0.5.
The task and the nature of a general semiotics are different. To outline a project for a general semiotics, it is not sufficient to assert, as Saussure did, that language is a system comparable to writing, symbolic rites, deaf-mute alphabets, military signals, and so on, and that one should conceive of a science able to study the life of signs within the framework of social and general psychology. In order to conceive of such a science, one must say in which sense these different systems are mutually com-parable: if they are all systems in the same sense of the word system; if, by consequence, the mutual comparison of these systems can reveal common systematic laws able to explain, from a unified point of view, their way of functioning. Saussure said that such a science did not exist as yet, even though it had a right to exist. Many semioticians assume (and I rank among them) that Peirce in fact outlined such a discipline; but others maintain (and I still rank among them) that such a discipline cannot be a science in the sense of physics or electronics.
Thus the basic problem of a general semiotics splits into three differ-ent questions: (a) Can one approach many, and apparently different, phenomena as if they were all phenomena of signification and/or of communication? (b) Is there a unified approach able to account for all these semiotic phenomena as if they were based on the same system of rules (the notion of system not being a mere analogical one)? (c) Is this approach a ‘scientific’ one?
If there is something which deserves the name of general semiotics, this something is a discourse dealing with the questions above, and this discourse is a philosophical one. In any case, it encounters the problem raised by philosophy of language because, in order to answer the ques-tions above, it is obliged to reconsider, from a general (not merely ‘lin-guistic’) point of view, classical issues such as meaning, reference, truth, context, communicational acts (be they vocal or else), as well as many logical problems as analytic vs. synthetic, necessity, implication, entail-ment, inference, hypothesis, and so on.
Naturally, many problems that originally were simply philosophical now belong to the province of some science. Perhaps in the future some of the problems raised today by a general semiotics will find a ‘scientific’ answer—for instance, the debated and still speculative problem of the universals of language, today tackled by the catastrophe theory. Some others will remain purely philosophical.
General semiotics was first of all concerned with the concept of sign. This concept is better discussed in Chapter 1, where I give the reasons why I think it is still tenable, despite the various criticisms it has under-gone. It must be clear that one can decide that the theoretical object of semiotics can be a different and more fruitful one, let us say, text, semiosis, significant practice, communication, discourse, language, ef-fability, and so on — but the real problem is not so much which object has to be appointed as the central one; the problem is to decide whether there is a unified object or not.
Now, this object (let it be the concept of sign) can become the central object of a general semiotics insofar as one decides that such a category can explain a series of human (and maybe animal) behaviors, be they vocal, visual, termic, gestural, or other. In this sense, the first question of a general semiotics is close to the capital question of any philosophy of language: what does it mean for human beings to say, to express meanings, to convey ideas, or to mention states of the world? By which means do people perform this task? Only by words? And, if not, what do verbal activity and other signifying or com-municative activities have in common?
A general semiotics at most improves some of the traditional approaches of philosophy of language. It assumes that it is impossible to speak about verbal language without comparing it to other forms of signification and/or communication. In this sense, a general semiotics is fundamentally comparative in its approach. But it is enough to think— for instance —of Wittgenstein, Husserl, or Cassirer to realize that a good philosophy of language necessarily takes up this issue.
A general semiotics is influenced, more than any philosophy of lan-guage, by the experiences of specific semiotics. But the history of phi-losophy displays other examples of speculations about signification and communication that have attempted to elaborate a systematic approach to every sort of ‘language’— starting from the results and from the technicalities of some specific semiotics. Thus a general semiotics is simply a philosophy of language which stresses the comparative and sys-tematic approach to languages (and not only to verbal language) by exploiting the result of different, more local inquiries.
0.6.
Not all philosophers of language would agree with such a project. Many of them assume that the categories provided in order to explain verbal language — including ‘signification’, ‘meaning’, and ‘code’— cannot hold when applied to other systems of signification. In Chapter I of this book, I discuss a strong objection formulated in this line of thought, according to which semiotics unduly fuses three different problems con-cerning three different and mutually irreducible phenomena, studied by three different theoretical approaches — namely, intended meaning, infer-ence from evidences, and pictorial representation. It goes without saying that, on the contrary, I assume that these three problems concern a unique theoretical object. Elsewhere (Eco 1976) I discussed in which sense ver-bal signification and pictorial representation (as well as other phenomena) can be subsumed under the general model of the sign-function. Here I shall maintain that inferential processes (mainly under the form of Peircean abduction) stand at the basis of every semiotic phenomenon.
It has been suggested (see, for instance, Scruton 1980) that the word sign means too many things and points to many functions; thus semiotics would play on mere —and weak —analogies when it asserts that a cloud means rain in the same sense in which the French sentence ‘je m’ennuie’ means that I am bored. What these two phenomena have in common is «only a small feature on the surface of each» and «if there is a common essence of ‘signs’ it is sure to be very shallow; semiology pretends that it is deep» (Scruton 1980). I suspect that no semiotician would say that on the surface a cloud and a sentence have something in common. As I recall in Chapter 1 of this book, Greek philosophers took a long time to recognize that there was some relation between ‘natural signs’ and words, and even the Stoics, who decidedly approached the problem, found some difficulty in settling it definitively. This means that, if a cloud and a sentence have something in common, this something is not shallow but deep.
On the other hand, there is something intuitively’ common to the red light of a traffic signal and the verbal order /stop/. One does not need to have a semiotic mind to understand this. The semiotic problem is not so much to recognize that both physical vehicles convey more or less the same command; it begins when one wonders about the cultural or cog-nitive mechanisms that allow any trained addressee to react to both sign-vehicles in the same way. To realize that /stop/ and the red light convey the same order is as intuitive as to decide that, to convince people to refrain from drinking a certain liquid, one can either write /poison/ or draw a skull on the bottle. Now, the basic problem of a semiotic inquiry on different kinds of signs is exactly this one: why does one understand something intuitively?
As posited this way, the question is more than semiotic. It starts as a philosophical question (even though it can have a scientific answer, too). Frequently, one uses the adjective ‘intuitive’ as an empiricist shibboleth and gets rid of a lot of interesting questions by recurring to ‘intuitive truths’. To say that some truth is intuitive usually means that one does not want to challenge it for the sake of economy—that is, because its explanation belongs to some other science. However, one (if not the most important) of the semiotic endeavors is to explain why something looks intuitive, in order to discover under the felicity of the so-called intuition a complex cognitive process.
It is intuitive that I can seduce a lady, a potential partner in an impor-tant business, or a corrupt politician, either by saying that I am rich and generous or by offering her or him a titillating dinner in the most luxuri-ous restaurant of the city, with a menu that would have syntagmatically delighted Roland Barthes. It is equally intuitive that probably the dinner would be more convincing than a crude verbal statement. It is not intui-tive why all this is intuitive. Perhaps it is by virtue of a ‘shallow’ similar-ity in their effect that one intuitively understands that both behaviors produce ideas and emotions in the mind of the potential victim. But, in order to explain how both behaviors produce the same effect, one should look for something ‘deeper’. To look for such a deeper common struc-ture, for the cognitive and cultural laws that rule both phenomena — such is the endeavor of a general semiotics. Once having addressed this Problem, one probably would be in the position of deciding whether the same cultural or cognitive mechanisms also
