Charles Sanders Pierce

Semiotic resaerch on five photography made from Tina Modotti in the post-revolutionary Mexico of '20. Deeping on photography history and theory, and on the role of photography and art for the Revolution.

“Sempre, quando le parole “arte” e “artistico” vengono applicate al mio lavoro fotografico, io mi sento in disaccordo. Questo è dovuto sicuramente al cattivo uso e abuso che viene fatto di questi termini.
Mi considero una fotografa, niente più"

Tina Modotti, "On photography"; 1929

Within Christian theology, the doctrine of the economic Trinity concerns the relation between the Triune God and living creatures like human beings. Roughly speaking, the orthodox view is that, though no Trinitarian person acts without the other two, God the Father creates, God the Son redeems, and God the Holy Spirit sanctifies. Instead of focusing upon the truth or falsity of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the present essay attempts to make sense of this doctrine through an appeal to the anthropological side of the divine-human relationship. Specifically, I will appeal to the process of symbolic interpretation by which human beings relate themselves to Ultimate Reality, arguing that the differentiated roles of the Trinitarian persons can be understood as reflections of the triadic relationship that defines the process of semiosis or sign-interpretation. 

This essay consists of three sections. Section 1 explains Charles Sanders Peirce's conception of semiosis as a process constituted by an irreducibly triadic relation between three relata: (1) a sign that represents, (2) an object that is represented, and (3) an interpretant that interprets the object on the basis of the sign. Section 2 demonstrates, through extensive quotations from the New Testament and the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), that the relation posited between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit corresponds quite closely with the relation between object, sign, and interpretant, respectively, in semiosis. Finally, section 3 considers two alternative explanations of this surprising correlation: Andrew Robinson's vestigia Trinitatis explanation and a naturalistic alternative that construes the doctrine of the Trinity as a reflection of the processes of symbolic semiosis that are central to all human religions.

Tourists, Signs, and the City: The Semiotics of Culture in an Urban Landscape, by Michelle M. Metro-Roland Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. x+171pp., US $89.95 (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-7546-7809-0

The thesis of the book is that an idea of the ‘tourist prosaic’ is valuable in interpreting how the tourist makes meaning through the activity of being a tourist in an urban environment.

Al término del curso, el estudiante contará con conocimientos básicos de la semiótica, sus conceptos. Precursores y fundamentos mismos que el estudiante aplicará para la construcción e interpretación del discurso, sus significados y la importancia de éste en el proceso comunicativo

Before the total cutoff of a household for unpaid electrical bills, and in anticipation of the violence it might precipitate, national power utility inspectors in Dar es Salaam have recourse to a gradient of ‘soft’ disconnections designed to signal good faith and encourage repayment. Drawing on a mixture of semiotics and exchange theory, this article argues that such soft disconnections may be understood as moments when the shared grounds of the household-utility relation—both the physical power network and social commitments it embodies—become figured, modified, and ultimately preserved in the face of urban postcolonial strain. Whereas semiosis is often thought of as a kind of infrastructural bridge that links sign to interpretant (or object to sign), the inspectors’ reflexively phatic signaling of common grounds highlights the thoroughly semiotic nature of infrastructure itself. More generally, the very presumption and preservation of shared grounds is a salutary alternative to the anti-relational violence and extinction that characterizes much of the contemporary world.

Ritwik Kumar Ghatak, the maverick Bengali filmmaker remains one of the most celebrated cinematic auteurs of Indian cinema. Dismantling the conventional constructs of commercial cinema, Ghatak along with Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen laid the foundation of the alternative or parallel cinema in Bengal during the 60s and 70s. This paper attempts to semiologically study the multiple layers of meanings and functions in Ghatak's seminal film, Subarnarekha (1962) and explore the impact of Partition and the tragic predicament of the innumerable immigrants which has been portrayed through the skillful cinematic technique in which Ghatak has blended melodrama with social realism. In addition, it is also aimed at discussing the linkage between communication and semiotics and is expected to generate positive contributions in underlining the significance of semiotic theory and further researches in related fields or specific areas.

There is a widespread idea that in grounded theory (GT) research, the researcher has to delay the literature review until the end of the analysis to avoid contamination – a dictum that might turn educational researchers away from GT. Nevertheless, in this article the author (a) problematizes the dictum of delaying a literature review in classic grounded theory, (b) presents arguments for using extant literature in the substantive field within a constructivist grounded theory, and (c) suggests data sensitizing principles in using literature, which are: theoretical agnosticism, theoretical pluralism, theoretical sampling of literature, staying grounded, theoretical playfulness, memoing extant knowledge associations, and constant reflexivity.

Ostensibly a monograph on the drawings of Josef Albers, the reader will find under the heading ‘excursus’ a series of investigations into the concept of constellation in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, the semiotics of star maps, the rhetorics of geometry and the structure of representation in which Josef Albers’s Structural Constellations are not discussed directly for almost 200 pages. Although it departs from its subject matter, this group of essays may be regarded as tending towards an interpretation of Structural Constellations, as Benjamin would say, ‘returning in a roundabout way to its original object.’
The main themes of the dissertation are addressed to specific objects: texts by Benjamin and Adorno, star maps in the tradition which stretches between Ptolemy’s Almagest and Argelander’s Bonner Durchmustering, geometry lessons, the gossip about Cubism, works and manifestos by Alberti, Dürer, van Doesburg, Lissitsky and Albers. The aim is to broaden the terms of reference and develop more precise interpretative tools for an assessment of Albers’s Structural Constellations, to place these works in a more accurate historical context and provide the basis for a reassessment of some of the products and rhetorics of twentieth century modernism.
The reader should not expect the dissertation to reach a climax with Albers’s Structural Constellations. Albers emerges, even as he dissppears in the elucidation of his works, as a late modernist and practitioner of negative dialectics. His works emerge as a configuration of these dialectics and offer a reflection on the topics and ideas explored in the dissertation.
The historical and theoretical discussion of the metaphorical and graphic praxis of constellation and what I have called the ‘epistemological wish-images’ mediated by geometry is counterbalanced by a companion volume cataloguing some 1,500 drawings by Josef Albers.

CONTENIDO

ARNOLD OOSTRA. La matemática intuicionista y sus conexiones
con el pensamiento de Peirce

FERNANDO ZALAMEA. Faneroscopia, filosofía natural y literatura.
“La Esfinge” en Peirce, Emerson, Poe y Melville

EUGENIO ANDRADE. Las categorías ceno-pitagóricas y la controversia
sobre el origen de las innovaciones evolutivas

ROBERTO PERRY. Desde Peirce: invitación a ampliar
nuestro concepto de signo

CARLOS GARZÓN. ¿Es la verdad la meta de la investigación?
Una lectura pragmaticista para objeciones pragmatistas

DOUGLAS NIÑO. Algunas reflexiones sobre la duda y la creencia

EDISON TORRES Idealismo epistemológico y realismo metafísico
en Charles S. Peirce

The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (b. 1839–d. 1914) has had a profound, expansive, and sometimes unrecognized impact on anthropological research and theory. Part of Peirce’s impact has been mediated through the work of philosophers influenced by Peirce’s theory of signs, and who were themselves subsequently taken into anthropological theory. But the impact of Peirce’s semiotic on anthropologists who have interpreted Peirce directly has also been transformative, in particular, in developing a surprisingly transdisciplinary theory of meaning in anthropology. This article documents the role of Peirce’s theory of signs in facilitating a semiotic approach in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology and in providing a framework to critically expand research on visual and material culture, archaeology, trans-species environmental relations, life-systems, and the evolution of language and culture. The transformative impact of Peirce’s semiotic can be understood against the history of the dominant structuralist semiotic theory that guided much 20th- century anthropology that developed from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure called for a science of signs (termed “semiology”) that placed at its center an analysis of the arbitrary linguistic sign (constituted by an ideal binary binding concept and sound-image) and which has value as part of a system of oppositions (langue), held commonly in the minds of speakers as members of a society. A parallel model of language was incorporated into American anthropology by Franz Boas, who argued that language is a conventional system of classification for a society, and the dominant focus became the study of such systems of classification in domains such as botany, zoology, kinship, color, and so on. The structuralist concept of language as a conventional system also became a dominant model of culture in French and British anthropology, in particular through the integration of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s binary analysis of mythic and mental structures, and which was coordinated with the Durkheimian concept of language/culture as a public representation of a society’s values to itself. In contrast, Peircean semiosis does not take the idealist and arbitrary linguistic symbol as the privileged basis of semiotic analysis. Peirce’s semiotic provides a framework for understanding actions relating signs and their material qualities to their interpretations by agents (human and nonhuman) in the habit of making meaning in social-ecological contexts. Peircean semiosis focuses attention on dynamic interpretive processes and their consequences, and on the form, diversity, function, and positionality of signs in chains of actions playing out in time and space to practical, meaningful, productive, or consequential ends.

Приведен анализ философских идей американского исследователя Ч.С. Пирса в контексте проблем философии коммуникации. Подчеркивается, что значение идей Ч.С. Пирса в исследовании коммуникативных процессов определяется тем, что он одним
из первых поставил вопрос о процессуальности мира и знака в нем. Сегодня открытия Ч.С. Пирса в логике и семиотике видятся в новом свете, как первый шаг к пониманию процессуальной природы знака при определении способа «жизни» знака в коммуникациях.

Ключевые слова: Знак, динамика знака, интерпретанта, семиозис, коммуникации, философия коммуникации.
Key words: Sign, sign dynamics, interpretant, semiosis, communication, philosophy of communication.

" …Por otra parte, todos los partidarios de la ciencia están animados por la feliz esperanza de que basta con que aquella se prosiga lo suficiente para que dé una cierta solución a cada cuestión a la que la apliquen. Uno puede investigar la velocidad de la luz estudiando los pasos de Venus y la aberración de las estrellas; otro, por las oposiciones de Marte y los eclipses de los satélites de Júpiter; un tercero, por el método de Fizeau; un cuarto, por el de Foucault; un quinto, por los movimientos de las curvas de Lissajoux; un sexto, un séptimo, un octavo y un noveno, pueden seguir los diferentes métodos de comparar las medidas de la electricidad estática y dinámica. Al principio pueden obtener resultados diferentes, pero, a medida que cada uno perfecciona su método y sus procedimientos, se encuentra con que los resultados convergen ineludiblemente hacia un centro de destino. Así con toda la investigación científica. Mentes diferentes pueden partir con los más antagónicos puntos de vista, pero el progreso de la investigación, por una fuerza exterior a las mismas, las lleva a la misma y única conclusión. Esta actividad del pensamiento que nos lleva, no donde deseamos, sino a un fin preordenado, es como la operación del destino. Ninguna modificación del punto de vista adoptado, ninguna selección de otros hechos de estudio, ni tampoco ninguna propensión natural de la mente, pueden posibilitar que un hombre escape a la opinión predestinada. Esta enorme esperanza se encarna en el concepto de verdad y realidad. La opinión destinada a que todos los que investigan estén por último de acuerdo en ella es lo que significamos por verdad, y el objeto representado en esta opinión es lo real. Esta es la manera cómo explicaría yo la realidad " Charles Sanders Peirce

In “La méthode de dramatisation et la question ‘Qui?’” (2015), I started exploring how, in the philosophy of William James and Alfred N. Whitehead, theism has been praised for favouring a sense of active personality. In the context of this article, I would like to push this philosophical inquiry in the surrounds of process theology further, by bringing into focus Bergson’s complex understanding of the notion of person. As for James and Whitehead, Bergson’s treatment of the question confers a crucial importance to activity. The evolution of the concept of person throughout his work culminates in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1935). There, he defines what is immediately communicative in a person’s emotional experience as a “call.” How does the problem of personality concern the now of immediate affective experience? And how to understand Bergson’s claim that enthusiasm, as a call, constitutes persons?

Familiarity, so the saying goes, breeds contempt. But, why should familiarity breed such a negative thing as contempt, or other negative orientations? There is something paradoxical about this little folk saying. For, if one is genuinely familiar-possessing the goods of having a high epistemic grade of cognitive or appreciative contact-with some piece of reality, then why should contempt follow on the heels of such genuine epistemic and existential intimacy? At first glance, this seems both bizarre and incongruous. And yet, as anyone who has relegated their most intimate beloved to the status of persona non grata knows, such appreciative failure is the common stock of human experience. This is a 'commonplace' mystery I propose to examine, with a focus on another experiential state parasitic on or constitutive of familiarity: jadedness. In what follows, I will attempt to sketch an initial theory of jadedness, and then expand that theory by attending to Percy's unique philosophical contributions. Percy's contributions suggest, I will argue, that there are at least two types of jadedness-a narrow, domain specific psychological type and a global, existential type-that share structural similarities such as volitional and epistemic inertia, an unsettled loss of meaning, a faulty assumption of epistemic completion or superiority, and a foreclosure of ontological possibilities. I will then show how Percy uniquely integrates these two types of jadedness within a broader framework of what it means to be human (as homo viator, a creature), offering a distinctive and philosophically integrated account of why being jaded involves a fundamental distortion of our humanity. Finally, insofar as jadedness involves failures of humility, I will argue that Percy's philosophical and theological work on our "unsignifiable" uniqueness provides an important critical alternative to prevailing philosophical accounts of humility, and also a unique solution to the problem of being jaded.

La obra del filósofo norteamericano John Dewey (1859-1952) es sistemática en la teoría y, en vida del propio Dewey, aspiraría a ser también sistemática en la práctica. En la práctica, un modo de tratar la profunda complejidad de la filosofía es atender a la antigua reciprocidad entre las palabras y las acciones, una práctica ausente o poco común en la continuidad que demanda naturalmente la vida humana, sobre todo en la actualidad. Tanto la naturaleza como la cultura serían un pretexto para la experiencia que, en ese sentido, podría significar todo o nada. Desde la perspectiva pragmatista de Dewey, la vida práctica de las ideas hace literalmente referencia a una realidad concreta que la profesora Calcaterra ha puesto de manifiesto paralelamente en relación con la biografía de Dewey en su libro 'Idee concrete. Percorsi nella filosofia di John Dewey' (que se puede traducir por 'Ideas concretas. Recorridos en la filosofía de John Dewey').

First I present a brief exposition of the relevant aspects of Peirce’s and Whitehead’s systems, focusing in particular on their accounts of the developmental role of love. Given this backdrop, I then proceed to consider what Peirce and Whitehead might learn from each other. More specifically, considering the metaphysical nature and role of both local and cosmological forms of teleology in their respective systems, I suggest that certain short-comings in each philosopher’s conception of teleology are at least partially remedied by the others. Finally, wanting not merely to think about, but also to think with Peirce and Whitehead, I consider what their conceptions of creative love may have to offer in contemporary debates at the frontiers of evolutionary biology.

Intro This is a condensed part of a much larger argument that comes from my forthcoming book which attempts to provide a multi-level conception of noise that brings out its full significance without hypostatizing or fetishizing it I elaborate this within a broadly information-theoretic modal realist metaphysical frame allowing for a description of the processes and structures underlying both the continuities and discontinuities between physical, biological, and cognitive systems, and giving a functionalist computationalist theory of mind as a pragmatically elaborated hierarchically nested non-equilibrium thermodynamic system it is broadly information-theoretic in the sense in which information provides the unifying framework for the analysis of structures, processes and systems at diverse levels of organization modal realism just means that modalities such as actuality, possibility, and necessity, are not just attributions by the mind that can be eliminated by reduction to some foundationalist level of description (composed of individuals such as atoms) but that what really exists are modal relations that hold across and between those diverse levels of structures and processes importantly, even though the description of anything that IS can be fully achieved within this unifying information-theoretic framework (in terms of degrees of randomness or patterns of structural organization), such a description is not adequate even to those complex systems displaying historicity, such as living systems, let alone to the mind (or to the social systems in which mind is necessarily embedded) As Negarestani asserts, mind is a project for which a complete description is not possible even though mind is causally reducible to the physical and chemical processes that compose it, in constraining and coordinating behaviour according to pragmatic proprieties and normative attitudes, it is logically irreducible to its information theoretic description the title of my talk refers to the notion of Autopoiesis developed in second-order cybernetics, where systems are observing rather than merely observed – where reflexivity, recursion, and self-referentiality are intrinsic factors, and systems are analysed in terms of their structural coupling with the environment, with which they form a single circuit with a doubled feedback the maintenance of internal order is no longer due to the robustness of the system to noise but to its resilience to perturbations (this moves from Schrodinger's reproduction of internal consistency by order-from-order to Von Foerster's notion of order-from-noise) so autopoietic systems dynamically self-organise at a number of different scales of observation

In this paper we outline the analytic limitations of action theories and interpretive schemes that conceive of beliefs as explicit mental representations linked to a desire-opportunity folk psychology. Drawing on pragmatism and practice theory, we recast the notion of belief as a species of habit, with pre-reflexive anticipation the primary mechanism accounting for both the formation of beliefs and their causal influence on action. We demonstrate the utility of this approach in three ways: first, by linking it with recent research on the cognitive and motor development of infants; second, by drawing out a typology of belief states that accounts for a range different experiential traits; and third, by applying the new model to reinterpret two belief-based phenomena of broad sociological interest: “irrational” decision-making and religious conversion.

Robert Scholes is a respected literary critic and semiotician who, motivated by dissatisfaction with the reigning epistemological assumptions in the field of literary theory, has advocated revamping the discipline of English in significant ways. Scholes's own epistemology and semiotic approach to pedagogy cohere quite well with Polanyi's epistemological work and are, in essence, post-critical. Given that far more students in the American educational system study English than philosophy, a wider embrace of Scholes's pedagogical approach could provide more opportunities than are currently available to give students access to a post-critical formation. Scholes's epistemology, semiotics, and pedagogy are discussed in some detail, and resonances with Polanyi's grand project are highlighted.

C. S. Peirce is often credited as a forerunner of the verificationist theory of meaning. In his early pragmatist papers, Peirce did say that if we want to make our ideas clear(er), then we should look downstream to their actual and future effects. For many who work in philosophy of mind, this is enough to endorse functionalism and dismiss the whole topic of qualia. It complexifies matters, however, to consider that the term qualia was introduced by the founder of pragmatism himself. Peirce was adamant that only triadic relations can support language and cognition. Even so, he insisted on purely logical grounds that, when we analyze triadic signs all the way, we are left with a qualitative residue he called Firstness. Such an isolated relatum could never be studied experimentally. Yet, given that this primitive state can be confirmed by means of a formal or prescissive distinction, I believe the Peircean account can do justice to many of the intuitions that generate the so-called hard problem of consciousness. My goal, then, is to show that Peirce's semiotic commitment to qualia is compatible with his foundational statements about pragmatism.

Communicology is the science of human communication. This definition derives from the use of semiotic phenomenology as a logic based method to determine how human beings come to endow (Husserl’s sense of Stiftung ) themselves and found their world with meaning. Such an analysis inevitably leads to a description of certain metaphysical and epistemological absolutes: (1) Edmund Husserl’s absolute that “subjectivity is intersubjectivity”, (2) Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s subsequent absolute that “the body is our general medium for having a world”, and the combinatory absolute suggested by Merleau-Ponty that (3) “It is by communicating with the world that we communicate beyond all doubt with ourselves. We hold time in its entirety, and we are present to ourselves because we are present to the world.” These three eidetic absolutes can be demonstrated empirically by describing the communicological extinction of the pain in a human “phantom limb” (a phantasm: mental representation of a real obj...

The design and construction of architecture rarely go according to plan. Unexpected problems, mistranslations and accidental discoveries can permeate the architectural design process producing surprising results. The ancient Roman architect Vitruvius recounts how Callimachus experienced a similar form of creative inspiration in his serendipitous discovery of a basket, roof tile and acanthus plant as the model for the design of the first Corinthian capital. For the Spanish artist, Pablo Picasso, Callimachus’ discovery is an example of a sagacious individual who has learned to anticipate aberrations in the creative process claiming, "Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working." Picasso’s friend, Le Corbusier embraced this approach in design by collecting “objets à réaction poètique” (objects of poetic reaction) that he kept in his studio to stimulate the architectural imagination. Perhaps the most famous object in Le Corbusier’s collection was the crab shell he found while roaming a Long Island beach in 1946 and became the structural model for the roof in his 1955-constructed Notre Dame du Haut chapel in Ronchamp, France. Like the basket, roof tile and acanthus plant, the crab shell was not created as a model of architecture, but interpreted as one. These strange tales of architectural evolution are examples that demonstrate what Louis Pasteur described as a “prepared-mind;” a mind actively engaged in a problem prepared to recognize an everyday object or event as inspiration for architecture. As evidenced by a diverse collection of histories of architectural evolution, this chapter explores the mutability between the everyday and the extraordinary through an examination of the cognitive relationship between the quotidian and their translation to architecture. Taking our inspiration from Umberto Eco who once observed how “every story tells a story that has already been told,” this chapter proposes to explore the thread holding these stories together.

Paul Emmons, Marcia Feuerstein, and Carolina Dayer, eds., Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture (Ashgate, 2016)

Formal causality has, in large part, been eschewed by both the philosophic and scientific communities alike.  David Hume in particular levied an assault against any form of causality other than material cause.  But formal cause is as viable a notion as material cause, and one that is of vital importance in both philosophy and science.  By re-assessing Aristotle’s notion of formal causality, and interweaving it with inspirations from such diverse disciplines as Anthropology, Semiotics, and Communication Studies the notion of formal cause can be restored to its rightful place, along side material cause, as a fundamental principle of scientific and philosophical methods alike.

n ABSTRACT: This article proposes a revised definition of glossolalia based on the ritual value of incomprehensible speech, which allows for an approach to meaning emergence in non-human languages and the issue of extreme linguistic alterity. The main social and acoustic features associated with glossolalia will be presented through the case study of a Christian charismatic community in Brazil (the Canção Nova), showing us how linguistic evidence supports different notions of Christian personhood and an iconic-based communication between human and divine beings. This article discusses relevant material on the subject since Samarin and provides a fully articulation among Linguistic Ideolology, Phonological Description and Sound Symbolism

Scientific Methodology (SM) has long suited those who favour analytical and quantitative research in management. Thus the dilemma between the rigour and relevance of contemporary management research methods is fuelled by action researchers who keep wanting to contrast Action Research (AR) with SM. This paper presents a Western philosophical view on the development of belief systems and theory-based methods over time. It thus links the progressive and cumulative development of SM with the contemporary AR methodology. In doing this it presents a different point of view—that the traditions of SM and AR have much closer relationships than people often give them credit for.

The opening chapter to 'Animal Neopragmatism: From Welfare to Rights' (Palgrave Macmillan 2019). I explain the theoretical and practical motivations for neopragmatism in animal ethics, and sketch the pragmatist critique of traditional animal right theory. I introduce the key concepts of animal neopragmatism: relational hedonism and expressivism.

In this paper, I examine the way humans interact with domestic companion animals, with a focus on ‘positive reward-based training’ methods, particularly for dogs. From a biosemiotic perspective, I discuss the role of animal training in today’s society and examine what binary reward- based reinforcement schedules communicate, semiotically. I also examine the extent to which reward-based training methods promote better welfare, when compared to the more traditional methods which rely on aversive stimuli and punishment, if and when they are relied upon excessively. I conclude that when used as the primary means of communication, they have the potential to be detrimental to animal welfare, because the underlying social signal is control and resource dominance. As an alternative view to behaviourist-based learning theory and conditioning, I outline how enactivist theories of cognition support a semiotic approach to interspecific human-animal communication. I therefore propose a move towa...

Ces cinq pages, qui font une suite à la notice sur 'L'Arbitraire du signe', exposent d'abord la position d'un penseur antique, Sextus Empiricus, pour montrer par un court extrait « comment il s'y prend » pour traiter la question du signe ; puis nous parlerons de Zénon, le fondateur du stoïcisme ; ensuite de l'éloge qu'Umberto Eco fit de la position de Charles Sanders Pierce. Nous terminerons en examinant sous cet angle la question des « mots nouveaux ».

Simgesel sistemiyle görünür olan dil, onu kullanan bireyin evrene ve ögelerine bakışını, düşünüş biçimini sunar ve böylelikle toplumu seslendirerek ve topluma seslenerek yaşama eşlik eder. Anlamı inşa eden insan, dili konuşarak onu yeniden üretmiş olur. Bu da ancak dilsel göstergeler yoluyla gerçekleşebilmektedir. Sesin söze dönüşmesiyle gösterdiği şey; söylenişi, çağrışımları ve anlam alanları gibi birçok öge Doğu ve Batı dünyasında çeşitli boyutlarıyla araştırma konusu edilmiştir. Bunlar arasında kavram, kelime ve nesne arasındaki ilişkiler de yer almaktadır. Dile ait bu bilimsel disiplinlerin kapsamlı ve geçmişi bakımından en önemlilerinden biri belagattir. Sözün doğru, güzel, yerinde ve zamanında dinleyicinin durumunu gözeterek söylenmesiyle ilgilenen belagat, kullandığı malzeme bakımından ve çeşitli yönlerden göstergebilimle örtüşür. Bunda klasik belagatin ve Batı'daki çalışmaların, Aristo tarafından sistemleştirilen klasik mantıktan beslenmesinin payı vardır. Bu çalışmada İslam mantıkçılarının üzerine eğildiği delalet kavramı ile Saussure ve Peirce'in üzerinde durduğu gösterge kavramı ele alınacaktır.