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competence that enables affluent, tired human beings, on a foggy night when the airports are closed, to travel comfortably from Milan to Paris by understanding what a sleeping car is, who is in the position of taking it, how to recognize a specimen of it at the railway station, and how to take the Trans Europe Express instead of the Orient Express? I suggest that we are facing in this case an instance of general semiosic competence, which permits one to interpret verbal and visual signs, and to draw inferences from them, by merging the information they give with background knowledge. |
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1. Objects and Dimensions |
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Charles Morris was the first to outline a division of semiotics into syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. This was a stimulating and fruitfulbut at the same time dangerousattempt to characterize the domain of semiotics. Foundations of a Theory of Signs, insofar as it was written within the framework of an Encyclopedia of Unified Science, suggests that pragmatics, as well as semantics and syntactics, is a science: "by pragmatics is designated the science of the relation of signs to their interpreters" 1938:5). |
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Since every science has a proper object, the definition above risks to transform semiotics into a mere confederation of three independent sciences, each of them dealing with three independent objects. In this sense semiotics becomes a generic label such as "natural sciences" (Morris was aware of this risk; see 1946:8.1). |
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We know, or we feel entitled to figure out, the proper objects of mineralogy, zoology, and astronomy, but it does not seem so easy to define the object of natural sciences. More than an object, or less than, it canat mostbe defined as a method, a way of knowing certain aspects of our physical environment through general explanatory laws that, once conjectured on the basis of certain relevant data, can be proved or disproved according to certain experiments. But even though such a method exists, we know that the data we look for in order to tell where cats come from are different in kind and availability from those we collect in order to explain the origin of diamonds. |
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If Morris only said that pragmatics is the science of the relation of signs to their interpreters, his whole theory of signs would become involved in a predicament. To define the object of a science x as the relation between a and b would mean that the definition of a is independent from the definition of b. On the contrary, in Foundations Morris explicitly states that "something is a sign only because it is interpreted as a |
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