…a Sign cannot denote an Object not otherwise known to its interpreter, for the obvious reason that if he does not already know the Object at all, he cannot possess those ideas by means of which alone his attention can be narrowed to the very Object denoted. Every object of experience excites an idea of some sort; but if that idea is not associated ( Read more... )

Paul Cobley, The Routledge Companion to Semiotics (ed. Cobley, 2010), pp. 203-4:

While Peirce is acknowledged as the greatest American philosopher, John Deely (b. 1942), in his wake, is arguably the most important living American philosopher and is the leading philosopher in semiotics. An authority on the work of Peirce and a major figure in both ( Read more... )

The other day it occurred to me that Indian philosopher Sañjaya Belatthiputta’s principle of four-cornered (or four-fold) negation (FCN) may bear an important conceptual relation to presemiotic semiosis, i.e., to semiosis that expresses no awareness of semiosis.* FCN follows the form “Neither A, nor not-A, nor both A and not-A, nor neither A nor ( Read more... )