Page 208 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
receiver, and a representative relation to an object are present 'simultaneously' in order to create meaning.
The precondition for the transformation of a material object into a sign is the 'abstractive rel- evance': Any sign-object, e.g., a gesture, has to be structured in such a way that we are able to retain only the features that are relevant for its meaning- creating function. This capacity of the subject and these objectively manifested features must be part of a collectively shared consensus, i.e., be founded in a formal grammar. From this argument Buhler is led to the seminal idea of phonology as an independent study of the structure of such features, which are formal in the sense that they are conditions for the function of sounds as differentiating meaning, but which are not formalistic in the sense that they are defined only through their internal organization.
Roman Jakobson develops Buhler's simple, phenomenologically based communication model into a more differentiated structure with more than three functional relations. One of these relations is of special semiotic interest: the so-called 'poetic' func- tion. This is the function through which the sign is related to itself, the sign represents itself as an object within the communicative structure as a whole. In verbal language, this function can be specified as a transformation of syntagmatic relations into para- digmatic ones. As soon as a work of art is appre- hended, it is in a way frozen as one set of simultaneously interrelated elements, in spite of the fact that it is perceived as a sequential order. In a novel the beginning and the end are directly connected once the reading is over.
This idea emerged among the Russian formalists, a group of linguists, literary scholars, poets, and artists, who worked together just before World War I. Par- allel to Saussure, they tried to define the study of art as a specific scholarly activity based on the specific artistic character of its object, especially its 'literarity.' This phenomenon was seen as the specific set of devices (rhyme, narrative structure, genre structures, etc.) through which the material aspect of the artistic object is given its specific artistic character as opposed to the ordinary use of the same material, e.g., artistic language as opposed to everyday language. Hence, taken as art, a given object becomes autoreferential. Because the same material is also used outside the artistic context, the effect of the autoreferentiality is not an isolation of the arts, but it is a way of intro- ducing new meaning in the ordinary context. The artistic function always works together with other communicative functions and with other sign systems. The specificity of the artistic object, and of any other object as a sign, is the devices it provides us with to carry out this intersemiotic relation.
This conception of aesthetics was taken up in Prague by Mukafovsky, among others, and a semi- otics of the arts (literature, theater, folklore, film, etc.)
was created with ideas which are still active in semi- otics. Jakobson's contribution was to combine the ideas of Russian formalism and the Prague School with essential aspects of structuralist semiotics, with- out being taken in by its hard-core formalism.
Another link between phenomenology and struc- tural semiotics is established on a philosophical level in the grammatological analysis of the sign as inaug- urated by Jacques Derrida (1930- ) in his De la grammatologie (1967) and in the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur (1913- ) in Le Conflit des Interpretations (1969).
Ricoeur criticizes the rigid notion of structure behind the structuralist sign notion. It produces a biased view on the concrete sign process, which in his work is seen as a concrete event where several interpretations of the world meet, e.g., in metaphors and symbols, and not simply as a manifestation of a transindividual structure.
Derrida is more oriented toward the epis- temological aspects of the structuralist sign notion: according to him, this notion implies the existence of a transcendental meaning that can be reached through the sign which is regarded as transparent vis-a-vis the virtual structure. But he also points out that this transcendental meaning has to be expressed in signs. The only mode of existence of what is beyond the sign, is the signs in which this beyond is expressed. This paradox is the creative dynamics of all texts. No text will ever express a conclusive meaning, but will always produce a continuous dissolution or 'deconstruction' of stable meanings.
While Ricoeur anchors structuralist semiotics in the hermeneutical tradition, Derrida's work has inspired a philosophical relativismcharacterized aspostmodern, deconstructionist, or poststructuralist. But as a whole, phenomenological semiotics is a broadly and cul- turally oriented movement which is still developing and focusing on how human beings are determined by signs.
2.3 American Semiotics
North American semiotics as a school is identical with Peircean semiotics, rooted in the works of Charles Sanders Peirce. Other types of semiotic activities in the USA are of non-American origin, being of struc- turalist or postmodern inspiration.
Peirce is a polyhistorian with logic as the center of his thought; logic considered as the way of reasoning about the world through the manipulation of signs which represent this world. So, for Peirce, logic is semiotics. Like Husserl, he is inspired by the medieval schoolmen and he adopts a phenomenological point of departure for his semiotics.
In Peirce, the core of semiotics is the 'semiosis' or the structured process in which the 'sign' imposes a 'coded relation' to an 'object' on a mind. Behind this triadic notion of semiosis are three basic phenom-
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