will’ — none of which considerations are appropriate as criteria to be ap-
plied in the interpretation of texts systematically exposing the objective
content of an author’s thematically developed thought. Whence, inevita-
bly, a doctrine of linguistic signs as ‘arbitrary’ suggests to many, even
in spite of themselves, and be it only on the fringes of consciousness, the
view of the Mad Hatter in Alice of Wonderland: ‘Words mean just what I
want them to mean, nothing more and nothing less.’ Do certain practices
(by no means all) of deconstruction perhaps come to mind?
I have always distinguished between deconstruction as an ad hoc tech-
nique for loosening up ossified interpretations of text, which was a pro-
found achievement and permanent contribution of the work of Jacques
Derrida to the development of semiotics, and deconstruction as a system-
atic technique for destroying responsibility in the interpretation of texts,
which is a practice of postmoderns falsely so-called (cf. Deely 2001a:
Part IV). For example, why should naming things contain the origin of
violence, if not because the doctrine that signs are ‘arbitrary,’ developed
in an unqualified way, has opened the door to a serious abuse of lan-
guage, the attitude that we can make signs, and words among signs,
mean anything we please? The focal doctrine of the ‘arbitrariness of the
sign’ has been seriously overextended and, so to put it, ‘under-understood.’
There are fundamentally two kinds of signs, let us say, with some risk
of oversimplification: those rooted primarily in physical interactions, like
smoke and fire, clouds and rain, milk and childbirth; and those rooted
primarily in habits developed through social interactions, of which words
are the most important variety for semiotic animals, but not for any other
animals even though many other animals likewise develop communica-
tion systems (even vocal ones) distinctive for local groups. All signs in
this second group, all signs which have their origin in social interaction
rather than physical interaction, are ‘arbitrary’ in Saussure’s sense. But
they are not at all ‘arbitrary’ in the context of their use. Only human

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18 J. Deely
language, sometimes owing to creativity respecting the critical control of

objectivity which distinguishes semiotic animals, but sometimes also only
by abuse rooted in the wilfulness of the individual language user, is sus-
ceptible of being ‘arbitrary’ even in the context of use. When use is arbi-
trary but abusive as well, we should speak not of ‘use’ but of misuse.
So, some signs, namely, the signs of species-specifically human linguis-
tic communication, owe their origin to involvement in stipulations, and
their meanings remain tied to that stipulative dimension (which depends
on the ability of animals which have available to them the means of lin-
guistic communication, semiotic animals, to grasp relations in their di¤er-
ence from related things), even though they acquire also further meanings
some of which are accessible zoösemiotically independently of anthropo-
semiosis. In the protosemiotic development (from Augustine to Poinsot),
these signs as such were characterized as signa ad placita, ‘stipulated
signs’ or ‘arbitrary signs.’ But the ‘arbitrariness’ is strictly limited, in
that a word, to succeed, needs not only to be stipulated, but also to have
that stipulation accepted socially, by which process it becomes further a
signum ex consuetudine. A term proposed to designate some objectivity
has no chance of being accepted, and thus coming into general use, unless
it appears in the ears of those hearing it and the eyes of those seeing it as
‘suitable’ or ‘appropriate’ to what is being named or discussed.
Suitability trumps arbitrariness every time. For in itself, naming — and
all words, as Augustine (389AD) early noted, are names before all else —
is a noble activity, properly exercised the highest achievement of anthro-
posemiosis.7 This is exactly why ‘semiology’ has lost out to ‘semiotics’ as
the more suitable name overall for the development of a truly general
doctrine of signs: because semiotics from the start but semiology only as
an afterthought gives consideration to all three of the elements or factors
whose union in relation constitutes the sign in its proper being. This de-
velopment distinctive of semiotics as begun in late modernity has matured
and revealed itself, philosophically, as determinately postmodern, while
semiology as Saussure proposed it, by its very restrictive program has
revealed itself as, after all, no more than ‘ultramodern’ — a development,
indeed, but one which, on its own, belonged heart and soul to, had not
the capacity to move beyond, the philosophical confines of modern
‘epistemology.’
Famously, ancient Greek philosophy considered the sign, or shmeíon,
only on the side of nature in the nature/culture divide. On the side of cul-
ture there were súmbola, not signs. Augustine set the medieval Latin Age
of philosophy on another track entirely, the Way of Signs, with his pro-
posal that the being proper to signum transcended the divide between na-
ture and culture,8 the distinction between shmeíon and súmbolon; and

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the subsequent Latin development, which quite disappeared from view

once the modern mainstream in philosophy turned rather to the Way of
Ideas, eventually showed that the being proper to signs transcended as
well the divide between inside and outside of consciousness.
But semiology came in the wake of modern philosophy, generally
knowing nothing of Latin thought in the matter of signs. And with Saus-
sure the shmeíon/súmbolon distinction was reasserted with a vengeance,
but this time to drive the shmeía from the field of signs, and to accept
only the súmbola. Quite ignorant of and uninterested in the Latins,
thus, Saussure’s epigones took up their cause without a thought for the
victories so painfully won in the Latin protosemiotic line, in particular
the careful Latin demonstration that the real contrast between shmeía
and súmbola is not at all — not either way — between what are and
what are not signs, but between signs which have their signifying origin
in causal interactions versus signs which have their signifying origin in so-
cial interactions. Just as causality (and so indexicality) grounds the for-
mer, so habit (and so symbolicity, often complicit with iconicity) grounds
the latter. Nor did these original Saussureans have the intellectual means,
as Sebeok would eventually demonstrate somewhat devastatingly (e.g.,
Sebeok 1975, 1975a, inter alia),9 to recognize that symbolicity cannot be
confined wholly to anthroposemiosis.
The sign as restricted to the realm of convention, especially as defined
in terms of the conventional and arbitrary (as súmbolon and onoma), is a
conception as distinctively modern as was distinctively ancient the restric-
tion of shmeíon to natural events and propositional contexts of inference
concerning jusiv. Semiotics contrasts both with the ancient view which
omits súmbola, signs acting in the realm of nomov, and with the modern
view which omits shmeía, signs acting in the realm of jusiv. By reason of
this contrast, semiotics is neither ancient nor modern.
Semiotics is medieval respecting ancient thought, but in the precise
sense of post-ancient: it retains all the insights of ancient thought from
the discussions of shmeía, but renders those insights aufgehoben in its dis-
cussion of signum as containing súmbola as well as shmeía. The Latin
Age, thus, saw nothing less than the original florescence of a semiotic
consciousness. Yet semiotics, respecting medieval thought itself, is also
post-medieval, because, even though the first florescence of semiotic con-
sciousness was a medieval development, semiotics renders that Latin pro-
tosemiotic development wherein the being proper to sign was identified
aufgehoben through the discussion of semiosis as the action of signs real-
ized in the production of interpretants as the proper significate outcome
of sign-action. And again, respecting modern philosophical thought, to-
gether with semiology as originally proposed (for I think it is clear by

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20 J. Deely
this stage of the discussion that the two are of a piece epistemologically
within intellectual culture as a whole), semiotics is post-modern. For while
semiotics proper takes full account of modernity’s demonstration that
the world of objects is neither equivalent to nor reducible to the world of
things ‘existing in themselves’ with their bare physical interactions, it yet
moves beyond modernity in showing how the physical environment
through semiosis is always partially included as such in the objective world
or Umwelt of animals,10 and especially in the further showing that objects
and things alike presuppose semiosis in order to be distinguished and
known in their interconnections as well as in their di¤erences of order.
By being postmodern, then, semiotics is not only ‘after’ each of the
previous epochs of philosophy, but more fundamentally it renders those
epochs aufgehoben rather than simply passé. Semiotics captures the insights
into signs of each of the earlier periods, but raises those insights to a higher
level and brings about a synthesis of its own established on the basis of a
paradigm never explicitated prior to semiotics itself. This paradigm of the
action of signs is the key to knowledge and experience and, if Peirce’s fur-
ther step be sound, also the key to the evolution of the universe as moving
from less to more developed stages and regions, both in the matter of
stars, galaxies, and planetary systems, and in the matter of life itself and
the development heretofore considered almost exclusively in terms of dy-
adic physical interactions under the rubric of ‘Darwinian evolution.’
So we see that, even if the doctrine of signs has finally established its
self-identity in semiotics as its proper name (and even if we wish for rea-
sons of nostalgia and respect for our forebears in the area to continue to
speak of the semiotics of culture as ‘semiology,’ that part of semiotics
which is concerned with anthroposemiosis in its uniqueness more than
in its completeness), the implications of that doctrine are far from fully
realized. The future work to be done easily exceeds what has been so far
accomplished.
We have established a good beginning, nothing more; but a good be-
ginning is not a little! For the sign as capacious enough to embrace both
nature and culture in their constitution of and interpenetration within
the objective world of experience — by contrast both to ancient and to
modern philosophy — may be (indeed is) a conception of medieval Latin
origin. But the turn (see Deely 1985: 404, 410–411) to a study of the full
extent of the action consequent upon that unique mode of being surpasses
the highest achievement of the Latins in establishing the exact constitu-
tion of that being as unique in requiring the triadic relation beyond the
causal dyadic relations of physical interaction. That is a turn that requires
and presupposes the being of sign as established for what it is, to be
sure, and this much the Latins accomplished. But it is a turn nonetheless,

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a further move conceptually that opens the way to the full development
of semiotics, and a turn that is (thanks in the first place mainly to Peirce,
and after him to Sebeok) a distinctively postmodern development. That is
why postmodern philosophy in its positive essence, by whatever name we
come eventually to call it in the future history of philosophy, is and will
be for a long time to come, semiotics.
And all those reasons are at play in the fact that ‘semiotics’ has come
to trump ‘semiology’ (to say nothing of ‘sematology,’ probably the term
Saussure should have adopted) in the growing consensus over how the
general study of signs ought best to be named. For a name that leaves
out the heart of the doctrina signorum, namely, that it has a standpoint
proper to itself which cannot be restricted either to nature or to culture,
but allows us to follow the action of signs wherever it leads — which has
proved to be ‘everywhere in nature, including those domains where hu-
mans have never set foot,’ as Emmeche eloquently enunciated the point
(1994: 126) — is hardly a suitable name for the development as a whole.
And ‘semiology’ is just such a name, to wit, unsuitable to the whole of the
study of signs for the very reason that in its stipulation semiology applies
only to a part of the whole in which signs reveal themselves at work, and
even there not according to the rationale proper to and distinctive of
every sign in its proper being.
What ‘semiology’ is suitable to name is that part of semiotics concerned
principally with the world of culture in its di¤erence from the world of
nature, as that di¤erence is mediated by signs and dependent in particular
upon signs of a certain type. But the revolution implied in what the Latins
showed and Peirce and Sebeok emphasized in the contemporary recovery
of semiotic consciousness lies in the realization that this whole ‘world of
culture’ cannot adequately be regarded in simple opposition to nature but
must instead be seen much rather as (Sebeok 1984a: 3) ‘that minuscule
segment of nature some anthropologists grandly compartmentalize as
culture.’
There are semioses distinctive of culture, to be sure, and they merit by
all means specialized study. But for the general doctrine of signs we need
a name that has embraced the whole from the start. We need a name that
has never been stigmatized by the intellectual myopia which set in when
Descartes contracted human being to res cogitans and the idea took root
(theologians can hardly escape some of the blame in this matter) that the
human being is above and radically separated from lowly nature: this
idea is one of the most deeply engrained of the modern notions, strongly
reinforced by modern ‘epistemology’ and linguistic philosophy, an idea
profoundly wrong but embraced without reserve in the original proposal
of semiology.

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22 J. Deely
In this respect, we find among the latter-day adherents of the original

late modern proposal for semiology a faithful remnant clinging to anthro-
poisolationism. These thinkers see in the idea of the ‘arbitrariness of lan-
guage’ a refuge from what has happened in the discussion of signs since
the sixties. A kind of would-be insurgency, these partisans see as their first
task to discredit and dismantle everything that has transpired in the Euro-
pean discourse under the alien influences of Peirce and Sebeok. An East
European academician modestly proposes the term ‘Bankov’s razor’ to
emblematize the idea that ‘semiotics’ should cut and cast away everything
that changes the playing field established by Saussure’s notion of the arbi-
trariness of signs.11 ‘Lost in the Sixties Tonight,’ reminiscent of an Amer-
ican popular song of recent vintage, could well be adopted as the Marseil-
laise of this rearguard movement.
The argument, for what it is worth, holds that ‘semiotics’ and ‘semiol-
ogy’ are merely synonym words, and what they are synonyms for is the
field of inquiry established by the Saussurean notion of the arbitrary.
(Not at all, of course, that Saussure had the ‘last word,’ since there is no
last word on anything; just that arbitrariness in Saussure’s sense is the
essence of signs, and semiotics — or semiology — must be defined and
understood accordingly.) Thus semiotics is semiology, just another word
for the same thing; and semiology is just what Saussure outlined: the
playing field established by the notion of arbitrariness in signs. The dis-
cussion of signs, then, as it stood (particularly in French and Italian
circles) in the ’60s should be regarded as the ‘Golden Age,’ the ne plus
ultra of semiotics, and the Éléments of Barthes can well be taken as the
charter or manifesto of semiotics (that is, semiology: for what’s in a
name?). As Barthes is the apotheosis of the Golden Age of semiotics, so
Sebeok has become the nemesis for what really needs to be done: and that
is to cut away zoösemiotics in particular and biosemiotics in general (to
say nothing of physiosemiotics and semioethics) as misguided develop-
ments, embarrassments to the profession, and obstacles to semiology
(¼ semiotics) assuming its rightful place among the Geisteswissenschaften.
On this view, irredentistly modern, let us call it, Sebeok’s proposal that
semiotics stands at the intersection of nature and culture has no more
merit or relevance than does the Latin protosemiotics or the pansemiotics
of Peirce. In fact, philosophy is one thing, but semiology quite another.
Semiotics — semiology: call it what you will; makes no di¤erence — is a
scientific specialization, one whose place among the sciences is threatened
by the philosophical pretensions of Peircean thought, and one which is
simply embarrassed by the Sebeokean pretensions of biosemioticians.
If nothing else, this rearguard movement shows that there can be intel-
lectual Luddites as well as working class Luddites.

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Unfortunately for these partisans of the arbitrary, words carry not only
stipulations but histories, and these histories carry the experiences of
those who lived them. All of this echoes in the use of words and the
choice of names, often unconsciously but nonetheless at work, as Jacques
Maritain (1938, 1943, 1956, 1957, 1986) so well pointed out in his writ-
ings on sign, not to mention other philosophers (Heidegger 1963 [1927],
1947; Deely 2000b). Seldom if ever (probably never) is it merely the ques-
tion of a convention as proposed that carries the day. Where the conven-
tion bears on active present concerns, especially among thinkers, the
weight of history, the burden of knowledge, will come to bear and tip
the balance at crucial points. Just such a crucial point in the study of signs
was reached by the closing decades of the twentieth century; and while at
mid-century one heard and read only of semiology on all sides, ‘slow by
slow’ the forces of scholarship and learning, active observation and cre-
ative analysis, took more and more of the relevant factors into account
and put the growing awareness of the requirements of the sign into play.
There was no way that the cumulative results of these discussions could
be kept from influencing the naming of what the discussions were about
overall!
6. The fullness of time
By the opening of the twenty-first century, the arbitrariness of Saussure’s

proposal of ‘semiology’ gave way before the suitability of Locke’s earlier
proposal of ‘semiotica.’ The o‰cial journal of the International Associa-
tion for Semiotic Studies bears the banner of the passage. Even Umberto
Eco, emblem of the discussion of signs to the popular culture of the new
millennium, who spoke of his work in 1968 as an Introduzione alla ricerca
semiologica, even as he broached there the problem of the name, by 1975
published rather a Trattato di semiotica generale. In fact, it was neither
Saussure nor Peirce who triumphed as much as it was Thomas A. Sebeok,
for it was Sebeok alone who, from the very start of his involvement, pro-
moted the term ‘semiotics’ as the general name (Peirce himself preferred
‘semeiotic’) for our new perspective.
But regardless of individuals, it is clearly around the name ‘semiotics’
that a postmodern consensus has coalesced, and we may regard the
name (by very reason of that consensus and of the extensive discussion
that has gone into its making, especially over the second half of the twen-
tieth century) as conventional, yes, but now anything but ‘arbitrary’: it
is less a signum ad placitum at this point, an ‘arbitrary proposal to be
considered’ (as it was in the text of Locke), than it is a signum ex

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24 J. Deely
consuetudine, a ‘proposal duly weighed and considered and adopted as

such.’
Semiotics names the time of the sign, and the sign is something whose
time has come. Intellectual culture will never be the same, for it will never
again be able to pretend that things are merely objects, objects mere play-
things of human creation, and reality no more than a social construction
essentially arbitrary. Areas of specialized inquiry are determined by the
object being investigated; but objects come about through semiosis, with
the result that, while specialization is essential to penetrate deeply what
objects are, particularly as they involve also physical reality, semiosis is
needed both to sustain those boundaries and to show where they are
crossable and when they need to be crossed.
Interdisciplinarity, so loudly called for in our universities today, is
nothing more than an unwitting call for the development of semiotics,
for its integration into the fabric of our institutions of learning. Toward
this end, a renewal of intellectual culture around an increasing apprecia-
tion of the manner in which human experience depends upon signs for
its life, the arrival at a suitable name for the development as a whole is
no mean beginning. It will take another century before we see what the
maturation of semiotics will really mean, before we have in our purview
something of the fullness of the implications of the various theoretical
considerations and choices that have gone into the naming so far of this
‘postmodern’ perspective that reveals signs as perfusing the universe, both
in its development over time and in its unfolding for the understanding of
the animals who have come to realize that knowing, like the growth
of experience and of being in nature, is always by way of an involvement
of signs. Signs are not the whole story, but they are the whole of the
story’s coming to be told.
Notes
1. ‘Terminologie sémiotique — Semiotic Terminology,’ the Friday, 9 July 2004 Roundta-

ble held in the framework of the 8 eme Congres De L’association Internationale De
Sémiotique (AIS/IASS), Lyon, France, 7–12 Juillet 2004, under the theme Les Signes
du Monde: Interculturalite et Globalisation.
2. For the reader’s convenience, I provide the following outline of the stages covered in
this essay:
1. The naming: Terminological considerations — semiology or semiotics? . . . . . . . 2
2. The naming: Theoretical choices — science of signs or doctrine of signs? . . . . . . 3
2.1. Saussure’s option . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.2. The option of Peirce and Sebeok . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.3. Eco’s dilemma: The state of the question in the middle sixties . . . . . . . . . . 7

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3. Theoretical considerations at play in the name semiotics as the twenty-first

century opens. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4. What does ‘semiotics’ name? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
5. Why suitability trumps arbitrariness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
6. The fullness of time. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
3. This is the whole matter of ‘Peirce’s Grand Vision’ (see Deely 1989) and the attendant
controversies over, first, phytosemiotics (beginning with Krampen 1981), and then,
further, physiosemiotics: see Deely 1990, 1993b, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000a, 2001b,
2001c, for my own arguments so far; but see Nöth and Kull eds. 2001 for the larger
framework.
4. An important technical term needed today ‘to rescue the good ship Philosophy for the
service of Science from the hands of the lawless rovers of the sea of literature’ (Peirce
1905: CP 5.449); definition and discussion in Deely 2001a: 310n125.
5. I am obliged to note here, in this felicitious conjunction of the notions of Innenwelt and
modeling system, the seminal contributions that intellectuals associated with the Tartu
University in Estonia have made to the maturation of semiotics, both on the side of the
semiotics of culture (the origin of the notion of modeling system through the work
principally of Juri Lotman) and on the side of the semiotics of nature (the origin of
the notion of Innenwelt through the work of Jakob von Uexküll), two major influences
which were brought together by Thomas Sebeok (esp. 1987, 1988a) after visit to Esto-
nia and meeting with Lotman in Tartu in the 1980s. See Anderson and merrell 1990;
Sebeok and Danesi 2000; Kull et al. 2005.
Tartu: the oldest center of semiotics in the world, publishing the oldest journal of
semiotics (founded in 1967 by Lotman, using for the title Shmíotikh́ originally, as
in Locke, then ‘corrected’ after three issues to Shmeíotikh́, and best known today
as Sign Systems Studies) along with a prestigious monograph series, Tartu is well-
positioned to assume a preeminent role in the twenty-first century development of semi-
otics within intellectual culture, notwithstanding the recent blows su¤ered from evit-
able administrative choices (I am thinking of the loss of the von Uexküll archives to
Hamburg in 2004, followed by the loss of the Lotman archives to Tallinn in 2005).
6. My choice of examples, of course, is completely arbitrary, though I do happen to have
a collection of over three hundred carved armadillos, quite possibly the largest such
collection in the world.
7. But because the use of verbal language is under the voluntary control of each individ-
ual who speaks, naming can be arbitrary and embittering instead of suitable and con-
siderate of the best that we can know of things and persons at any given time under any
given circumstances. By arbitrary, of course, Saussure did not in any way mean ‘arbi-
trary’ in this sense of ‘abusive.’ But enough among his epigones have gone that way
to signalize the inherent connotative problem, so to put it, inevitable in the context of
ordinary usage at this stage of linguistic development throughout the European lan-
guages, at least; and in any event there remains the fact that the signifiant/signifié rela-
tion dyadically considered, unmotivated for sure in signs such as language determined
principally by social interactions, are indeed motivated when we take into account also
the interpretant. Whence the unqualified doctrine that ‘signs are arbitrary’ depends for
its force on ignoring or suppressing the third element — ‘the proper signficate out-
come,’ no less, at that! — without which there is no triadic relation, and hence no sign
in its fully constituted being. And that point semiotics demonstrates as essentially
qualifying the semiological doctrine of arbitrariness, without even having to consider
the further case of signs ‘natural’ in the sense originally characterized by Augustine
(AD397: Book I, Paragraph 2, opening lines) as ‘those which, independently of any

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26 J. Deely
will or desire whatever of signifying beyond themselves, yet make something other than
themselves able to be known,’ such as smoke or storm clouds or milk-filled breasts.
8. On the saltations embodied in signum as a fifth century and later Latin term, see Deely
2002b and 2004b.
9. Thus Cassirer’s neo-Kantian definition of human being as ‘symbolic animal’ fails to
meet the requirement that a definition be coextensive with the defined, and is not at
all the same as the formula ‘semiotic animal’ proposed as the postmodern definition
of human being to replace the modern formula res cogitans proposed for modernity:
discussion in Deely 2005; see also Deely, Petrilli, and Ponzio 2005.
10. In their recent study of Sebeok’s work, Petrilli and Ponzio (2001: 20) capture the post-
modern essence of the way of signs exactly: ‘there is no doubt that the inner human
world, with great e¤ort and serious study, may reach an understanding of non-human
worlds and of its connection with them.’
11. The choice of terms, inevitably connoting in the associative fringes of consciousness of
any person even minimally educated in the history of philosophy ‘Ockham’s Razor’ of
universal fame, consequently suggests also a refined device intended to promote theo-
retical sophistication and parsimony among theoreticians. This indeed is the manner in
which I took and struggled to interpret the expression for months during my stay in
Bulgaria, as evidenced in the text of my four books published there while teaching un-
der the dual auspices of the American Fulbright Program and the Southeast European
Center for Semiotic Studies at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia. Only slowly did
it dawn on me that the connotation of Ockham’s razor was an empty connotation, as
conversations forced me to realize that my attempt at interpretation was wholly mis-
guided. Imagine the incredulity I experienced on being forced in the end to recognize
that what was being proposed was not at all a maxim summarizing a requirement for
or call to theoretical sophistication, but, on the contrary, a naked shibboleth intended
to promote an ideological position pure and simple stopping the clock on the twentieth
century development of the doctrine of signs at that point when, in the early 1960s, the
international discourse on signs began to move decisively beyond the frontiers circum-
scribed by the Saussurean doctrine of arbitrariness — indeed beyond the frontiers cir-
cumscribed by that doctrine on any possible interpretation — by taking account not
only of the context within which language operates but of the larger context as well in
which language users operate as semiotic animals.
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(eds.), 1–42. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1978. Originally published as
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Von Uexküll, Jakob (8 September 1864–25 July 1944) (1899–1940). Kompositionslehre der
Natur. Biologie als undogmatische Naturwissenschaft, selected writings edited and with an
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Authenticated
International Universities Press, 1957; reprinted under the general editorship of Thomas
A. Sebeok as a special issue in Semiotica 89 (4), 319–391.
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issue titled ‘The theory of meaning’ in Semiotica 42 (1), 25–82.
John Deely (b. 1942) is Full Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas, Hous-
ton and Executive Director of the Semiotic Society of America 3deelyj@stthom.edu4. His
main research interest is the role of the action of signs in mediating objects and things, in
particular the manner in which experience itself is a dynamic structure or web woven of tria-
dic relations (signs in the strict sense) where elements (representamens, significates, and inter-
pretants) interchange positions and roles over time in the spiral of semiosis. His most recent
principal publications include Four Ages of Understanding (2001); What Distinguishes
Human Understanding (2002); The Impact on Philosophy of Semiotics (2003); and Why Semi-
otics? (2004). His Basics of Semiotics (1990) is now in its fourth edition with translations in
Japanese, Romanian, Portuguese, Spanish, Ukranian, Estonian, and Italian. German and
Bulgarian editions are in preparation.

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On ‘semiotics’ as naming

the doctrine of signs

On the afternoon of July 9, 2004, as part of the Lyons Congress of

Semiotica 158–1/4 (2006), 1–33 0037–1998/06/0158–0001

cultural creations. By contrast, and more di¤usely, the term ‘semiotics’

1. The naming: Terminological considerations — semiology or semiotics?

Semeiological, a. Relating to semeiology or the doctrine of signs; spe-

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Semeiotic, a. Relating to semeiotics; pertaining to signs; speciﬁcally, re-

2. The naming: Theoretical choices — science of signs or doctrine of

2.1. Saussure’s option

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Saussure’s appropriation of ‘semiology’ to name a ‘science of signs,’

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to establish a new modern science exclusively in the line of the

2.2. The option of Peirce and Sebeok

The other major thinker of the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century

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rationale of signs obtains in the case of all animals, including humans,

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developments in semiotics over the twentieth century. By the opening of

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‘semiotics’ (or at least had been named ‘semiotica’ already by Locke in

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only be thought of as a ‘postmodernity’ — an idea terminologically that

3. Theoretical considerations at play in the name semiotics as

The human being is an animal distinguished by a capacity to form repre-

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other-representations of an Innenwelt correspond to the ﬁrst of these

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but what is sensed is interpreted (ofttimes rightly, but sometimes wrongly)

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as an object), even sensation prescissively considered is an action of

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have taken place in science if we were unable to attain to a knowledge,

4. What does ‘semiotics’ name?

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5. Why suitability trumps arbitrariness

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‘signiﬁcate.’ But whereas a signiﬁcate, semiotically, can be a physical

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Although, as I have already granted, the sense of the ‘arbitrariness of

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language, sometimes owing to creativity respecting the critical control of

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the subsequent Latin development, which quite disappeared from view

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In this respect, we ﬁnd among the latter-day adherents of the original

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6. The fullness of time

By the opening of the twenty-ﬁrst century, the arbitrariness of Saussure’s

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consuetudine, a ‘proposal duly weighed and considered and adopted as

1. ‘Terminologie sémiotique — Semiotic Terminology,’ the Friday, 9 July 2004 Roundta-

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3. Theoretical considerations at play in the name semiotics as the twenty-ﬁrst

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