Indizii griceiani -- segno un indizio

Luigi Speranza

Let me begin here by recalling from elsewhere three established etymological points.

First:

there is the generally accepted point that `semiotics' as the name for the study ofsigns has at its Greek root the ancient term

"semeion",

the designation for a phenomenon of nature acquaintance with which leads the one acquainted to an expectation or anticipation of or aversion to something else again, ´ something with which the semeion has given evidence within human experience of being causally related quite independently of the experience within which it has come to be objectified or known.

Second:

there is the fact that the first appearance in the modern context of `semiotics' as a name is not as an English form at all but as a bastardized Greek malformation in the concluding chapter of Locke's Essay of 1690, thus:

Semiotike.


Third:

there is the consideration that `semiotics', as the English version of Locke's semiotike, presupposes a Latin interpretant, semiotica, which, since it never existed as such, can only be assigned as an arche of the cultural unconscious of the sort Jung has made familiar.

**************

In ancient Mesopotamia, the attitude toward semeion was rooted in divinatory practices.

But in ancient Greece, whence it principally exerts its influence alike on the late modern and postmodern development of the doctrine of signs, the understanding of the term was rather rooted in a rational attitude toward natural phenomena and made the basis of Greek medical practice, whence Sebeok (1975: 181) rightly came to regard the work of Hippocrates in particular (c.460­c.377bc) and Greek medicine in general as `very likely the most deeply rooted' stem from which the late twentieth century development of semiotics as the doctrine of signs takes its proper nourishment.

Hence Grice's seminal:

"Those spots mean measles".

----

This observation applies equally to the carry-over of that development into the twenty-first century as the central thrust intellectually of a postmodern culture, even though -- as Sebeok himself was delighted to grant once he became fully aware of the 1632 Treatise on Signs authored by John Poinsot -- Morris's sentiment (1971: 337), repeated by Sebeok in the passage just cited, that Peirce had been `heir of the whole historical philosophical analysis of signs' stands only as the late modern symptom of how much had been lost in what concerns semiotics when early modern philosophy made its transition

from Latin

to the various national languages,

Italian,

French and German in particular.

The `passage' from Greek "semeion" to Latin "signum", by contrast with medical semiotics from ancient Greek times to the present day, knows no such continuum of usage.

"Signum" appears not as a terminological evolution but rather as a saltation, a cultural illustration of what we are familiar with in biology from the work of Gould and others as a kind of `punctuated equilibrium'.

For while the Latin neuter noun "signum" includes the Greek usage of the neuter nown "semeion" as one of its species, to wit, the species of

"signum naturale",

its other main species, the

"signum ad placitum"

-- or (loosely) `conventional sign' has no direct counterpart in the thought of the ancient Greek philosophers or medicine men.

---- This is what Grice had problems systematising with his "non-natural" 'mean' (never 'sign').

It appears as a postulate, a leap, to a whole new level and genus of linguistic evolution.

The proposal of "signum"

as a genus having the

signum naturale

(semeion)

and

signum ad placitum

as species assimilates semeion to the Latin general notion signum coordinate with the two notions of

sumbolon

and onomata, symbols and `names', cultural artifacts and the words of human language, which, in ancient Greek, are not co-ordinate with but contrastive to semeion as elements of culture in general contrast, in general, with elements of nature in the whole of its extent.

In other words, when we make the move from Greek

semeion

to Latin

signum

--- italian, 'segno';

the move is not simply or primarily a linguistic one.

We have to speak of a conceptual saltation rather than of a linguistic translation, an adaptation at the level of modeling system itself (language), requiring a fundamental innovation at the level of cultural code in order e¤ectively to pass from Innenwelt to the system of linguistic communication as the exaptation of language.

Signum as it appears in Latin under a general notion transcending the opposition of nature to culture, in short, neither translates nor transliterates from the objective world (the Lebenswelt) of Greek thought.

Signum introduces a new linguistic horizon against which the phenomena of nature and of culture equally are to be set and interpreted anew.

The limited Greek notion of one thing standing to someone for another by reason of a connection experienced (or at least interpreted) as obtaining independently of the experience as human experience, is now replaced or (rather) superseded by the more general notion of one thing have blinded him both to the novelty of his proposed terminology and to the problematic it inevitably established for philosophy insofar as philosophy hopes to engage `reality' by means of its conceptual devices.

As a philosophical problem, we may say, the terminological usage introduced by Augustine anticipated by ten centuries the problematic usually associated with Ockham.

For how do we know that the usage of signum proposed by Augustine is not an empty usage, a veritable nominalism, that is to say, a `general term' signifying nothing in reality, a flatus vocis or `fart of the vocal cords', as Ockham's predecessors in the Latin Age originally proposed?

he first florescence of nominalism', 243¤.)?

How do we know that the general usage of signum among the Latins was not a convention pure and simple, an ens rationis without the roots in nature as well that Augustine presupposed it to have?

So we see how semiotics in its central notion of a doctrine of signs exemplifies the exception Wittgenstein adverts to in laying down his `rule' that `meaning is use':

`For a large class of cases -- though not for all -- ', he told us (c.1931/50: P42), `the meaning of a word is its use in the language'.

Usage is truly indi¤erent to fact and fiction in its employment.

The same word used one time to lie can be used next time to convey a truth.

Augustine has made to us the proposal that the being proper to sign is what underlies the possibility of discourse being indi¤erent to originating in or conveying fact or fiction.

What signum names, he has proposed, is not a usage to be adopted but a being which enables us to navigate every sea unto which human understanding opens: the sea of natural phenomena, the sea of cultural artifacts, the sea of divine intentions and interventions, real or imagined. And the being of sign is such, he proposes, that it enables us not merely to sail those diverse seas but so to navigate them as to have some hope and occasional success -- in a large class of cases, if not in all -- precisely in separating fact from fiction. The underlying question, the semiotic question, if we may put it thus, is not how did signum as a lexical item come to be used, but what if anything could justify such a usage philosophically? Wittgenstein notoriously neglected to mention that `class of cases' for which `the meaning of a word is not its use in the language'. Perhaps he really did not know, indeed, what such a class actually consisted in; but then again, he knew nothing of semiotics, neither its history nor its doctrine. Yet it is interesting that the cases in question prove to be precisely instances of the semiotic case, the case in which signs occur so as to manifest the circumstances which determine the di¤erence between one and the same sign now conveying fact, now conveying fiction, and back again.

As Sebeok used to note, each sign maintains itself as part of a ´ `shmeion' to `sign' by way of `signum' larger `semiotic web'; and to understand this status according to which a sign is maintained in its proper being is the project of semiotics. Semiotics has its focus, its center of gravity, its tap-root as a distinctive inquiry, right in the center of that `class of cases for which the meaning of a word is not its use in the language', according to a being which makes language itself, as a system of signs, possible in the first place. This very possibility, in turn, has but a relative, not an absolute autonomy respecting the many signifying systems from which language is only incompletely distinct, inasmuch as its occasional distinctive success involves always channels of signification that do not reduce to linguistic codes (Deely 1980 and 2002).

As far as concerns semiotics, Peirce noted unmistakably (1904: CP 8.332):

"If the question were simply what we do mean by a sign, it might soon be resolved."

"But that is not the point'. Semiotics, in short, is no nominalism. As semioticians, `we are in the situation of a zoologist who ¨ wants to know what ought to be the meaning of ``fish'' in order to make fishes one of the great classes of vertebrates'.

The doctrine of signs, in short, is not a language-game, but the much more fundamental inquiry into the semiosic context within which language games are possible to be played as far as they go, and then beyond.

For philosophy, semiotics ` amounts to a revolution vis-a-vis the dead-end of the `linguistic turn' in which twentieth-century English-speaking philosophers trapped themselves.4

The celebrations of the `linguistic turn' have the nature of pure fin ` de siecle: they belong to the end of modernity, as semiotics opens philosophy unto a postmodern intellectual culture.

When Augustine proposed sign as a general mode of being respecting which natural and cultural instances of signification are alike species, he also proposed a definition for the new usage:

signum est quod praeter
species quas ingerit
sensibus aliquid aliud
facit in cognitionem
venire.

--

A sign is anything which, over and above the impressions it makes on the senses, makes something other than itself come into awareness.

When we perceive one thing and think of another concomitantly or consequently we are in the presence of a sign.

Augustine quite naturally focuses on the

`one thing'

here and now impressing itself upon our senses as the `sign' insofar as its impressions lead to something other than themselves as further object of apprehension.

In so doing, he makes the focus of his definition transcend the division between nature and culture, for it makes no J. Deely di¤erence, he tells us, if the `one thing' impressing our sense be artifactual or natural: as long as it leads to the awareness of something other than itself we have the function of sign. But in focusing his definition in this manner, besides not noticing that he has introduced into the vocabulary of philosophy a wholly new general notion, Augustine also fails to notice that his proposed definition for this new item risks misleading his readers into thinking of signs as a particular class of things among other things -- as if one were confronted here with forks, there with knives, there with rocks, there with trees, and there with signs. And he risks at the same time identifying the `class' of signs with material items perceptible by the senses.

Both of these risks turned out to be real, in the sense that subsequent thinkers, adopting Augustine's general notion of signum as transcendent to the division of being into natural and artificial (or `cultural'), proved to have to go to great lengths of analysis before they finally succeeded -- at the end of about thirteen centuries of discussion and controversy over the points -- in freeing the general notion from these twin confusions. Success in removing the risks was achieved finally with the realization that the sign strictly speaking is neither a sense-perceptible material structure as such, nor a class of particulars in contrast with other particular things. A sign strictly speaking is but purely and simply a relationship involving irreducibly three elements or `terms', three particulars of possible awareness, if you will. The sign is a `particular' relationship, if you will (a triadic as opposed to dyadic or monadic relations); but whereas all sense-perceptible `particulars' as such participate in and exhibit to sense subjectivity as such, relations as `particulars' are always suprasubjective and only presuppose subjectivity in di¤ering ways without ever themselves reducing to subjectivity. But let the story unfold on its own terms.

Augustine died in 430 ad.

Among his readers soon were numbered all of the Latin intellectuals, and so it would continue to the end of the Latin Age and beyond.

Among the most influential of his notions was the proposal of signum.

Indeed, the notion seems so intuitively clear that, once it had been proposed, it seemed on all hands like something `self-evident', selbstverstandlich, something that goes without saying.

In the twelfth century, when Petro Lombardo disseminated his anthology in four books of the opinions of the early Christian writers, the so-called `Fathers of the Church', under the title Sententiae (c.1150), he made Augustine's definition of sign the threshold stone of the fourth book, concerning the sacraments of the Church.

Thence it became the foundation stone of the medieval development of sacramental theology, and indeed it fitted perfectly to the occasion: the sacraments, as `outward signs instituted by Christ', ´ `shmeion' to `sign' by way of `signum' are indeed something sensible which concomitates awareness of something other than the sensible, the `outward sign'.

But despite the perfect fit of Augustine's definition in this regard (a regard which, after all, was really central to Augustine's main concern in originally introducing his general notion in the first place: see Deely 2001: 220¤.), at least as early as Aquinas (c.1224/5­1274; for comprehensive discussion of Aquinas' texts, see Deely 2001: 331­341), cracks were noticed in the proposed foundation Augustine had laid for the nascent enterprise of semiotics.

For there seem to be things which are not detectible by our outward-looking senses which nonetheless seem to function in exactly the manner that what Augustine focused on in his definition of sign functions, insofar as there are elements in our being which are other than what they focus our attention upon are. Think of your deceased mother, or an absent friend. There is an idea in your mind on the basis of which your attention is directed to this absent party, but it is the absent party, not your idea as presupposed to your objective awareness, that is the focus of attention and interest. So slowly an essential question forces its way to the fore of Latin consciousness in the matter of signum: which is more proper to the being of sign, that it be something making an impression upon sense or that it lead to an awareness of what it itself is not? And if some particular item, such as an idea in the mind or a feeling in the heart achieves the latter function, ought it not to be regarded as signifying even though it not involve an impression of outward sense? But if it be the relation of one thing to another than itself that be essential to signifying, in what precisely ought we to say a sign consists?

This last question matured more slowly than did the first, although as early as the work of Roger Bacon contemporary with

Tomasso d'Aquino

(see esp. Bacon c.1267) we see the beginnings of the focus on triadic relation as the being strictly proper to sign (Deely 2001: 365­376).

That something need not be sensible in order to signify is the point that captured the interest of Duns Scotus (c.1266­1308).

No one before him so fully developed the dynamics of sign as involving the whole network of our perceptions and conceptions alike in the presentation of objects in experience as well as in thought (Deely 2001: 376­385, esp. 382¤.; Beuchot and Deely 1995).

But the naming of this new emphasis in the semiotic consciousness of the Latins fell to an unlikely hero: the followers of William of Ockham, the Nominalistae. No one before or since has succumbed so completely to the risk of confusing signs with a particular class of things among other particulars as did William of Ockham (for detailed analysis, see Deely 2001: 389¤.). Signs, said Ockham, are those particulars which lead to an J. Deely awareness of something other than themselves, regardless of whether the particulars in question be sensible entities or concepts within the mind.6

From this observation, the followers of Ockham were soon led to propose a new terminology: the material objects of sense which lead us to think of other things than themselves let us call instrumental signs, while the passions of the soul (such was the medieval terminology for what we call today rather `psychological states') are rather formal signs, i.e., signs which signify without first being themselves objects directly apprehended.

In terms of Augustine's original definition, this amounts to relegating the first part of the definition to the status of something accidental, and making the second part the essential, thus:

`A sign is anything [First part:] perceived by sense [Second part:] that makes something other than itself come into awareness' becomes more simply `Whatever makes something other than itself come into awareness is a sign, be that original element sense-perceptible or not'. This move by the Ockhamites involves a transparent advance and an opaque turn toward what would prove eventually to be a dead-end path for any doctrine of signs (see Deely 2001: 413¤.).

On the transparent side, just as Augustine's original proposal made signum transcend the division of nature from culture, so this revision of the proposal makes of signum an element superordinate to the division of inner from outer. On the opaque side, no one seems to have noticed that the further doctrine of Nominalism (that there are no relations apart from the workings of the mind, that, in medieval terms, all relations are entia rationis, creatures of ´ thought) defeated the notion of natural sign as shmeion, that is to say, as an event of the natural world known in its relation to whatever it signifies as being in that relation independently of the workings of the human mind. For, according to Ockham and the Nominalists after him, there is no such thing as a relation independent of the workings of the mind. Ens reale consists solely of particulars, individuals with their individual characteristics or qualities independently of the mind. There are, `in reality', only subjects of existence with their subjective characteristics. To these individuals the mind may and does add relations; but it cannot find relations already there, for there are no `generals', no suprasubjective particulars, only subjective particulars, individuals.

For Ockham, concepts within the mind become the only natural signs.

Outside the mind there are only individuals in their subjective being, individuals among which the mind, by making comparisons, introduces whatever relations there are as `intersubjective'. Under this doctrine, between `natural signs' as concepts internal to the ´ mind and `natural signs' as shmeia or events external to the mind (like smoke signifying fire, clouds signifying rain, or lactating breasts signifying ´ `shmeion' to `sign' by way of `signum' childbirth) there is nothing common, only an equivocation. For natural signs in the former sense add to individuals whatever relations there are through comparisons the mind makes among objects of its awareness, while natural signs in the latter sense, apart from the mind's consideration, are isolated in themselves from their putative significates in just the way that every physical individual is distinct from every other such individual.

There need only be added, as will happen in the work of Descartes and Locke alike (see Deely 2001: Chapter 12), the distinctively modern doctrine that concepts as representations are the direct objects of all experience. The problem of the relation of these concepts to objects actually external to awareness, objects existing not only objectively but also physically (precisely in their being as known, moreover -- that is to say, objectified in their very being as physical), will prove historically an insoluble conundrum. The problem, we now see in retrospect, lay in the continuing tendency to confuse the element of representation in the foreground of signification, what we now would call rather the sign-vehicle, with the sign itself, which is not the vehicle but precisely the relation which, through a signvehicle, makes some object other than the sign vehicle be present to or for some third party. Arriving at the notion of `formal signs', the Latins were no longer at risk of identifying the `class' of signs with material items perceptible by the senses. But they had not yet overcome the risk of thinking of signs as a particular class of things among other things, a risk which had taken now the precise form of confusing signs in their proper being with sign-vehicles, the representative elements on the basis of which signs present their significates to whomever or whatever they present them. Necessary to remove this risk, to produce a truly unified doctrine of signs based on a common subject of inquiry shared by all instances of signification, natural or cultural, inner or outer, was to realize the di¤erence between triadic relation as the being proper to or constitutive of any sign and the elements themselves united within such a relation, namely: (1) the sign-vehicle (be it sensible or psychological) representing (2) some object to or for (3) some interpretant.

Already with the Conimbricenses, Poinsot's teachers, in fact (see Beuchot and Deely 1995; Deely 1994b) the realization had already been achieved that every signvehicle as such is irreducibly involved with two other particulars, so that the sign in its signifying involves necessarily a triadic structure; but the further realization that, indeed, what is commonly called `sign' -- to wit, that one of the three elements in the foreground role of representation (especially when it is a conventional structure erected for the purpose of signifying rather than a subjective psychological state of thought or J. Deely feeling) -- is strictly subordinate to and not a sign at all without the superordinate relation precisely and particularly uniting the three elements (and hence itself, in its pure being as relation, irreducbly triadic as well as irreducibly suprasubjective): this was a conceptual move yet to be made.

The Latin text in which this decisive move was made was precisely the

"Tractatus de Signis",

-- the Treatise on Signs, of John Poinsot, brought to press in 1632 (after a gestation of some thirty or so years) in the context of an otherwise traditional e¤ort to fashion a Cursus Philosophicus preserving at the end of the Latin Age the coenoscopic gains that had been made over the medieval centuries.8 The Tractatus appeared just in time to be lost in the change of climate which would shift the interests of intellectual culture away from coenoscopy in the direction of the new enterprise of human understanding, ideoscopy, the full-scale development of an extended understanding of nature based on means of experimentation and mathematization irreducible to, however dependent upon, such knowledge as may reliably be developed by reasoning from direct sense experiences of the normal human body alone. This project (in contrast to what was to become modern philosophy9) would prove to be nothing less than the positive essence of modern intellectual culture, what we now see as the contrast of a culture scientifically permeated to the all-but exclusively coenoscopic intellectual cultures of the Latin Age and of the classical Greek philosophical development of ancient times.

This contrast, indeed, apparent in `globalization', as the scientifically permeated culture derived from European civilization in and after the seventeenth century increasingly encroaches upon and overflows into those cultures which remained, as it were, comparatively medieval well into the modern age, is every bit as stark and dramatic as the contrast between an Umwelt without language as part of the underlying modeling system or network of Innenwelts on which it is based and the human Lebenswelt as an Umwelt which has become permeated with linguistic means of communication exapted from the biologically underdetermined dimension of the species-specific part of the underlying modeling system, language in the root sense. I think it would not be an exagerration to say (see Deely 1984, 1994a) that achieving a balance in intellectual culture between coenoscopy and ideoscopy now appears as the distinctive task of postmodern times.

Before the eclipse of the first achievement among the Latins of a semiotic consciousness by the modern turn to the related yet quite di¤erent problem of achieving an understanding of nature in what we today have come to call scientific terms in contrast to philosophy, Poinsot was able to leave a record of how signs work which explained the justice of Augustine's original proposal of `sign in general' as transcending the distinction ´ `shmeion' to `sign' by way of `signum' between particulars of nature and culture, particulars of inner and outer vehicles of signification.

In this decisive Tractatus de Signis of Poinsot, both of the risks to which Augustine's proposed definition of sign had exposed his more general notion are eliminated together. After Poinsot, at least for those who would become familiar with his text, it was no longer possible to think of signs as one group or class of particulars among other particulars, as Ockham had done, and even less possible to think of signs as identical with sense-perceptible items as such. Poinsot had identified the semiotic ground of the traditional distinction between sense and intellect (see Deely 1982: 117 text, 200­201 note 4; Deely 2002), upon which attends one of history's many ironies: what Anthony Russell called `the first treatment of the distinction between sense and intellect worth reading since the days of Locke and Hume' was a treatment outlined in its essentials before the days of Locke and Hume had arrived. Exporting `signum' from Latin into English Well, you can see that we are still stuck with understanding something from that class of cases for which the meaning of the words at issue is not their use in the language! It is not the use of signum among the Latins that is at the center of our interest, but how the general use first proposed by Augustine and then adopted by so many Latins after him came to find a warrant in the understanding of how signs work as a consequence of the being proper to them.

In other words, in order to render signum in this sense from Latin to English, we need to understand the conceptual moves by which Poinsot arrived at his understanding of signs as, in every case and irreducibly, triadic relations.

What makes of Poinsot's Tractatus de Signis a masterpiece in philosophy is not only the fact that it achieves for the first time an understanding of the basic unity of the subject matter of semiotics, but the further fact that it reaches this achievement by summarizing and bringing to bear on the question of signs the whole treatment of the subject of relations from its first thematic discussion in the categories of Aristotle through its first translation from Greek to Latin at the hands of Boethius, its trinitarian elaboration in the work first of Augustine (354­430; see esp. Augustine i.397­422/6 ad) and then of Tomasso d'Aquino (1224/ 5­1274; esp. Aquinas 1266: I. 28), to its realization in the unique case of signs as transcending in their being and consequent function the distinction between ens reale (being as it is independent of the workings of the human mind) and ens rationis (being as it is not independent of the workings of the human mind).

Aristotle, at the practical beginning of this long development, taking up some bare suggestions of Plato in the matter (cf. Cavarnos 1975: 13­38; Deely 2001: 73), was the first to thematize the subject of relation as a distinct mode of being.

It may fairly be said that his e¤ort was not without its diculties, as proven by the seldomness with which his achievement has been rightly understood as identifying relation as a distinct and irreducible mode of being over and above individuality as such, or, more generally, subjectivity both in its substantial dimension (the individual as such) and in its various other accidental dimensions (the characteristics of the individual which complete and identify subjectivity in its uniqueness).

Let us look first at what Aristotle was able finally to conclude in the matter of the being proper to relation as one among the possible modes or ways in which being is capable of exercising existence independently of the finite mind.

Keep in mind his objective: to formulate a doctrine of relations wherein would appear focally what is unique to, what separates relation from, the other features of being verified in our experience of a changing world.

The irreducibly distinct features or modes of being Aristotle enumerated as `categories'.

Basic in the list was the category of `substance', the natural individual.

The remainder of the list consisted in the attempt to enumerate the characteristics by which individuals are distinguished in their existence, the categories of `accident'.

So, as far as concerns the matter of the relations in which individuals are involved or into which individuals may enter, the question was, what would fall under the heading of `relation' in this list, and under no other heading in the list? The final doctrine may be briefly stated. In common with all other accidents, relations require a subject, a physical individual -- that is to say, a substance -- to which they belong, which they modify, and through which they are sustained. But whereas the other accidents simply belong to that subject according to their subjective rationale (as size, shape, etc.), relations refer the subject in which they are based through a subjective rationale to yet some other subject, called the terminus of the relation. Thus, two things can be `similar' or `the same' or `di¤erent' in shape or size, for example. Each of the two has its own shape, each has its own size. Neither the shape nor the size is a relation, and both the shape and the size are in the respective individuals. But the relations of similarity, sameness, or di¤erence are only founded on what is in the related individuals.

As such, the relations themselves are over and above, supra- `Being' is that which is able to exist | | either `in itself ' as in a subject of existence, in which case we have a substance | or `in another' as a subjective characteristic or modification of a subject, in which case we have an accident, a mode of being which depends upon substance in order to be | | | either directly, in which case we or indirectly, in which case we have have an inherent accident, a part relation, a mode of being which depends of the very subjectivity of the upon inherent characteristics but which is individual unit of nature; itself not inherent but supra- or trans-subjective, existing over and above the related subject (the substance) with all its subjective characteristics (the inherent accidents) Figure 1.

Diagram of `being in itself ' versus the two senses of `being in another' ´

`shmeion' to `sign' by way of `signum' these first two attempts at face value, relation proves to be not a distinct category among other categories which are not relations, but rather the heart of every category. Even substance, `being in itself ', is relative in this sense of requiring for its explanation reference to other things which are not substances. Here is not the place to repeat the full details of the analysis of these attempts, one failed but clearly twice repeated, one successful but made obscure by the rubble of the context in which it was subsequently undertaken (the full analysis is given in Deely 1985: 472­479).

But should you care to verify the extent to which the misreading of Aristotle on the subject of relation has confused even the best studies of his thought, I can do no better than to have you read for yourself the great work of Grote titled Aristotle (1872), in which twice-repeated failed doctrine comes to be presented as the whole doctrine of relation, and the later success doctrinally becomes lost entirely.

It may seem incredible, but you can read and see for yourself in light of the distinctions that have been made here. I bring up Aristotle's diculties at this point because, in the Latin Age, they were turned to positive advantage together with his final solution of how relation is unique. The twofold failure the Latins managed to turn to a positive point in contrasting what they eventually called `transcendental relation' with the one success of Aristotle in putting his finger on the doctrine of `ontological relation'. This reduction of the two failures to one positive point contrasting with the point of the one success played a decisive role in the final clarification of semiotic that Poinsot achieved in establishing the warrant for Augustine's general notion of sign as transcending the distinctions between nature and culture, inner and outer, while granting the failure of Augustine's proposed definition of sign as proving too narrow to encompass many of the instances of signification that he himself succeeded in identifying.

Even Homer nods; so too Aristotle and Augustine!

The Latin destiny of Aristotle's diculties In his translation of Aristotle's diculties in getting clear about the distinctive or unique character of relation as a mode of being, Boezio (esp. c. 510ad) made one of the most decisive contributions over the long run to the problematic of the general notion of sign that Augustine had naively bequeathed to Latin philosophy.

This problematic, which made its way to the fore of Latin consciousness only gradually, carries over directly into the postmodern period because it a¤ords the intelligible substructure in terms of which the action of signs reduces to being. It was the J. Deely last great coenoscopic discovery of the Latin Age in philosophy.

Here we need to examine, accordingly, this translation of those diculties.

By 510 the Italian philosopher, Boezio, had translated and commented upon the Categories of Aristotle.

By this work, he set the terms according to which the whole tangled medieval discussion of relation would develop, and by which subsequently the problem raised by Augustine's posit of signs as superior to being divided into mind-independent and mind-dependent would eventually be resolved. In particular, it was from Boethius that the pair of expressions, relatio secundum dici (`relation according to the way being must be expressed in discourse') and relatio secundum esse (`relation according to the way relation has being'), eventually transcendental versus ontological relation, were put into play.

The former expression, `relation according to the way being must be expressed in discourse', Boethius forged to account for Aristotle's first two attempts (c.360bc: Categories, chap. 7, 6a36­39, and 6b6­9, mentioned in note 14 below) to define relation, which turned out to apply equally to substance and the inherent accidents as such.

The latter expression, `relation according to the way it has the being proper to itself ', he fashioned to apply only to Aristotle's third attempt (Aristotle c.360bc: 8a28­34) to define relation as a phenomenon restricted to intersubjective instances of physical being. Boethius presented his discussion of Aristotle's categories in the spirit according to which he understood Aristotle himself to have essayed it, to wit, as establishing a categorial list that had little to do with linguistics and everything to do with the variety of ways in which physical being is perceptually encountered in our experience as having its existence independently of human society.

Whatever truly exists in nature as an individual, as we have seen, Aristotle classed as a substance. Whatever exists in nature as some modification or characteristic of an individual, however important, Aristotle classed as an accident. Among the accidents (some, but by no means all, of which can come and go without destroying the individual they modify and characterize at a given time) Aristotle counted relations. But in order to include relation in his list as a distinct category, as we saw, Aristotle had to formulate for relations a definition which would cover nothing but relations, all and only relations among the accidents of substance -- a definition which would be neither too narrow nor too wide. In this e¤ort, as we saw, he encountered and twice stumbled over a major diculty: just as the accidents of substance ultimately have to be explained in terms of the ability of substance to sustain them, so substance itself ultimately has to be explained in terms of the ability of the environment to sustain individuals (in terms of the `principles and causes and sustaining conditions of existence', in medieval terms). In other words, in actual existence, ´ `shmeion' to `sign' by way of `signum' every substance and every accident is maintained by realities of circumstance and being other than itself.

So it appears that even if `relation' is unequivocally a distinct category of physical being, there is yet another sense of `relation' which is not thus unequivocal, but one which expresses rather a condition which applies to physical being in every category, including and beginning with substance. This discovery does not exactly help us, however, when our goal is to determine how relation is to be conceived of as a distinct category. To get around this diculty, Aristotle (c.335­322bc: Categories, ch. 7, esp. 8a28­34) proposed a distinction, as we saw: `the fact that a thing is explained with reference to something else does not make it essentially relative'. Relation as a distinct category, then, would comprise all and only those features of being whose very essential conceivability is directly being toward another, those features of being which cannot, even by an abstraction, omit reference toward, those features which (to put it the other way around) can at least by abstraction omit reference directly to `being in' -- the third of our three senses of `being in' diagrammed above, to wit, `being in another indirectly'. An individual is conceivable apart from knowing who were the parents. A size is conceivable apart from conceiving what sort of thing might be that size. And so on. But a relationship in the categorial sense is inconceivable except in terms of something other than itself: a son or a daughter as an individual may be thought of without giving any consideration to the parents, but an individual son or daughter is inconceivable apart from consideration of a parent as well. For the parents make the o¤spring be as a daughter or son, even though the daughter or son as an individual exists independently of the parents who procreated. Of course the individual is procreated; but the procreator's existence is not part of the procreated individual's essence. But the o¤spring is not only procreated as a matter of fact. As o¤spring the whole essence of the individual consists in its relation to its procreators, even though as an individual in its own right it has an `essence' (an intrinsic formal constitution, that is) which is more than, and here and now independent of, that relation. Thus the classical medieval definition of relation as `that whose whole being consists in a reference or being toward another'

sunt illa, quorum totum suum esse se habet ad aliud

-- is intended to convey Aristotle's idea of relation as verifiable under a distinct category of physical being. However, to memorialize Aristotle's troublesome realization that even those types of being which are not relations in this sense (namely, individuals and whatever subjective characteristics of individuals there are besides relations, such as quantity, quality, and the rest) are yet relative in their maintenance in subjective existence and in their possibilities for being J. Deely explained, the medievals after Boethius circulated a distinct name:

Relatio secundum dici, `relation according to the requirements of discourse about being'.

Boezio had introduced this terminology, as we said, into his translation of and commentary upon Aristotle's book of Categories, In categorias libri quattuor (c.510ad).

There is then a profound sense of relativity in medieval discourse that applies to every category of accident as a subjective characteristic, and to substance itself as the subject of existence.

The Latins thus recognized a relativity that reaches to the very pillars and foundation of finite being in its own order.

Following Boezio, they called this radical ontological relativity, the relativity of all subjective being as such, relatio secundum dici, `relation according to the requirements of bringing being to expression in discourse'.

But they later came to call this sense of relation that applies to the explanation of the whole of nature relatio transcendentalis (transcendental relation), after the qualification `transcendental' became the accepted medieval term for any notion that applies to more than one category.

In contrast to this transcendental relativity there is the sense of relation that applies only to the single category of relation (i.e., which designates only what is relative in its very definition as well as in its possibilities for explanation and conditions for existence), which Boethius termed not only relatio secundum esse but also, and more particularly, relatio praedicamentalis, i.e., `predicamental' or `categorial' relation. Praedicamentalis was a Latin expression that applied both to category (of being) and to predicate (of a sentence). Later thinkers have inferred from this fact that there is more linguistic involvement in the ancient scheme of categories than Aristotle saw or the medievals came to realize. But for the medievals themselves, this terminology reflected no more than their understanding of Aristotle's scheme of the categories as identifying those senses in which being, when `said di¤erently', could yet be said (hence `predicated') in a single sense (`univocally') among a variety of tokens or instances of a type of being. Redrawing boundaries in understanding relation.

With Boethius, the notion of relation among the Latins may be said, on the side of physical being, to have been at once clarified and expanded. It had been expanded by a remarkable new take on Aristotle's diculties. Instead of seeing the notion of relativity bound up with all the categories (that is to say, with all the modes according to which finite being can exercise an existence independently of finite mind) as an obstacle to be ´ `shmeion' to `sign' by way of `signum' circumvented, Boethius found in it an idea to be thematized under the rubric of `the requirements of expressing being within discourse' (relatio secundum dici). Being can be understood, he took note, only by involving it in relations of understanding with what the being understood or explained is not. Now this realization has a peculiar consequence: for often the relations requisite to making sense of a thing, even when once they were `real', i.e., `categorial' or `physical' (obtaining in the order of being as it exists independently of mind, ens reale), often enough are not real now, as when I consider the identity of someone known to me in terms of their family relation to parents no longer alive. So, if reality means primarily ens reale, then Boethius' thematization of transcendental relation carried the implication that ens rationis, mind-dependent being in the form of relations that circumstances prevent from continuing (obtaining here and now) outside of thought, is the sine qua non of discourse (and, we might note, more generally, of perceptual experience transcending sensation). Nonbeing, in short, is essential to being in thought, not just in the logical dimensions of discourse, as was commonly understood among the Latins,16 but even in the order of actually existing real beings (`first intentions', as the Latins liked to say, in contrast to the logical properties or `second intentions' introduced by the mind in order to locate real things within logical classifications, divisions, and definitions)17 so far as that order enters into or is sustained by a community of discursive animals, is part and parcel of that order of `actually experienced being' under some broader notion of being than can be contracted into the categories of ens reale. It may be that it was not a Latin but an Arabic commentator on Aristotle who first brought this consequence somewhere near the surface of Latin thought. But we see in hindsight that it was already latent in the depths of Boethius' thematization of Aristotle's diculties in arriving at the notion of categorial relation as quite another type of relation entirely, as the `relativity' inscribed in the very being of physical individuals whereby they bear the traces of their origins and subsequent interactions as a story to be uncovered, whether by sciences such as paleontology, geology, and the like, or by detectives at work on `solving their case'.

The very possibility of abduction, we may say, the making of guesses so as to provide working hypotheses, depends on this fact that relations may be formed wholly in thought regardless of the physical circumstances which make some such particular `thought experiment' impossible outside of thought here and now. In any event, so far as my own investigations have been able to uncover, it was in the commentaries of Avicenna (980­1037) translated into Latin18 that the medievals began to think explicitly of what I can only J. Deely think to call purely objective relations, relations `non formantur nisi in intellectu', relations whose whole being as relations is owing to thought.

Such relations are emphatically not categorial, for the reason stated by Tomasso d'Aquino (c.1265/6: Quaestiones disputatae de potentia q. 7. art. 9).

Only a thing independent of the soul pertains to the categories.

Yet, equally emphatically, they are relations in the `essential' sense identified by Aristotle (c.360bc: Categories 7, 8a28¤.)19: `if those things only are properly called relative in the case of which relation to an external object is a necessary condition of existence, perhaps some explanation of the dilemma may be found' in `the fact that a thing is explained with reference to something else does not make it essentially relative'. The `common teaching' (Poinsot 1632: 89/9­11) that `in this category of being which is called relation three factors must concur, namely, a subject [an individual existent], a fundament [a characteristic within that individual on the basis of which it is related to something else], and a terminus [that to which the individual stands related over and above its subjectivity taken as such]' was about to take an unexpected turn, for it was about to be realized that the subjective foundation or ground (the individual characteristic) giving rise to a relation could be indi¤erently a physical or a psychological characteristic of the individual, whereas in every case20 the terminus of a relation -- even when from other points of view it exists as a being in its own right, as is the case with every terminus of a categorial relation here and now obtaining -- has a relative status deriving from the relation itself rather than from any being that may or may not exist apart from the relation.21 Reaching the standpoint proper to semiotics We are on the verge of the realization that Poinsot will single out as identifying the roots in being of the prior possibility of semiosis, the realization that relation is unique not only in the sense that it is one of the irreducible modalities according to which being can be realized independently of the finite mind, but further that, among these modalities, relation is further unique in being the only modality of mind-independent being that can be realized according to its positive essence outside that order as a pure creature of thought, an `ens rationis'. Every creature of thought is a complex of relations; but not every relation is a complex of thought. So a relation formed in thought may be the very relation that also obtains outside of thought (in the order of nature, ens reale), or it may be the very relation that obtained outside of thought when conditions permitted or necessitated it, or it may be a pure creature of thought mistaken for what obtains or obtained apart from thought. ´ `shmeion' to `sign' by way of `signum' The translations of Aristotle by Boethius together with the later translations of Avicenna carried the discussions of the Latin Age in the area of relation more or less to this point.

The fact that categorial and rational relations share alike a common `essence' or definability as something whose whole being consists in a reference to another, however, was not a point of central interest in the original medieval debates over relation. In general, the medieval mainstream focused immediately on the di¤erences between physical being (ens reale) and logical being (ens rationis), and on the problem of universals, which first appeared in the guise of nominalism, the view that general conceptions (such as Augustine's proposal of signum) are nothing more than mind-dependent relations.

Nonetheless, the point did not escape notice entirely that, if there are relations in the world as well as in thought, then relations in thought are unique among mind-dependent beings in having as their positive essence exactly the same positive structure as their mind-independent counterparts. Aquinas, for example, made this point central to the intelligibility of the Christian dogma of God as triune.22 For this or for any other application, the Latins found that they had from Boethius an expression to designate relation in its indi¤erence to the distinction between mindindependent and mind-dependent being, namely, relatio secundum esse, `relation as such according to the way it uniquely has being'.23 The point of this expression, originally formulated to express no more than the idea of relation in the order of physical being (`categorial or predicamental relation'), thus came to bear a larger import, to wit, that relation remains a relation (according to the way it has being) regardless of whether its being emanates from a concept in the mind or from a material characteristic of a physical individual. But since this was not a point at the center of medieval concerns at the moment of its peripheral realization, unfortunately, relatio secundum esse was not an expression the medievals generally undertook to refine and ramify. They did not, for example, develop any one-word synonyms for secundum esse comparable to their stipulation of `transcendental' as an equivalent for secundum dici. The most serious attempt to translate relatio secundum esse into a national language settled on the designation `ontological' as the translation of `secundum esse', a choice lacking in neither justification nor diculties (see Deely 1985: 463­465, 472¤.), but still the expression best suited to convey the singularity at issue.

Now what has all this to do with semiotic?

The answer is not far to seek.

From the beginning, Poinsot notes, every thinker has recognized that a sign is a relative being.

We know that relative being admits two senses, one according to the requirements of being in discourse (which is identical with some form of subjectivity introduced into discourse) J. Deely another according to the very way relation as such has being. Heretofore thinkers have focused on the aspect of subjectivity necessary for a relation to exist. Thus Augustine identified sign with a sense-perceptible entity, and later thinkers thought of signs in terms of subjective psychological states, whether ideas or feelings. But this is to think of signs as transcendental relations, which is to beg the question. For besides transcendental relativity there is also ontological relativity, and there is prima facie evidence that this last is the being proper to signs, from the fact that sign in general includes equally mind-dependent and mind-independent being, which could only be if the being proper to sign were the being of ontological relation. But let us see Poinsot make the point directly for himself: We ask therefore whether the formal rationale of a sign consists, primarily and essentially, in a relation according to the way it has being (an ontological relation) or in a relation according to the way being must be expressed in discourse (a transcendental relation), that is to say,24 in something subjective which founds an ontological relation. What a relation is according to the way being must be expressed in discourse and according to the way it has being, what a transcendental relation is and what a categorial relation is, has been explained in our Second Preamble concerning Relation. And we speak here of ontological relation -- of relation according to the way it has being -- not of categorial relation, because we are discussing the sign in general, as it includes equally the natural and the social sign, in which general discussion even the signs which are mind-dependent artifacts -- namely, stipulated signs as such -- are involved.

And for this reason, the rationale common to signs cannot be that of a categorial being, nor a categorial relation, although it could be an ontological relation, according to the point made by Tommaso d'Aquino in the Summa, I, q. 28, art. 1, and explained in our Preamble on Relation -- to wit, that only in the case of these things which exist toward another is found some mind-independent relation and some mind-dependent relation, which latter relation plainly is not categorial, but is called a relation according to the way relation has being (an ontological relation), because it is purely a relation and does not import anything absolute. (Poinsot 1632: Book I, Question 1, 117/18­118/18)

the textual complexities of this passage in Latin, and on the lexical points that had misled the only previous attempt to render these lines in English to create three alternatives where Poinsot envisages only two. Here, for the interested reader, I think I can leave these technical points in the form of the original scholarly note 6 from p. 117 in my critical edition of the Tractatus glossing the text translating seu as `that is to say' in the translation above (preceding endnote 24 here).

My concentration for the present is only on the result, rather than the diculty of ´ `shmeion' to `sign' by way of `signum' reaching it; and the result in question is to free Poinsot's insight from its original Latin text to provide, in an exaptation of today's English language, an understanding about the standpoint that distinguishes semiotics in the history of philosophy, namely, the explicit adoption from the outset of a point of view that is postmodern today precisely because it transcends the opposition between realism and idealism which characterized modern culture in philosophy in particular, where ensreale went `under erasure'.

Recapitulating the passage from Latin signum to English `sign' in the doctrine of signs Let me recapitulate the passage we have traced. Try to keep the key terms as reasonably clear in your mind as you can. Remember that everything has to be explained in terms of something besides itself: this is all that `transcendental relation' means. The expression `transcendental relation' is not quite literal, because what it names are subjects of existence with their subjective characteristics, not relations as such. But one among the many things to be explained is what exists not as or within an individual, but with its whole being between other things: this is what `relation' or `pure relation' or `relation as such' signifies.

A relation as such may exist in the environment or in thought.

When it exists only in the environment it is called a `physical relation', also a `mind-independent relation'. When it exists in only thought it is called a `mind-dependent relation'. Mind-independent or physical relations, because they belong to the category of real being, are also called `categorial relation' or `praedicamental25 relation'. Thus `categorial relation', `physical relation', and `mind-independent relation' are synonymous terms. `Ontological relation' is the term used to express the fact that a relation may have a source in nature or in thought, but in either case the relation as such remains a pure relation. And, finally, `objective relation' simply means a relation existing as known, as an object of awareness, regardless of whether it exists in nature as well as in thought or only in thought. Thus, a mind-independent relation may or may not be an objective relation, and an objective relation may or may not be a mind-independent relation. The same for an ontological relation: it may or may not be known. If known and mind-independent in its circumstances, the relation will be objective as well as physical; if not, the relation will be purely physical. With these terms refreshed, we are in a position to appreciate the brilliance of Poinsot's achievement in identifying for the doctrine of signs (for J. Deely ´ `shmeion' to `sign' by way of `signum' is also any relation formed in and by thought, any relatio rationis), can yet not be reduced to any `relation of reason' because we find in our experience of objects relative aspects which are not invented by us, that is, essential relativities which are discovered and not created (cf. Poinsot 1632: 86/6­19). Contemporary examples would be the order in a marching column of army ants, which is something over and above the individual ants as such; or the revolution of the planets around our sun rather than e converso (a point on which the medievals themselves were notoriously confused, well illustrating the essential and functional equivalence between categorial and rational relations as objective relations). The early discovery that categorial and rational relations share alike a common `essence' or definability as something whose whole being consists in a reference to another26 no one at the time took special note of, because attention was focused elsewhere. But now we have reached the point in the discussion of sign among the Latins where the pertinence of the development of these points concerning the theory of relation to the foundations of the doctrine of signs begins to be apparent. We have reached the point where the whole previous discussion of relation over centuries suddenly becomes directly relevant to the controversy over what a sign in general is. We are forced to begin to address directly the import of the sign as a relative being. Since a sign, in every case, imports `something relative to something else for another', aliquid stans alicuique pro alio, what precise meaning is to attach to the `relative to' (the stans pro) in the semiotic case, the case of the sign as such? Given the terms of the medieval development of the notion of relative being, the Latin discussion at this turn could be given a very precise sense: Is the sign to be identified with a being relative in the transcendental sense (secundum dici) or in the ontological sense (secundum esse)? For once it is understood that the whole of the physical universe is relative at least transcendentally (i.e., in its explainability) and sometimes perhaps ontologically as well (i.e., in its very definition), then it is also clear that anything relative must be relative in at least one of these two senses. The sign precisely as such is a relative being, to be sure; but every being that is relative is so either transcendentally only or ontologically as well. Which is the case for the sign? The first to recognize the problem in these terms was John Poinsot.

Augustine of Hippo began the medieval semiotic development with a question disguised in the form of a proposition: Does the sign as the means of knowing have a being which transcends the divide between nature and culture? John Poinsot ended the medieval development with the answer to this question that explicitly justified Augustine's original implicit proposal. Poinsot's Treatise on Signs, essayed in the very year of J. Deely John Locke's birth (1632), provided semiotic inquiry, to guide its investigations, for the first time with the thematic realization of a unified subject matter involved with, but also outside of, the subjective order. Poinsot answers the question bequeathed by Augustine of how the ancient dichotomy between the causal relations linking natural phenomena to the things of which they are signs and the imaginary relations linking cultural phenomena to the things of which they are `signs' is overcome in the being of the sign. For the being proper to a sign consists, in every case, of neither a transcendental nor a categorial nor a rational relation, but simply of an ontological relation (a relatio secundum esse as expressing the single definable structure common to relation regardless of the circumstances extraneously further di¤erentiating the realization of this structure as categorial or `rational', physical or objective, at a given moment). He had the advantage of the whole Latin tradition of discussion of relative being to draw on. But what was decisive was that he had the insight of how to apply the many distinctions of that tradition to the question so as to get a resolution. He saw at once that if all being is relative, but either subjectively so in the rationale of transcendental relativity or suprasubjectively in the rationale of ontological relativity (and in the latter case indi¤erently to the question of whether the source of the relation under varying circumstances be thought or nature), then the question of the being proper to every sign as such all but answers itself by the very terms in which it has now been posed. In e¤ecting his answer to the profound question of how the being of sign is able to bridge nature and culture, thought and being, Poinsot begins his Treatise with exactly the point that Augustine's famous and first attempt at a general definition of sign had presupposed.

Instead of simply stating what a sign is, Poinsot, in Book I, Question 1, 117/18­119/9, asks rather what a sign must be in order to function in the way that we all experience it to function, namely, as indi¤erent to the distinction between real and imaginary being, truth and falsehood, or as conveying indifferently cultural and natural objects.

To answer this question, Poinsot (119/10­124/39) distinguishes sharply, as had Soto, between representation and signification.

This distinction becomes his basis for di¤erentiating between signs and objects.

An object may represent itself.

A sign, rather, must represent other than itself.

Thus representation is involved in the being proper to a sign as the foundation for the relation of signification, but the signification itself always and necessarily consists in the relation as such, which is over and above that characteristic of a material being or psychological state of an organism upon which the relation itself is founded. ´

Signification is opposed from the outset to whatever exists as an individual material entity or aspect thereof, that is, to subjective being in its entire extent.

Signification (signatio, segnazione) is always something over and above its foundation in some individual being or material object, something superordinate thereto, something of its very nature intersubjective, either actually or prospectively.

Signs act through their foundation, but the actual sign as such is not the foundation but the relation which exists over and above that foundation linking it as sign-vehicle to some object signified.

This object signified (italian, "segnato"; latin: segnatum) in turn, may or may not also be an existing thing, that is to say, it may or may not have as a dimension of its being an indi¤erence to whether or not it is signified (inasmuch as it may also happen to exist apart from the signification)
(cf. Poinsot 1632: Book III, Questions 1 and 2; Raposa 1994).

But this further dimension and status of the object, exactly as Scotus said, is a matter of indi¤erence to the sign as such.

For the sign as such consists purely and simply in the relation between sign-vehicle and object signified, e¤ected as such through an interpretant, an actual or prospective observer, as we might say.

This relation is not a¤ected intrinsically by the conditions that determine the subjective status in reality of the object signified in any being it may happen to have apart from the signification (cf. Book I, Question 4, 166/1­180/7).

Thus, things are fundamentally distinct, in Poinsot's semiotic, from objects, in that the former do not necessarily while the latter do necessarily involve a relation to a knower.

Things may or may not also be objects, and objects may or may not also be things.

But every object signified exists as such as the terminus of a sign relation. Whatever exists as a thing has a subjective structure, that is to say, a structure indi¤erent to being or not being known.

But whatever exists as signified has an objective structure as terminus of a relation founded upon and correlated with27 some subjective structure of being, such as the psychological reality of a concept in the mind or the physical reality of a spoken, written, or gestured word. Signs mediate between objects and things by giving rise to objects as significates (cf. Book I, Question 1, 122/17­123/25; Question 3, 161/ 24­34; Question 5, 195/18­29) and by the partial objectification of things in sensation (see Book I, Question 6, esp. 209/34­47, 210/25­32, 211/ 29­213/7; and Book III, Questions 1 and 2).

Whence objects participate in the indi¤erence of sign relations to being based in cultural or natural constructions, and sign-vehicles are distinct from signs as the foundations of relations are distinct from the relations they found.

The foundation as such belongs to subjective being, whereas the relation as such is always suprasubjective. So is the object as such which terminates the relation, even though nothing prevents this object J. Deely from coinciding materially with some actual structure of subjective being -- again, either natural or cultural. Previous medieval criticisms of Augustine's original attempt to define sign in general, brought from the University of Paris to the Iberian university world, notably by Dominic Soto in the early sixteenth century, had gone no further than to distinguish between signs whose relation to the object signified was founded on physical structures of subjectivity accessible to outer sense (the case of so-called instrumental signs, to which alone Augustine's definition applies), and signs whose relation to the object signified was founded on psychological structures accessible to inner sense and understanding (the case of so-called formal signs).

Despite the novelty of the terminology, the reasoning itself of Soto and his Paris masters, when it was not nominalistic, amounted to nothing that could not already be found explicitly in Scotus and Tomasso d'Aquino.

One of Poinsot's ´ contemporaries, Francisco Araujo, made express note of this point: `What Soto says amounts to what we find in Aquinas'.28 By contrast, the work of Poinsot advanced the discussion dramatically.

The originality of Poinsot's advance is underscored by contemporary tes´ timony. In the inventory of Latin opinions provided by Araujo's synoptic presentation of Latin discussions of sign up to 1617, Poinsot's solution to the problem of sign is conspicuous by its absence.29

That is to say, as of 1617, the solution on which Poinsot was already at work and would propound in his Tractatus of 1632 had yet to be propounded. Poinsot showed (Tractatus de Signis, Book II, Question 1, 223/1­229/38) that the vaunted distinction between formal and instrumental signs circulated throughout Iberia after Soto was in fact a consideration secondary to the primary consideration of the being proper to the sign as such consisting in a pure relation (triadic at that) according to the way relation has being. For signs are called `formal' or `instrumental' not according to what is proper to them as signs but only according to the representative aspect which in the sign belongs to the foundation of the sign relation rather than to the relation itself in which the sign as such exists in its actual signification.30 The same point applies, however, to the other main traditional division of sign into natural and conventional.

Like the division of signs into formal and instrumental, this division, too, into

natural and

non-natural

or conventional is made not from the point of view of that which constitutes every sign as such, but from the point of view rather of that subjective or `absolute' characteristic of some individual which makes of that individual the foundation for a relation in the essential sense of existing over and above its subjective ground.

Yet what constitutes every sign as such is an ontological relation triadic in character (which may be either rational and purely objective or categorial -- physical as well as objective -- depending ´ `shmeion' to `sign' by way of `signum' on circumstances, and even sometimes one and sometimes the other, also depending on circumstances).

And this relation, like every ontological relation, objective or not, is always suprasubjective, sometimes intersubjective, never subjective. Hence it cannot be identified with any term in the sign relation, not even that term from which the sign-relation primarily performs its function as vehicle for the presentation of something (namely, the signified object) which neither the sign vehicle nor the sign relation itself is.

Never identified with any one term, in fact, the sign as such consists in the uniting or nexus of the three terms -- sign-vehicle (that from which representation is made), interpretant (that to which representation is made), object signified (that which is represented).

`By the one single sign-relation which constitutes the proper being of the sign,' Poinsot says,31 are the three terms of sign-vehicle, object signified, and prospective observer brought into unity.

The line of argument is as novel as the conclusion to which it leads, a conclusion which, like Darwin's positing of natural selection and many a great thesis of science and philosophy, seems obvious once it has been stated. Since rational and categorial relations have the same essence or definable structure of essential relatives which, as such, exist dependent upon some subjective foundation but as superordinate to that foundation, it matters not whether the foundation be a material structure or a psychological structure or the quasi-unconscious habit structure of a convention.

In whatever case, the foundation as such does not constitute the sign formally, the sign in its proper being as sign.

And whether the foundation gives rise to a categorial relation or a mind-dependent relation makes no di¤erence to the fact that the relation to which it gives rise is what constitutes the sign formally as a sign.

This relation is in either case an ontological relation in contrast to a transcendental relation.

Moreover, whether the circumstances surrounding the relation in which the sign consists make that relation to be purely objective or physical and categorial as well as objective is a matter of indifference to the sign as such, precisely because and inasmuch as this distinction (whether the sign relation is purely objective or physical and categorial as well as objective) normally depends on circumstances extrinsic to the signification.

Thus a dinosaur bone recognized as such functions as a

NATURAL SIGN sign vehicle, even though the objective relation to which it gives rise here and now, which would be categorial if the dinosaur were alive, is purely rational in the circumstance of the dinosaur's now not existing.

With this identification of signs with triadic pure relations as such medieval semiotic reaches its highest point of development.

The question of whether signs can be identified with any definite class of things able to J. Deely exist subjectively, whether as physical or as psychological realities, is definitely answered in the negative.

In every case, the sign as such, consisting in the relation between sign-vehicle and object signified, is something suprasubjective and invisible to sense.

Those `things' or perceived objects which we call signs, such as

a traffic light,

a

barber pole,

a word, etc., are not, technically speaking,

signs but the vehicles of signification.

The actual signification itself consists in the relation between the vehicles and the knowability of their objective content.

Similarly, those psychological states such as images or concepts called by the later medievals `formal signs' are not technically speaking signs but the vehicles of signification.

At this stage of discussion a new definition of signs may be said to be implicit.

A sign is that which any object presupposes.

Any subjective structure, whether physical or psychological, is never a sign strictly speaking but merely something that can enter into a sign relation, either as its foundation (as sign-vehicle) or as its terminus or ground32 (as or `within' an object signified) or as its interpretant (as that to which the significate is presented through the sign-vehicle), or as now one, now the other, in an unending spiral of developing and changing significations.

The being in which the sign, properly and formally speaking, consists is never some object as such, nor is it any subjectivity as such. The being in which the sign properly and formally consists is rather each strand in the network of real and unreal relations in function of which whatever objects appear exist as objects (as nodes or termini in the network of relations) in the first place. The medieval distinction between `things' as what exist whether or not known and `objects' as whatever exists as known appears in Poinsot's synthesis as mediated by `signs' as a third term of the distinction.

For things cannot become fully objects except through psychological states and conditions. And psychological states and conditions cannot exist as such save through giving rise to relations indi¤erently categorial or imaginary (`rational' in the broadest sense of mind-dependent). These relations founded upon psychological states have as their terminus objects indifferently also physical (such as the planets and stars and whatever of the physical universe happens to be known at any given time) or merely objective (as in the case of leprechauns, dragons, and Dracula). In either case, the `objects signified' hold their place among the many objective features constituting the world of experience, a mixture of `nature' and `culture'.

These objects known, in their turn, become signs of one another ´ `shmeion' to `sign' by way of `signum' as new relations among them are imagined or discovered.

And so, in the end, the universe as a whole, in terms of medieval semiotic theory, exactly as Peirce later projected (1905­6: CP 5.448n), comes to be `perfused with signs, if it does not consist exclusively of them'.

For now we see that there are signs and there are signifieds, and that whatever is signified can itself become a sign in relation to other objects signified!

Henceforth it will be necessary to distinguish between a loose and a strict sense (or, of course, much better `usage') of signum, `sign' in English.

Loosely, we call `a sign' any sense-perceptible vessel that causes us to think of something else, particularly in those cultural cases where the sense-perceptible material structures were erected for the purpose of guiding our attention.

Loosely too, but more critically, we call `a sign' any psychological state of feeling and apprehension whereby our attention is focused on something besides ourselves.

But strictly, we understand now that signs in the being proper to them cannot be perceived directly by sense at all because they consist precisely in those suprasubjective modes of being Aristotle called `relations' -- with the proviso that the relations which Aristotle was concerned to identify were dyadic structures of physical being, whereas semiotics is concerned with those same relations in their essential structure as indi¤erent to physical existence and, moreover, only insofar as they engage not two but three terms, in conformity with the classical formula, signum est aliquid alicuique stans pro alio,33 by which we understand that signs are not only essentially relations, but irreducibly triadic relations at that.

Whether this strict usage will ever displace the loose usage suciently to become the common usage we can only guess, but that is how we ordinarily get at the truth anyway.

************** ECO as the Italian Grice ----

The sign is not only whatever can be used to lie, as Eco famously remarked.

--------------

It is whatever can be used to advance discourse in any way.

It is the sine qua non of human understanding.

Given the importance in our discourse of sensory illustrations, however, even after the full realization that it is only the sign-vehicle's position under an imperceptible triadic relation that provides its content as signifying, it seems unlikely that the practice of referring to the signvehicle simply as `sign' will ever fall fully to desuetude.

This essay is derived from three lectures delivered in English on `Semiotics and Translation' orally presented in the Ammattikielten ja Kaantamisen Opintokokonaisuus ¨¨ ¨ lecture series, `Kaantamisen pragmatiikka' (Pragmatics of Translation), delivered No¨¨ ¨ vember 8, 15, and 22, 2000, at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

J. Deely 2.

For who knows what papyrus may turn up by accident tomorrow revealing an authorial priority to Augustine respecting the usage in question? 3.

This very question, of course, answered in the negative, will become the exact basis on which Vico (1744) will propose his `new science', and Kant his untenable postulate of the Ding-an-sich as `unknowable': see Deely 2001: 558­559, 570­572, and 573n60. ` 4.

On December 1, 2000, Professor Eero Tarasti organized the First Annual Hommage a Oscar Parland at the University of Helsinki, the main paper for which I prepared as Visiting Professor of Semiotics under the title `The Impact of Semiotics on Philosophy', a paper subsequently posted to the university's website by the Metaphysical Club there as The Green Book.

A later version of this paper, revised and expanded, is now available under the title The Impact on Philosophy of Semiotics (Deely 2003). 5.

Augustine 397/426a.D.: Book I, Chapter 1. See the discussion in Deely 2001: Chapter 6. 6.

Hence Gilson's prescient remark (1955: 491) that `the only diculty there is in understanding Ockham' is his notion of concepts as `natural signs'. See Ockham i.1317/19: Scriptum in librum primum sententiarum ordinatio I. 2. 8; discussed in Gilson 1955: 491­492, and 785­786n13. See the commentary in Deely 2001: 389¤. 7.

At present, no one seems to know exactly by whom or when this terminology was first proposed, though it most likely must fall between the death of Ockham (1349) and the maturity of Pierre d'Ailly (1350­1420; see esp. d'Ailly a.1396): see Deely 2001: 402­ 407. 8.

A complete table of all the editions, complete and partial, and in whatever language, of Poinsot's systematic works in philosophy and theology is provided in Deely 1985: 396­ 397. 9.

The idealism into which modern philosophy grew is the dark side of the story, the Mr. Hyde to the scientific Dr. Jekyll, who contrastively symbolized what was best in modernity: see Deely 2001: Chapter 13. 10.

Throughout the present work, I have based my dating of Aristotle's works on Gauthier 1970. 11. Migne (c.1844­1864) has presented in his PL vols. 63 and 64 the main versiones Boethii extant to our time, though not in the form of critical editions.

The main works useful to the present study appear in Vol. 64, Manlii Severini Boetii opera omnia, non solum liberalium disciplinarum, sed etiam majorum facultatum studiosis utilissima, mo et sine quibus Aristoteles in praecipuis locis intelligi non potest, etc. [Bibliothecae Cleri universae]. Dating of the works of Boethius is something of a scholarly nightmare. I have used for the works from PL 64 the dating worked out in Cappuyns 1937.

Dating for nine of these works has been further examined in De Rijk 1964 (q.v.), and, for the convenience of other researchers, I have included in the list of References the variant dates from De Rijk in square brackets after the dates of Cappuyns. 12.

Fully half the categories in Aristotle's full list of ten -- posture, where (location), when, and vestition (or external attachments) -- were themselves varieties of the category of relation; while two more -- action and passion (or undergoing an action) -- considered substance in terms of (that is to say, relative to) its interactions and surrounding circumstances. See Deely 2001: 74, 76­77. 13.

This fact is conveniently illustrated through the Latin term `in', insofar as this term may be translated in the sense of `within', which is the direct sense of `dependence on another', or in the sense of `on the basis of ', which is the indirect sense of `dependence on another'. ´ ` ` ´ È sa 14. Aristotle, c.360bc: Categories, chap. 7, 6a36­39:

Prov ti de ta toiauta legetai, oo ~ Ân  ` È ´ ´ ` È teron·

Those things are

Å Á posoun allov prov eo auta aper e stin eÁ teron eii ai legetai, h oo ~ Æ ´ called relative which, being either said to be of something else or related to something Ân ´ else, are explained by reference to that other thing'.).

And again at 6b6­9: prov ti oui Ân É on Æ rov  sti È sa  ta È per ` È ete ´ ´ ` È teron; oio oo Å Á posoun allov prov eo eo `n oo auo` ao eÆ stin eo ´ron eii ai legetai, h oo ~ Æ ´ ´ ` È teron·

So it is with all other relatives that have been mentioned.

mega legetai prov eo

Those terms, then, are called relative, the nature of which is explained by reference to something else').

The diculty in understanding the terminology Boezio created reached legendary proportions in Neoscholastic circles after Krempel (1952: 394).

Remarks on substance by Boethius himself such as McInerny cites (1990: 102n13) raise the question whether there is not an unclarity in the terminology because Boezio himself only confusedly grasped the diculty to which his terminology conveyed a prospective solution.

 me  n Á kano Á to ´ Á rismo  pode Å ~ Categories, chap. 7, 8a28­34:

eio `n oui io ~ v oo ~ n prov ti oo ` v ao ´ dotai, h ton ´  sti ` ~ ´ ´  de Á v  demi  si ~ panu walepon h ton ao ´ ton eo ` to deixai ooouo ´a ouo´a ton prov ti legetai· eio ` ~ Å ~  duna É v ` Ân ` ` Á kano  ll' ´  to  sti ~ ´ Å mh io ~ v, ao eÆ sti ta prov ti oio to eii ai tauo´ n eo to prov ti pov eÆ wein, iÆ sov an ´ `  ta Á de ´ ´  mh Á rismo rhyeih ti prov auo´ . oo ` proterov oo ` v parakolouyei men pasi toiv prov ti, ouo ` n ~ ` ~ ~  to ´  sti ` ´  toi  n `  ta È per  stin ´ ´ tauo´ n ge eo to prov ti auo ~v eii ai to auo` ao eo eÅ teron legesyai.

Indeed, if our definition of that which is relative was complete, it is very dicult, if not impossible, to prove that no substance is relative. If, however, our definition was not complete, if those things only are properly called relative in the case of which relation to an external object is a necessary condition of existence, perhaps some explanation of the dilemma may be found. The former definition does indeed apply to all relatives, but the fact that a thing is explained with reference to something else does not make it essentially relative'.).

For extended discussion of the definitions and their English translations in terms of the conceptual content at stake, see Deely 1985. (In modern English the intellectual situation in this area has actually deteriorated.

Since 1963, the Ackrill (a disciple of Grice's) translation of the Categories -- Aristotle c.360bc -- has gained currency over the older Edghill translation, the newer normally having the presumption of improvement over the older, provided the sponsoring press is suciently reputable.

But in this case, alas, for the reasons combed in detail in Deely 1985: 472­479, esp. 473n114, the presumption is not vindicated, and we can only await the day when Ackrill's translation in turn su¤ers the fate of Edghill's, hopefully at the hands of a translator with philosophical sensibilities considerably superior to what Ackrill displays.

After all, it was their common doctrine that genus, species, di¤erence, property, and accident as entia rationis were the principal subject matter studied in logic and employed in the formulation of `real' definitions.

This distinction in Latin thought between `first' and `second' intentions is customarily treated in the nineteenth­twentieth century revival of scholasticism (often labeled `Neothomism') as quite straightforward and clear, a view which appears in the perspective of semiotic as hopelessly naive.

On the contrary, a whole doctoral dissertation lies here waiting to be discovered and formulated by some bright graduate student.

See Deely 2001: 351­353, 470­471. My dating for works of Avicenna, both in Arabic and in Latin translation, is based on Gutas 1988: 123­125. See the extended citation in note 15 above.

See Poinsot 1631/35, Reiser ed. Vol. I, Q. 17, Art. 5, 596a42­b15, a text which has been added into Appendix C of the electronic edition of the Tractatus (Poinsot 1632) as S21, italics added:

Ratio formalis termini relativi, ut terminus est, non potest esse aliquid omnino absolutum et ad se.

Ratio est duplex: Prima, quia terminus in quantum terminus formaliter alicuius est terminus; nihil enim terminat nisi alterum. Ergo terminus relationis est aliquid relationis; ergo si est relatio praedicamentalis, terminus illius est pure terminus, id est non habet aliud quam terminare seu opponi relationi et esse aliquid ipsius ut respicientis. In quo di¤ert a fundamento, quia fundamentum oportet, quod det esse relationi secundum inhaerentiam, in quo esse convenit cum accidente absoluto. Terminus autem non dat esse relationi, sed oppositionem terminationis. Ergo formalitas termini non est aliquid absolutum. `Secunda ratio est, quia, ut constat ex D. Thoma . . . 2. Contra Gent. cap. 11. dicit, quod ``non potest intelligi aliquid relative dici ad alterum, nisi e converso illud relative dicatur ad ipsum''. Et ratio est, quia relatio ut relatio oppositionem habet non minus quam contrarietas vel privatio; non habet autem oppositionem nisi ad suum terminum; ergo terminus ut terminus est oppositus ei relative. Sicut ergo non potest intelligi relatio nisi ut habens oppositionem ad terminum, ita neque terminus formaliter intelligitur nisi ut oppositus; sed illa oppositio est relativa; ergo in quantum terminus est aliquid relativum'.

Here I want to add a gloss on Avicenna apropos of the Latin translation alleged by Krempel as the first explicit source of the notion of relatio rationis as over against relatio realis seu categorialis seu praedicamentalis.

The relatio rationis/relatio realis distinction seems to first appear in an original part of the Shifa dated to c.1024, in a Latin ~ translation of a date prior to 1150. The passage in question can be found in Avicenna Latinus Liber de Philosophia Prima sive Scientia Divina I­IV (i.e., Avicenna c.1024), ´ ´ ed. critique de la traduction Latine medievale par S. van Riet (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977), Tractatus Tertius, Capitulum Decimum, p. 178 -- whether translated originally by Gerard of Cremona or Dominic Gundisalinus seemed undetermined (ed. cit. p. 123*n2). Aquinas 1266: Summa theologiae prima pars Q. 28. art. 1,

Utrum in deo sint aliquae relationes reales'. See the survey of opinions in Poinsot 1632: Tractatus de Signis, `Second Preamble: On Relation', 93/17­96/36. Here I reproduce the text of note 6 from p. 117 of the critical edition of Poinsot's Tractatus, with an added final gloss: `Seu in classical Latin usage introduces an alternative condition or a disjunction. This has led even careful scholars (e.g., Yves R. Simon, John J. Glanville, and G. Donald Hollenhorst, The Material Logic of John of St. Thomas [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1955], p. 389) into a most serious misreading of Poinsot at this point -- most serious, because it involves as a consequence nothing less than total misunderstanding of the point of departure for the doctrine of signs. Their rendering of this passage reads:

We propose to determine whether the formal notion of the sign consists, primarily and essentially,

(a) in a relation according to existence or
(b) in a relation according to expression or
(c) in a thing absolute which would ground the relation that the sign implies''.

This is not a correct reading of the text'. By way of further gloss, I might here again emphasize that this incorrect reading renders incoherent the standpoint proper to semiotics insofar as the doctrine of signs begins at a point superior to the modern opposition of idealism to realism. `Relation according to existence' and `relation according to expression', in fact, are modern transliterations rather than translations of relatio secundum esse and relatio secundum dici.

They `make sense seemingly' according to the individual words involved, but really no sense at all insofar as the syntax of the Latin expressions as a whole bears on the sense the words involved are intended to convey.

Moreover, the `seeming sense' they make is rather misleading, for the prima facie most reasonable reading for `relation according to existence' would be as a synonym for relatio realis, while `relation according to expression' would most reasonably be taken as a synonym for relatio ra- ´ `shmeion' to `sign' by way of `signum' tionis; and neither of these renderings could provide a generic being for the opposed species of natural and conventional signs. `Praedicamentum', remember, being the Latin term for `category' considered in relation to linguistic expressions univocally predicable or `able to be said' of objects which have as well subjective existence and being.

See `The Ontological Peculiarity of Relation' in Deely 2001: Chapter 6, p. 432. The correlation with the fundament gives to the terminus its objective status as extrinsic formal cause, something that does not belong to it simply and formally as terminus, but only as terminus opposed to (`obicitur') the concept or feeling as fundament. See note 20 above. ´jo Arau 1617, lib. iii, q. 2, art. 2, dubium 1: `in idem incidit dictum Magistri Soto'.

This rare, valuable survivor of the last Latin century exists in very few copies.

The work itself contains one of the most extensive surveys we have, besides the Disputationes ´ Metaphysicae of Francis Suarez (1597) and Cursus Philosophicus of John Poinsot (1631­1635), of late Latin positions, including a thematic discussion of sign; and it has ´ the advantage of appearing almost exactly mid-way between Suarez and Poinsot.

A summary exposition of the metaphysical doctrine of this work has been published by Mauricio Beuchot (1987) as a stop-gap measure until an edition of the complete origi´ nal can be published. But until now the huge size of Araujo's work -- over a thousand pages -- has posed an insuperable economic obstacle.

Fortunately, Beuchot has published a Spanish translation of the section on sign (to wit, Book III, quest. 2, art. 2, dubia 1­4, in Beuchot ed. 1995: 51­106). ´ Francisco Araujo 1617: the series of four `Dubitatur' following the treatment of first ´ intentions. In Dubitatur I Araujo gives his own view that there is not a single rationale for natural and conventional signs but only `an analogy of two concepts', as is also the case for `signs whose signifieds exist and signs whose signifieds don't exist', which, however, leaves the doctrine of signs in essentially the circumstances assigned to it earlier by the Conimbricenses. Poinsot 1632: Tractatus de Signis, Book I, Question 3, 163/28­36, italics added: `this division of signs into instrumental and formal presupposes in the signs themselves diverse manners of stimulatively moving and representing to the cognitive power, specifically, as an external object or as an internal form; yet this is related presuppositively to the rationale of sign, whereas the most formal rationale of a sign consists in being something substituted for a significate, whether as an object external or as representable within the power'. See also Book I, Question 2, 142/16­145/28, esp. 143/21­144/ 5; Book II, Question 5, esp. 271/22­42. Book I, Question 3, 154/25­29: `Si vero consideretur potentia ut terminus in obliquo attactus, sic unica relatione signi attingitur signatum et potentia, et haec est propria et formalis ratio signi'. -- `If indeed the cognitive power', that is, that to which representation is made, what Peirce will later generalize under the term interpretant, `is considered as a term indirectly attained, then the object signified and the power are attained by the single triadic relation in which the sign has its formal and proper rationale'. The various senses of this concept of `ground', somewhat unusual from the point of view of `ordinary usage', are discussed in Deely 2001: 343¤., 362¤. Compare the definition of sign as triadic with which Poinsot opens his Tractatus of 1632, common among the Latins since the work of Petrus Hispanus c.1245, and explicitly adopted to replace the narrower formulation originally proposed by Augustine, as we have seen: `Signum est id quod repraesentat aliud a se potentiae cognoscenti' (Poinsot 1632: Book I, Question 1, 116/3­4). Lest the inference of the unity and irreducible triadic nature of the sign relation be too subtle for some, Poinsot makes the J. Deely point fully explicit in the form of the entire Question 3 of Book I (153/1­165/19) that he devotes to demonstrating that (154/27­29) `unica relatione signi attingitur signatum et potentia, et haec est propria et formalis ratio signi'. 34. On details of historical layering, see the `Gloss on the References' in Deely 2001: 835­ 836. All abbreviations used are also explained there. References, historically layered (34) d'Ailly, Pierre (Petrus de Aliaco, 1350­1420) (c.1372).

Concepts and Insolubles, Paul Vincent Spade (annotated trans.). Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980. -- (a.1396). Destructiones Modorum Significandi (secundum viam nominalium), nach Inkunabelausgaben in einer vorlaufigen Fassung neu zusammengestellt und mit Anmerkungen versehen von Ludger Kaczmarek. Munster: Munsteraner Arbeitskreis fur Semiotik, ¨ 1980. ´ ` d'Alverny, Marie-Therese (1994). Introduction to Avicenna Latinus Codices, codices de´ ` scripsit Marie-Therese d'Alverny, addenda collegerunt Simone van Riet et Pierre Jodogne, 1­10. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Aquinas, Thomas (1224/5­1274) (i.1252­1273). S. Thomae Aquinatis Opera Omnia ut sunt in indice thomistico, Roberto Busa (ed.), in septem volumina: 1. In quattuor libros Sententiarum; 2. Summa contra Gentiles, Autographi Deleta, Summa Theologiae; 3. Quaestiones Disputatae, Quaestiones Quodlibetales, Opuscula; 4. Commentaria in Aristotelem et alios; 5. Commentaria in Scripturas; 6. Reportationes, Opuscula dubiae authenticitatis; 7. Aliorum Medii Aevi Auctorum Scripta 61. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: FrommannHolzboog, 1980. -- (i.1259/65). Summa Contra Gentiles, in Busa ed. vol. 2, 1­152. -- (c.1265/6). Quaestiones disputatae de potentia, R. P. Pauli M. Pession (ed.), in Quaestiones disputatae, vol. II, 9th ed. rev. by P. Bazzi, M. Calcaterra, T. S. Centi, E. Odetto, and P. M. Pession. Turin: Marietti, 1953, 7­276; in Busa ed. 3, 186­269. -- (c.1266/73). Summa theologiae, in Busa ed. vol. 2, 184­926. ´ Araujo, Francisco (1580­1664) (1617). Commentariorum in universam Aristotelis Metaphysicam tomus primus. Burgos and Salamanca: J. B. Varesius, 1617. Aristotle (384­322bc) (c.360bc). Categories, trans. E. M. Edghill. In The Basic Works of Aristotle, Richard McKeon (ed.), 1­37. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1947. -- (c.353bc). Topics, trans. W. A. Pickard-Cambridge. In ed. cit., 187­206. -- (c.353abc). Refuting Sophisms, trans. Pickard-Cambridge. In ed. cit., 207­212. -- (c.348­7bc). Prior Analytics, trans. Jenkinson. In ed. cit. 62­107. -- (c.348­7abc). Posterior Analytics, trans. G. R. C. Mure. In ed. cit. 108­186. -- (c.330bc). On Interpretation, trans. Edghill. In ed. cit. 38­61. Augustine of Hippo (354­430ad) (i.397­426ad). De doctrina christiana libri quattuor (Four Books On Christian Doctrine), in Tomus Tertius Pars Prior of Sancti Aurelii Augustini Hipponensis Episcopi Opera Omnia, opera et studio Monachorum Ordinis Sancti Benedicti e congregatione S. Mauri. Ed. Parisiana altera, emendata et aucta (at the Xochimilco Dominican priory in Mexico City; Paris: Gaume Fratres, 1836), 13­151; also in Patrologiae Cursus Completus, J. P. Migne (ed.), Series Latina (PL), vol. 34, cols. 15­122. Paris. Avicenna (ibn Sina; 980­1037ad) (i.1020/27). The Cure (Kitab al Shifa), a compendium of ~ ~ Logic, Physics, Mathematics, and Metaphysics (Gutas 1988: 101¤.), `a summa of philosophical wisdom . . . in his own style' (Houser 1999: 110), which appeared in Latin only by ´ `shmeion' to `sign' by way of `signum' J. Deely -- (1982).

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La doctrine de la relation chez saint Thomas. Expose historique et ´ systematique. Paris: J. Vrin. Lombard, Peter (c.1095/1100­1160) (c.1150). Libri Quattuor Sententiarum (The Four Books of the Sentences). In PL 192 (Migne 1844¤.), cols. 522­963. Paris. McInerny, Ralph (1990). Boethius and Aquinas. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. Migne, J. P. (1800­1875) (ed.) (c.1844­1864). Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina (PL, customarily), 221 volumes. Paris. -- (c.1857­1866). Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca (PG, customarily), 162 vols. Paris. Morris, Charles W. (1971). Writings on the General Theory of Signs (¼Approaches to Semiotics 16). The Hague: Mouton. Ockham, William of (c.1285­c.1349) (i.1317/19). Scriptum in librum primum sententiarum ordinatio, as follows: Opera Theologica I (1967), Prologus et distinctio prima, ed. Gedeon ´ Gal with Stephanus Brown (time of composition discussed on pp. 34*­36*); Opera Theologica II (1970), Distinctiones ii­iii, ed. idem; Opera Theologica III (1977), Distinctiones iv­xviii, ed. Girardus I. Etzkorn; Opera Theologica IV (1979), Distinctiones xix­xlviii, ed. Girardus I. Etzkorn and Franciscus E. Kelley. St Bonaventure, NY: Editions of the Franciscan Institute of the University of St. Bonaventure, 1974­1988, in 17 vols. J. Deely Peirce, Charles Sanders (1838­1914) (i.1866­1913). The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. I­VI, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931­1935. Vols. VII­VIII, Arthur W. Burks (ed.), same publisher, 1958. All eight vols. in electronic form ed. John Deely. Charlottesville, VA: Intelex Corporation, 1994. The abbreviation CP followed by volume and paragraph numbers with a period between follows the standard reference form in using these volumes. -- (1904). On signs and the categories, from a letter to Lady Welby dated 12 October, in CP 8.327­341. -- (1905­1906). Ms. 283, partially published under the title, The Basis of Pragmaticism, in CP 1.573­574 (¼ms. pp. 37­45), 5.549­554 (¼ms. pp. 45­59), and 5.448n. (¼ms. pp. 135­148). Petrus Hispanus (Peter of Spain) (c.1245). Summulae Logicales, I. M. Bochenski (ed.). Rome: Marietti, 1947. Poinsot, John (1631/35). Cursus Philosophicus, 3 vols., B. Reiser (ed.). Turin: Marietti, 1930, 1933, 1937. -- (1632). Tractatus de Signis, subtitled The Semiotic of John Poinsot, extracted from the Artis Logicae Prima et Secunda Pars of 1631/5, using the text of the emended second impression (1932) of the 1930 Reiser edition and arranged in bilingual format by John Deely in consultation with Ralph A. Powell. First Edition; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Pages in this volume are set up in matching columns of English and Latin, with intercolumnar numbers every fifth line. (Thus, references to the volume are by page number, followed by a slash and the appropriate line number of the specific section of text referred to -- e.g., 287/3­26.) Also available as a full text database, stand-alone on floppy disk or combined with an Aquinas database, as an Intelex Electronic Edition. Charlottesville, VA: Intelex Corp., 1992. Raposa, Michael (1994). Poinsot on the semiotics of awareness, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly LXVIII.3 (Summer), 395­409. Robin, Richard S. (1967). Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce. Worcester: University of Massachusetts Press. -- (1971). The Peirce papers: A supplementary catalogue. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society VII.1 (Winter), 37­57. Sebeok, Thomas A. (1971). `Semiotic' and its congeners. In Linguistic and Literary Studies in Honor of Archibald Hill, I: General and Theoretical Linguistics, Mohammed Ali Jazayery, ´ Edgar C. Polome, and Werner Winter (eds.). Lisse: Peter De Ridder Press, 283­295; reprinted in Sebeok 1976: 47­58, and in Deely, Williams, and Kruse 1986: 255­263. -- (1975). The semiotic web: A chronicle of prejudices, Bulletin of Literary Semiotics 2 (December 1975), 1­63, with an Index of Names appearing in the following issue No. 3 (May 1976), 25­28; text reprinted with essential corrections and additions in Sebeok 1976: 149­ 188, to which reprint page numbers in the present essay are keyed. -- (1976). Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs. Lisse: Indiana University, Bloomington, and The Peter De Ridder Press, Netherlands. -- (1984). Vital signs. Presidential Address delivered October 12 to the ninth Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America, Bloomington, Indiana, October 11­14; subsequently printed in The American Journal of Semiotics 3 (3), 1­27, and reprinted in Sebeok 1986: 59­79. -- (2001). Galen in medical semiotics. In Global Semiotics, 44­58. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Soto, Dominicus (`Domingo de'; 1494­1560) (1529, 1554). Summulae (1st ed., Burgos; 2nd ed., Salamanca; 3rd rev. ed., Salamanca; Facsimile of 3rd ed. Hildesheim, NY: Georg Olms Verlag, 1980. ´ `shmeion' to `sign' by way of `signum' -- (1570). Summularum editio postrema, nunc denuo in Summulistarum gratiam ab in` numeris diligenter repurgata mendis Salamanca in aedibus Dominici a Portonariis, S.C.M. Typographi (en 200 maravedis). Vico, Giambattista (1668­1744) (1744). Scienza Nuova (3rd ed.; Naples), as edited by Fausto Nicolini. Bari: Laterza, 1928, and presented in the rev. trans. by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889­1951) (c.1931­1950). Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in the edition of G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees. London: Blackwell, 1953. John Deely (b. 1942) is Full Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas, Houston hdeelyj@stthom.edui. His main research interest is into the role experience plays in mediating objects and things, in particular the manner in which experience itself is a dynamic structure or web woven of triadic relations (signs in the strict sense) where elements (representamina, significates, and interpretants) interchange over time in the spiral of semiosis. His most recent principal publications include Four Ages of Understanding (2001), What Distinguishes Human Understanding (2002), The Impact on Philosophy of Semiotics (2003). A third edition of Basics of Semiotics (1988) is forthcoming in Bulgarian, Italian, and Estonian