Jerzy Pelc
Prolegomena to the definition of the concept of sign
Nelson Goodman
Chains of reference
Holger van den Boom
The origins of Peircian semiotics.
A logical-phenomological reconstruction
Jürgen Trabant
Monumental, critical and antiquarian history of
semiotics
Enclosure
Rainer Schneewolf
Postwoods
Literary report
Gerhard Regn
Trends in semiotics in Italy
Prolegomena to the definition of the concept of
sign
Jerzy Pelc, University of Warsaw
Summary. This article discusses problems that should be taken into account when
defining the concept of sign. Proceeding from the ancient distinction between
semeion (symptom) and semainon (sign), the author asks whether both can be
treated in a unified way. He deals with the following questions: Is a sign a
concrete or an abstract entity? Do signs belong to the category of things or to
the category of facts? Is the relation that holds between signs and objects
sometimes a natural, or always a conventional, one? Does using a sign sometimes
or always involve making an inference?
Chains of reference
Nelson Goodman, Harvard University
Summary. The author is concerned with the various relationships that may obtain
between a sign or symbol and what it stands for. He characterizes four kinds of
denotational reference, viz., verbal denotation, notation, pictorial
denotation, and quotation; and he distinguishes them from nondenotational
reference, e.g., exemplification and expression. He goes on to analyze cases
where the referent of a sign itself stands for something else, and so on, thus
making up chains of reference having two or more links. In terms of such
chains, a way of measuring referential distance is developed. It is shown how
fictive and figurative reference and the relationship between symbols and our
several worlds can be clarified with this conceptual apparatus.
The origins of Peircian semiotics.
A logical-phenomological reconstruction
Holger van den Boom, TU Berlin
Summary. This article is divided into four parts. Part One characterizes the
problem that arises when the logic of signs is represented by signs. Part Two
analyzes the foundations of Peirce's semiotic from a logical point of view: It
is shown that the paradigm of mediation is to be found in the logical copula as
the third part of a judgment. Part Three deals with the categories of
Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, which provide the logical frame for a
phenomenology of signs based on the logical copula. On the basis of these
results, Part Four criticizes the way in which the so-called Stuttgart school
of semiotics analyzes the internal structure of the triadic sign relation.
Monumental, critical and antiquarian history
of
semiotics
Jürgen Trabant, Free University Berlin
Summary. Historiography of semiotics should be aware of the fact that an
"objective" history of semiotics is not possible but that there will be
different histories of semiotics depending on the different semiotical
conceptions of the historians, who should make their semiotical convictions
transparent and who should be open to corrections of their history by
"antiquarian" (Nietzsche) historical research. Nietzsche's distinction
between
three motives for a non-objective history ("monumental",
"critical",
"antiquarian") - which to my opinion have to be linked together in good
historiography - is used as an instrument for a short examination of the
sketches of the history of semiotics in two well-established introductory works
(Walther, Sebeok).
