Page 210 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
a driver had started while the light was red, his act would still have been a dynamical interpretant, but a police officer might have stopped him, taking it as a sign related to the same dynamical object but rep- resenting another immediate object. In this case, the traffic would no longer be a practical affair but a legal complex.
Because of the generality of Peirce's thought and its comprehensive character, bridging the gap between profound epistemological viewpoints, cultural and historical problems, and particular types of signs and sign processes in different disciplines, it has had an immense influence in all semiotic domains.
The tripartition of signs has been the emblem of his semiotics and has been used to characterize sign processes of all types and in all kinds of expression systems. And his emphasis on the dialogical structure of the semiosis and of the shared knowledge pre- supposed by the semiosis, has led to penetrating stud- ies in philosophical and literary hermeneutics or in anthropology and the social sciences (e.g., Singer 1984). But in most cases the generality also means a lack of specific analytical devices, so that the appli- cation of Peirce's notions is normally integrated as specifying guidelines for a methodological pluralism. In this capacity, Peirce's semiotics has a global influ- ence as well as a growing one.
2.4 The Moscow-Tartu School
With the Moscow-Tartu School, a school in the literal sense of the word was established. Founded in 1962, it continues the cooperation between the Slavic coun- tries and the other countries on the European con- tinent which dates back to Saussure and his foundation of structural linguistics, to Russian for- malism, and to the Prague School. Among the leading figures are Jurij Lotman (1922-1993) from Tartu and Vjaceslav Ivanov (1929-1993) from Moscow.
Although the activities of the school have several sources of inspiration, structuralist semiotics is the most decisive: the Saussurean sign and the Hjelmsle- vian hierarchy (see Grzybek 1989). On the basis of these fundamentals, the ambition is to focus on more complex sign structures than verbal language and to transform the basic notions and methods of the linguistically based structural semiotics beyond a mere analogy. Hence, the main interest of the school is the study of 'culture' as a semiotic system. The basic notions are 'text' and 'model.'
Culture is based on a process of creation, exchange, and storage of information, and the specific 'unity' of this process is the object of cultural semiotics. The material for this study is the 'text' in which this process materializes, and the 'invariants' which can be found in the texts constitute the ultimate object of cultural semiotics. The text is a megasign, as it were, and is built up of binary signs. In the structuralist sign con- ception, the invariants are the relationally defined
elements whichconstitute the signifier-component and the signified-component. But in the cultural flow of information, the invariants are neither located in the sign itself nor in the text in itself. Therefore, the sig- nifier of the sign is seen as a material unit, not as a formal unit. Furthermore, when the text is seen in analogy with the sign, it is regarded as any delimited material unit with a content that can be divided in smaller units of the same kind.
Following this idea, the formal definition of the invariants requires another notion, the notion of 'model.' First of all, the notion of model implies a 'hierarchy' between two levels, a model being a model of something. The invariants are the elements which remain stable when meaning from one level in a hier- archy is transformed to another. Second, the notion of model is necessarily linked to the assumption of a basic 'code' or structure which reworks an object, duplicating or replacing it by a model. In culture the basic object is always a text, dealing with our world of experience, e.g., a linguistic or visual text. The model is another text which uses the first one as expression and which contains the rules by which this expression takes place. This is an application of the connotative hier- archy in Hjelmslev.
The point is that any text, also the basic one, in order to be text must be placed in a modeling hier- archy, either as the so-called 'primary modeling system,' e.g., the verbal text which functions as a model of our experience of the world, or as a 'sec- ondary modeling system' which reconstructs the first modeling system's way of systematizing our experi- ence. So, a 'model' is a text considered as an organ- izing system in relation to another text.
From this point of view, the cultural invariants are attached to the text-as-model, functioning in an irreducible double structure consisting of at least two modeling systems. The two systems will never be identical, neither by being identical repetitions nor by being infinite, because texts as models impose limits on the infinite flow of information from the surrounding world. They will be different and often in opposition.
The advantage of this approach is that the basic text, the primary modeling system, will be delimited according to the purpose of the analysis, i.e., the relation to another modeling system. Furthermore, in a cultural perspective the text is always linked to a hierarchy which cannot be reduced to a homogeneous whole where the two modeling systems function as one. Thus, culture is always seen as a dynamic inter- section or a continuous process of unifying het- erogeneous texts.
In an analogy to the notion of biosphere, this cul- tural space is called the 'semiosphere' by Jurij Lotman. With this notion he wants to draw our attention to the fact that the domain of texts, in order to be texts, is always opposed to a domain of phenomena which are not texts. The heterogeneous character of the
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