Point-i | Blog / 20211107

#n01

That everything may be composed exclusively of signs (rather than that it is word), is the error of explaining word at all, that is, as "sign," and only then language done or had as all manner of, "symbol." Such explanation is the (retro)active nonword word bullshit fundamentalism POWER, as the ecstasies of love and war (origins of the sacred) of solidly dealing in victimhood status scapegoating, with the nonsense context or content beyond the symbol, namely the icon(why, as mind) and index(how, as cause). re.

From Joseph Brent's biography?

“Peirce’s semiotics is at least as robust as de Saussure’s account of symbolic semiosis, and he goes much further in explicating the significance and power of indexical (or causal) and iconic (or sentient) sign theory in addition to its symbolic (or sapient) aspects. His own remarks best convey just how comprehensive and fundamental the notion of ‘signs’ really is:”

** It seems a strange thing, when one comes to ponder over it, that a sign should leave its interpreter to supply a part of its meaning; but the explanation of the phenomenon lies in the fact that the entire universe — not merely the universe of existents, but all that wider universe, embracing the universe of existents as a part, the universe which we are all accustomed to refer to as “the truth” — that all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs**

Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vol V, “Pragmaticism and Pragmaticism.” “Symbolic sapient dispositions only partially describe and explain human cognition. Iconic (sentient) and indexical (causal) dispositions are needed to complete that model of our cognitive abilities. Indeed, the empirical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) seek to discover the causal laws of nature and the cosmos, and that is not attainable without understanding the semiosis of indexical processes. This is why I, for one, prefer Peirce’s more comprehensive semiotics to de Saussure’s narrower semiology, on philosophical as well as scientific grounds.”