Semiology - Terminology and History

Terminology and History

Using the Greek letters σημιωτικὴ, the term “semiotics” was introduced into the English language by John Locke as a synonym for “doctrine of signs” (Latin: doctrina signorum, the oldest name for the study of what is now called “semiosis” or “the action of signs”). This was in the concluding chapter of his Essay concerning Humane Understanding, which bears the date 1690 (although it was actually released in December of 1689). There already existed in Locke’s time (and long before) the Greek term Σημειωτικὴ, “semeiotics”, to name that branch of medical science concerned with the study of symptoms of disease or σημεια — “natural signs” in today’s language. Thus, a specialized study that goes back all the way to the times of Hippocrates (BC c.460–370) and Galen (AD129–c.200/210), before the notion of “sign” as transcending the nature/culture divide was introduced by Augustine of Hippo (13 November 354–430 August 28), was firmly established before Locke came on the scene. Himself a man of medicine, Locke was quite familiar with this “semeiotics” as naming a specialized branch within medical science. Indeed, in his personal library were two editions of Scapula’s 1579 abridgement of Henricus Stephanus’ Thesaurus Graecae Linguae, which listed σημειωτικὴ as the name for “diagnostics”, the branch of medicine concerned with interpreting symptoms of disease (“symptomatology”); and indeed the English physician and scholar Henry Stubbes (1632–1676) had transliterated this term of specialized science into English precisely as “semeiotic” in his 1670 work, The Plus Ultra Reduced to a Non Plus (p. 75).

But “semeiotics” in this established and even ancient sense of a specialized science was not what Locke had in mind with his proposal of “semiotics” (σημιωτική) as a general doctrine of signs, in contrast to any special science or branch of science. In other words, Locke’s omission of the epsilon following the mu in his term “semiotics” was not a semantic error by someone ignorant of Greek, but was rather a deliberate spelling to contrast his proposal to name the general doctrine of signs (Σημιωτική, semiotica or “semiotics”) with the existing name of the specialized branch of medicine (Σημειωτική, “semeiotics”) concerned with analyzing symptoms of disease.

Full examination of the circumstances of Locke’s work confirm this point. Locke devoted utmost care in preparing four subsequent editions of his Essay, up to his death in 1704. In each of these full editions, his original spelling of σημιωτικὴ was retained in his proposal for “the doctrine of signs”. Thus we are constrained to think that because σημειωτικὴ was already a signum ex consuetudine (a customary sign) by Locke’s time, his proposed σημιωτικὴ was quite deliberatively and contrastively a signum ad placitum, a neologism stipulated for the express purpose of naming a new science, a discipline which did not yet exist yet whose right to existence, in contrast to all existing disciplines, needed to be recognized and named accordingly, as Saussure also (26 November 1857–1913 February 22; but incognizant of Locke’s earlier statement) would point out.

What Locke had in mind with his proposal for the development of semiotics as a general study (what would come to be called a cenoscopic in contrast to an idioscopic science after Bentham and Peirce) was the fact that the general division of science (perennial since Aristotle) into speculative (or the study of the nature of things) and practical (or the study of how we can gain some control over things, both in behavior and in technology) made no mention of the fact that the whole of human knowledge, whether speculative or practical, depends in its origins and throughout its development upon the action of signs or “semiosis”. In the five closing paragraphs (little more than the very last page) of his Essay concerning Humane Understanding, Locke proposed that, along with science as concerned with attainment of speculative truth (or “knowledge of things, as they are in their own proper beings”), and science as concerned with attainment of practical truth (or the “right applying our own powers and actions, for the attainment of things good and useful”), there is need for a science concerned with “signs the mind makes use of” both in acquiring knowledge of things and in developing control over things. For this new, “third science” Locke proposed the name “σημιωτικὴ” or, alternatively (he is explicit on the point), “the doctrine of signs”.

Many misunderstandings have arisen from the careless reading of that concluding chapter of Locke’s Essay, beginning with the claim of later linguists to “correct” Locke’s spelling of Σημιωτικὴ by inserting an epsilon after the mu, thus: Σημειωτικὴ, which transliterates “semeiotics” rather than “semiotics”. While this “correction” can be to a limited extent justified by Greek etymology and orthography, this is true only when the orthographic considerations are introduced entirely apart from the actual philosophical context of Locke’s introduction of his term to name the new, general science. In the context of Locke’s work, intention, and time, such a correction is a misguided “correction”, a blunder philosophically speaking. Even Juri Lotman (28 February 1922–1993 October 28), who introduced semiotics into Eastern Europe and adopted Locke’s coinage of Σημιωτικὴ as the name to subtitle his founding at Tartu University, Estonia, in 1964 of the first semiotics journal, Sign Systems Studies (but did not have the advantage of examining all five of the editions of the Essay prepared in Locke’s home and lifetime), was hounded by linguists into later altering and substituting as the journal’s subtitle Σημειωτικὴ — a misguided “correction”, as pointed out above, which yet persists to the present day. One can only hope that the (mis)“correction” will likely be corrected (or re-corrected!) eventually, as the actual history of semiotics comes to be more generally and deeply understood.

In Peircean circles, Max Fisch (21 December 1900–1995 January 6), the doyen of Peirce scholarship within his lifetime, introduced the myth that “semeiotic” was Peirce’s preferred term for the doctrine of signs. So deep runs the influence of habit over logic, that not even the exposure of this myth as a falsehood has so far persuaded later generations of Peirce scholars (epigones, in this matter) to abandon their preference for singling out Peirce’s work on the doctrine of signs as “semeiotic” or “semeiotics”, in contrast to all other work in “semiotic” or “semiotics” — as if the study of semiosis was not a larger project than the work of any one researcher, however key. Semiotics can no more be reduced to Peirce than geometry can be reduced to Euclid, astronomy to Galileo, or physics to Einstein, etc.

Other Peirce scholars have tried to disparage the name “doctrine of signs” by associating the term “doctrine” with authoritarian and dogmatic religious teaching. But such a move presupposes considerable ignorance of the history of the term “doctrina” in the context of the Latin Age, where it was a synonym for “scientia”, and where (in the 1632 Tractatus of Poinsot) the irreducibly triadic character of the relation formally constituting signs as signs was originally established. Inasmuch as the latter term (“science”) in modern times came to be restricted to idioscopic investigations, while both scientia and doctrina in Latin times applied mainly to cenoscopic investigation, and in view of Peirce’s claim that semiotics belongs first to cenoscopy in its contrast to ideoscopy, there is much wisdom in Sebeok’s decision to prefer in contemporary context the expression “doctrine of signs” over Saussure’s proposal for a “science of signs”, even as Sebeok assimilated “semiology” to “semiotics” as a part to a whole, and was involved in choosing the name Semiotica (in effect a Latin transliteration of Locke’s σημιωτικὴ) for the first international journal devoted to the study of signs.

Thus “doctrina signorum” or “doctrine of signs” is the oldest name for the general study of signs, an expression used in common by Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430), John Poinsot (1589–1644), John Locke (1632–1704), Charles Peirce (1839–1914), and Thomas Sebeok (1920–2001) — i.e., from ancient times, when “sign” as a general notion was first introduced by Augustine, to postmodern times, when the general study of signs as signs first became a thematic focus of general interest within intellectual culture. But given the ancient origins of sign study (in Greek medicine in particular), and given the late-modern awakening of intellectual culture to the fundamental role of signs in the whole of culture and understanding, the English transliteration, “semiotics”, of the name Σημιωτικὴ proposed by Locke against the background of medical knowledge, has quite justifiably — almost inevitably — become the most accepted generic name for sign-study.

Peirce himself, the main transitional figure in this area from a modern to a postmodern intellectual culture in philosophy, would likely have had little use in his own semiotic development for provincial narrowness in trying to eliminate or belittle the oldest name for semiotic study, even as he most emphatically rejected for semiotics the understanding of “doctrine” in the latter modern sense of “dogma” (as Bergman points out). Peirce’s whole idea for semiotics as the doctrine of signs was that semiosis would become the focal point for a community of inquirers, who would investigate the perfusion of signs throughout the universe for its own sake and according to its full requirements. (He would not likely have looked with admiration upon the development of a scholarly circle closed upon his personal work as something to be isolated from or within the larger semiotic community of inquiry.)

Too, no one understood better than Peirce that history is to philosophy (cenoscopic science) what the laboratory is to science in the specialized modern sense (idioscopic science). He distinguished himself among the moderns by being the first thinker educated in the modern mainstream to ignore Descartes’ advice to beware in reading the Latin philosophers antecedent to modernity, “lest in a too absorbed study of these works we should become infected with their errors”. Unlike his modern forebears, and unlike most of his own followers today, Peirce did indeed read the Latins — Aquinas, Scotus, the Conimbricenses, in particular — and from them seems to have gotten some of his most seminal ideas for semiotic, most notably perhaps the Conimbricenses’ thesis that “all thought is in signs”.

In sum, as Peirce recommends, if we go by the history of the terms rather than by etymology, we find two things. First, we find that the oldest common name for the development of a cenoscopic study of the action consequent upon the being proper to signs (according to the classical formula “agere sequitur esse”, or “the way a thing acts reveals what it is that is acting”) — understood as transcending both the nature/culture divide and the inner/outer divide — is “doctrine of signs” (doctrina signorum). Second, we find from John Locke that the Greek form of a name as proposed synonymous with doctrina signorum is Σημιωτική, or “semiotics”.

All other variants for “semiotics” (“semeiotics”, “semeotics”, etc.), proposed on the basis of the Greek term for natural signs, σημεια (which alone were recognized in the Greek Age of philosophy from Thales, BC c.625–c.545, to Proclus, AD 8 February 412–485 April 17), do not serve the purpose stipulated and intended by Locke in making his original proposal. The variants, “semeiotics” most conspicuous among them, either confuse in the historical preconscious the study of signs with medical study of symptoms of disease, or are based on terms considered etymologically rather than historically.

Not all of these considerations surrounding Locke’s term in context — indeed, few of them collectively considered — enter into the explicit consciousness of students of philosophy raised in the late-modern Analytic or even phenomenological traditions of philosophy; yet all of them are at work in the preconscious dimension of understanding at work (as our postmodern philosophical era dawns) in every educated human being alive today as inheritors perforce of linguistic systems shaped by modern philosophy, indeed, yet dating back much farther than the modern traditions of philosophy and linguistics.

“Semiotics”, for this reason more than any other, perhaps, emerged by the opening decades of the 21st century as the most accurate and compelling name for the general and cenoscopic study, unconscious to ancient Greek philosophy, that began in Latin with Augustine of Hippo and culminated in Latin with the 1632 Tractatus de Signis of John Poinsot, then to begin anew in late modernity with the attempt in 1867 by Charles Sanders Peirce to draw up a “new list of categories”. Peirce aimed to base his new list directly upon experience precisely as constituted by action of signs, in contrast with the list of Aristotle’s categories which aimed to articulate within experience the dimension of being that is independent of experience and knowable as such through human understanding. The estimative powers of animals interpret the environment as sensed to form a “meaningful world” of objects, but the objects of this world (or “Umwelt”, in Jakob von Uexküll’s term) consist exclusively of objects related to the animal as desirable (+), undesirable (–), or “safe to ignore” (0). In contrast to this, human understanding adds to the animal Umwelt a relation of self-identity within objects which transforms objects experienced into things as well as +, –, 0 objects. Thus the generically animal objective world as Umwelt becomes a species-specifically human objective world or Lebenswelt wherein linguistic communication, rooted in the biologically underdetermined Innenwelt of human animals, makes possible the further dimension of cultural organization within the otherwise merely social organization of animals whose powers of observation can deal only with directly sensible instances of objectivity.

This further point, that human culture depends upon language understood first of all not as communication, but as the biologically underdetermined aspect or feature of the human animal’s Innenwelt, was originally clearly identified by Thomas A. Sebeok. Sebeok also played the central role in bringing Peirce’s work to the center of the semiotic stage in the 20th century, first with his expansion of the human use of signs (“anthroposemiosis”) to include also the generically animal sign-usage (“zoösemiosis”), then with his further expansion of semiosis (based initially on the work of Martin Krampen, but taking advantage of Peirce’s point that an interpretant, as the third item within a sign relation, “need not be mental”) to include the plant world (“phytosemiosis”).

Peirce’s distinction of an Interpretant from an Interpreter, with the further qualification that the former need not be “of a mental mode of being” — not his demonstration that sign relations are perforce irreducibly triadic, as is commonly assumed in his following so far as the followers continue the modern tradition of ignoring the Latin Age of philosophy’s history — was actually his most revolutionary move and most seminal contribution to the doctrine of signs. Not only does Peirce’s Interpretant notion open the way to understanding an action of signs beyond the realm of animal life (study of "phytosemiosis" + "zoösemiosis" + "anthroposemiosis" = biosemiotics), which was his first advance beyond Latin Age semiotics, but it opens the way also to inquiry into the possibility of an action of signs even beyond the biosphere, a semiosis shaping the physical evolution of the universe itself in the direction of first being able to support and then actually to support life (“physiosemiosis”).

To summarize: Locke did not know the Latin development of semiotics from Augustine to Poinsot, indeed; but he did know very well the difference between symptomatology as the specialized branch of medicine called Σημειωτικὴ, “semeiotics”, and the doctrine of signs he was proposing to become a general science under the name Σημιωτικὴ, “semiotics”. Hence the term he introduced needs to be kept in the form that he introduced.