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the Corpus Hippochraticum up to the Stoics, made a clear-cut distinction between a theory of verbal language (names, onomata) and a theory of signs (semeia). Signs are natural events that act as symptoms or indexes, and they entertain with that which they designate a relation based on the mechanism of inference (if such a symptom, then such a sickness; if smoke, then fire). Words stand in a different relation with the thing they designate (or with the passions of the soul they signify or, in Stoic terms, with the propositionlektonthey convey), and this relation is based on mere equivalence and biconditionality (as it appears also in the influential Aristotelian theory of definition). |
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As I have tried to stress elsewhere (Eco 1984, ch. 1), the fusion between a theory of signs and a theory of words (albeit vaguely foreseen by the Stoics) is definitely sanctioned only by Augustine, who is the first explicitly to propose "general semiotics," that is, a general science of signa, the sign being the genus of which both words and natural symptoms are species. In doing so, not even Augustine resolves definitely the dichotomy between inference and equivalence, and the medieval tradition is left with two lines of thought which are not yet unified. This is a crucial observation because one of the main reasons why the latratus canis occupies different positions in different classifications of signs depends on whether they are classifications of signs in general (in the Stoic and Augustinian mode) or of voces, in the Aristotelian mode of a theory of spoken language. |
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The detonator of the controversy about the latratus canis is the passage of De interpretatione (1620a), where Aristotle, with the intention of defining nouns and verbs, makes some marginal statements about signs in general. To summarize the result of an unending discussion among interpreters of this passage, Aristotle basically says that nouns and verbs are cases of phoné semantiké katà synthéken, that is, in medieval terms, vox significativa ad placitum. Aristotle says that words are symbols of the affections of the soul (or, if you want, of concepts), just as the written words are symbols of the spoken ones. He takes "symbol" in the sense of Peirce, as a conventional device, and that it is why symbols are not the same for every culture. On the contrary, the passions of the soul are the same for all since they are images (we could say "icons") of the things. But in speaking of the passions of the soul, Aristotle adds (rather parenthetically) that words are, of these passions, "before all else" signs. |
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Is that an instance of mere redundancy in which the word "sign" is |
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