Jean Poinsot

The goal of this article is twofold. First, it revises the historiographic partition proposed by John Deely in Four Ages of Understanding (2001) by arguing that the moment marking the beginning of philosophical Modernity has been vividly recorded in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy with the experiment with the wax. Second, an upshot of this historical study is that it helps make sense of Deely’s somewhat iconoclastic use of the words “subject” and “subjectivity” to designate mind-independent worldly things. The hope is that successfully accomplishing these twin tasks will give semiotic inquiry a better appreciation of its own history, as well as resources genial to furthering its ongoing development.

It is often thought that consciousness has a qualitative dimension that cannot be tracked by science. Recently, however, some philosophers have argued that this worry stems not from an elusive feature of the mind, but from the special nature of the concepts used to describe conscious states. Marc Champagne draws on the neglected branch of philosophy of signs or semiotics to develop a new take on this strategy. 

The term “semiotics” was introduced by John Locke in the modern period – its etymology is ancient Greek, and its theoretical underpinnings are medieval. Charles Sanders Peirce made major advances in semiotics, so he can act as a pipeline for these forgotten ideas. Most philosophers know Peirce as the founder of American pragmatism, but few know that he also coined the term “qualia,” which is meant to capture the intrinsic feel of an experience. Since pragmatic verification and qualia are now seen as conflicting commitments, Champagne endeavors to understand how Peirce could (or thought he could) have it both ways. The key, he suggests, is to understand how humans can insert distinctions between features that are always bound.

Recent attempts to take qualities seriously have resulted in versions of panpsychism, but Champagne outlines a more plausible way to achieve this. So, while semiotics has until now been the least known branch of philosophy ending in –ics, his book shows how a better understanding of that branch can move one of the liveliest debates in philosophy forward.

Semiotics (sometimes spelled “semeiotic”) is the name first given by John Locke, and later reprised by Charles S. Peirce, for the “doctrine of signs,” or the study of how some things can stand for other things to still other things. This deliberate inquiry can be contrasted with “folk semiotic” accounts, which assume that there is some intrinsic feature about, say, the human voice or a painted board that makes them capable of signifying. Such a naive assumption does not withstand serious scrutiny. From a philosophical standpoint, what makes something a sign is an involvement in a specific sort of triadic relation. This relation is found in human/nonhuman and deliberate/nondeliberate signs alike. Semiosis, the action of signs, is what permits communication, but it is wider than communication. For example, if while in an adjacent room I smell that the turkey in the oven is ready, my pet dog can smell it too, and the turkey is not trying to “tell” us anything. But if the cook in the kitchen tells me it is ready, I receive that message, while my dog hears the sounds but is none the wiser (in contemporary semiotic parlance, my dog and I couple our Umwelten via indices, but the symbols at hand generate interpretants only in my anthroposemiosis). In spite of the fact that it has a long and distinguished history (especially during the medieval period), general inquiry into signs became an organized research program only in the mid-20th century. Today, in addition to philosophers, semiotics attracts a wide range of scholars, such as ethologists, cognitive scientists, linguists, art historians, logicians, media theorists, literary critics, computer programmers, biologists, sociologists, and so on. From a methodological standpoint, then, parochialism is not an option. The scholarly literature can nevertheless be fruitfully divided into theoretical and applied strands. Not surprisingly, most philosophers drawn to semiotic questions work in the former strand. Semiotics is not to be confused with “semiology,” a (now largely defunct) project that originated in the lectures of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and which was active in the 1960s, mainly in France. Semiotics, by contrast, is a vibrant tradition that continues to flourish worldwide. Although some persist in employing the term “semiotics” when discussing narrow studies that focus exclusively on cultural codes, such terminological misuse masks the fact that a study of signs is broader than a study of language. A sustained philosophy of signs, then, promises (as Locke initially surmised) to yield truly novel insights.

C. S. Peirce introduced the term “icon” for sign-vehicles that signify their objects in virtue of some shared quality. This qualitative kinship, however, threatens to collapse the relata of the sign into one and the same thing. Accordingly, the late-medieval philosopher of signs John Poinsot held that, “no matter how perfect, a concept [...] always retains a distinction, therefore, between the thing signified and itself signifying.” Poinsot is touted by his present-day advocates as a realist, but I believe that, judged by realist standards, his requirement of minimal dissimilarity backfires. Poinsot thinks that, in analyzing the sign, we should stop before a full merger between sign-vehicle and object is reached. Peirce, by contrast, saw good reason to push the analysis all the way down to one isolated quality. Because such a qualitative merger can lend support to realism, I favour Peirce’s stance.

In this article, we discuss John Poinsot’s theory of formal sign. First, we show some objections that M.-D. Roland-Gosselin has made to this theory. Second, we answer them, but modifying some points of Poinsot’s statements. We leave an evaluation of the whole thesis for a next article.

En este artículo, discutimos la teoría del signo formal de Juan de Santo Tomás. En primer lugar, mostraremos algunas objeciones que M.-D. Roland-Gosselin hizo a esta teoría. En segundo lugar, intentaremos responderlas, pero modificando algunos puntos de la elaboración de Juan de Santo Tomás. Una evaluación de la tesis en su integridad quedará para un próximo artículo.

Plusieurs ouvrages de sciences sociales ou de philosophie politique prennent comme thème le mot idéologie et ce qu’il signifie. Ici, on l’aborde comme problème dialectique, et ce, au sens où Aristote l’entend dans son ouvrage intitulé Topiques : « Un problème dialectique est une question dont l’enjeu peut être soit l’alternative pratique d’un choix et d’un rejet, soit l’acquisition d’une vérité ou d’une connaissance. »

Essays on Emergent Self-consciousness in Sankara, Aquinas and Husserl - Foreword by J. N. Mohanty; available at http://www.amazon.com/Convergent-Phenomenology-Steins-Philosophical-Eidetics/dp/3659660078/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8. " The relentless exploration by Jim Ruddy of the illusive notion of relation and its place in Being is itself a reminder of the sort of radical insights that phenomenology inspires. This work is an invitation to take this journey with him." Donn Welton, author of The Other Husserl: The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology, Indiana University Press (May 22, 2001)

Existe-t-il une source de lumière pour chercher à découvrir et découvrir l’être, «le sujet commun de toutes les recherches [philosophiques]»,  comme le dit Aristote, et pour assurer qu’on l’a bien découvert ?
Cette exploration est faite à la lumière d’une école de sagesse encore très actuelle qui naquit dans l’Antiquité grecque, avec Aristote, qui fut ensuite relayée par de grands disciples de ce dernier, notamment ceux que nous citons dans notre étude, Thomas d’Aquin au XIIIe siècle, Jean Poinsot au XVIIe siècle, avant de nous parvenir aujourd’hui.