The endless frontiers of semiotics скачать в хорошем качестве

The endless frontiers of semiotics

The epistemological status of semiotics has long been a subject of debates among semioticians. The semiotic movement started a century ago as a challenging scientific project aimed at integrating various disciplines within an overarching framework. It first defined itself as a frontier-science. However, it soon evolved toward a set of competing doctrines that proceeded top-down, applying their “axiomatic” theories and models to a range of cultural domains. This has generated an abundant discourse of interpretation through which the phenomena considered are described in the terms of a particular doctrine. These efforts, though, have been mostly sterile because they were not oriented toward solving problems. Doctrines do not endeavor to create new knowledge as they claim to embody authoritative truths and exclude the eventuality of counter-intuitive results that would challenge them. The dynamic sense of “frontiers” has thus been replaced by the notion of defensive “boundaries”. This presentation claims that the time has come to take stock of this state of affairs and to recast semiotics as a bottom-up scientific process, starting from the actual social and cultural problems of today’s world involving meaning and communication, and working out methods to achieve epistemological and practical results. There is not a single actual problem that can be solved through the theory and method of a single discipline. If semiotics can contribute to the advancement of knowledge, it is by helping to create new frontiers of ignorance and inabilities at the interface of the relevant emerging disciplines, a truly endless process. In this sense, imagining the possibility of a closure would amount to fall back into the doctrinal trap. Paul Bouissac (University of Toronto)