IN THE United States, in contrast with the predominantly literary and linguistic development semiotics has undergone in the more typically European contexts, the development of semiotics has taken a rather different turn, influenced especially perhaps by Thomas A. Sebeok and the many projects associated with the Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies which he chaired at the Bloomington campus of Indiana University. This development shows promise of providing for the semiotics movement as a whole a new and larger framework for the conduct of research, one that is, to tell the truth, more in keeping with the possibilities contained in Locke's original adumbration of the place of semiotics among the sciences, natural and human alike.

It helps often to have a label identifying important differences, and in this case the labels have largely been provided by the developments themselves. All that is needed is to pluck from the tree of established usages the terms most fruitful for conveying the flavor of the paradigm shift semiotics continues to undergo sociologically, as it expands outward from the literary and the linguistic to take in further the realm of biological forms and, indeed, evolutionary development in general. For the very emergence of semiotic animals is already itself a thirdness respecting the general development of the physical universe. What these terms are was suggested in the French context by Georges Mounin, inadvertently and in spite of himself, as early as 1970 (57n.): "the term semiotic has made its way into French ... as a designation for semiology in general—an ill-advised usage... ."

What I want to bring out are the underlying reasons why Mounin experienced the emerging usage as "ill-advised", and, at the same time, paradoxically, I want to point out that what was ill-advised was not the emergence of the new usage, but the attempt to equate it with the established usage whereby the designation "semiology" had come to stand for a part mistaken for the whole prospective of a doctrine of signs. From the point of view of the North American development, it turns out to have been profoundly misleading for Decio Pignatari (1971: 27) to announce: "In Europe, Semiotics is called Semiology...."

Asa Berger correctly noted (1982: 14, 17) that "the essential breakthrough of semiology is to take linguistics as a model and apply linguistic concepts to other phenomena—texts—and not just to language itself". So far so good. But if that be the case, then the essential breakthrough of semiotics, by contrast, is to see that the phenomenon of semiosis requires a model within which linguistic phenomena taken together appear as a subset of a much broader range of sign-activity which cannot even be confined to the cultural side of the line defining our ideas of the natural world. In other words, if semiology is rightly taken as a proper name for the genre of semiotics studying the sign as "first of all a construct", in the exact expression of Paul Perron (1983: 1), then semiotics by rights should be taken inclusively to name that larger realm of which semiology forms but a distinguished part, including, as it does in anthroposemiosis, the highest achievements of semiosis, undoubtedly literary.

What I would like to do here, then, is suggest a way of broadening the consideration of literary semiotics to include in some sense natural phenomena as well as purely cultural and literary texts. Thereby we may see if the notion of narrative as semiotically conceived might not recapture something of the classical philosophical understanding that saw cultural phenomena—including literature—as in some sense an extension of and linked with a larger world of nature which cultural beings no doubt may take for granted and even ignore in their round of life, but which remains nonetheless the inevitable context in which they move and on which they depend even as cultural. For it is this larger ambience which provides in the first place the materials or, as we may say, the raw possibilities of cultural creations—including literary texts, just as it subsequently provides for their sustenance.

In his 1984 International Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies (ISISSS) workshop on "Semiosis as a Psychologically Embodied Phenomenon", Gary Shank proposed for semiotics the notion of narrative which I would like to make the center of my reflections here. Human beings, he suggested, "are essentially narrative as opposed to the other animals." This is an interesting notion and a highly semiotic one. We hear much of formal and logical structures in the context of semiotics. Yet the essential transmission of culture to children takes place first of all under the guise of stories—that is to say, narrative. The animals other than human do not do this. They do not bring their young up on stories, but on instinct and examples—examples of a straight behavioral kind, not examples of heroism or adventure embodied in narrative tales such as sustain the cultures of humankind and constitute the substance of the enculturation of children in all societies. We (perhaps the literary semioticians above all) have to face the question raised by Jerome Bruner in his first class of that 1984 ISISSS (May 31): "Why can children understand stories so much earlier than logic?"

Anthropologists bring to our attention rich and exotic data that similarly attest to the importance of narrative among all the peoples of the earth. It can perhaps be said that the first of the narrative universals we ought to consider, therefore, is the universal role of narrative as the root of the transmission of culture—the root, as Brooke Williams points out in her essay on history and semiotic (1985), of the distinctively human semiosis whereby biological heredity is transcended in the cumulative transmission of learning that narrative alone makes possible.

From this point of view, a number of clarifications become possible that are of the first importance for semiotics itself in defining its own future and in seizing on the unique opportunities opened up by the development in our day of the doctrine of signs. For the first time in perhaps three hundred years, semiotic makes possible the establishment of new foundations for the human sciences, foundations making possible in turn a new superstructure for the humanities and the so-called hard or natural sciences alike. Such a framework has been often dreamed of, but semiotics for the first time puts it within our reach, provided only that we have an understanding of the sign and its essential functionings sufficiently rich to prevent closing off semiotic research within the sphere of constructed signs.

In this regard, the actual development of semiotics in our time provides a number of clues that should not be neglected in our attempts to interpret what sort of human phenomenon we are dealing with. "While every contributor to Semiotica", Thomas Sebeok pointed out in 1971 (56), "may indulge his personal taste when attaching a label to the theory of signs", the terminology within the same piece of discourse will not oscillate ad libitum, for the "initial selection will have signaled" to the sophisticated readership the tradition with which the author in question stands principally aligned.

It is well known that semiotics as we find it today traces back mainly to two contemporaneous pioneers, one in the field of linguistics and one in the field of philosophy. The first of these, Ferdinand de Saussure, envisioned the possible developments under the label of semiology, which seems to have been a word of his own coining, fashioned, of course, from the Greek semeion. The second, C. S. Peirce, chose the name semiotic, also fashioned from the Greek but not of Peirce's own coining. Peirce derived his vision of the possible development we now see being actualized, as he himself tells us, from the text with which John Locke concludes his Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

For Saussure, the "science" of signs was to be a branch of social psychology and linguistics a subspecies within that branch, albeit the most important one. Of this "possible science", of course, Saussure himself did not say a great deal. But he did wisely caution that, "since it does not yet exist, one cannot say what form it will take" (i.1906-1911: 33)—a wise caution largely ignored, it must be said, by even the most brilliant of those in our own day who took their early inspiration from Saussure and proceeded to develop a "science" of signs centered exclusively on literary texts and other artifacts of culture, which were always treated on the patterns of language and almost as of a piece with it. Within this tradition, the possibilities of semiotic understanding, though very rich and diversified, have always been restricted in highly artificial ways in terms of what Paul Bouissac, among others, has repeatedly pointed out (for example, 1979, 1981) as glottocentrism.

To this extent, semiotic development has undoubtedly been hampered in establishing the perspective fully proper to itself by some inevitable entanglement with the coils of modern philosophy—the work of the Kantian critiques, in particular, according to which there is no world known or knowable beyond the phenomena constructed by the understanding itself according to its own hidden mechanisms and ineluctable laws. Writing within this tradition, Terence Hawkes (1977: 18) reminds us that:

It follows that the ultimate quarry of structuralist thinking will be the permanent structures into which individual human acts, perceptions, stances fit, and from which they derive their final nature. This will finally involve what Fredric Jameson has described as [1972: 209] 'an explicit search for the permanent structures of the mind itself, the organizational categories and forms through which the mind is able to experience the world, or to organize a meaning in what is in itself essentially meaningless'.

This tradition, as I have noted, originally flourished under the banner of semiology, a term that today remains far from desuetude. It has, however, been greatly and increasingly influenced in recent years by the other semiotic tradition, which develops not from Saussure but from Peirce and Morris and a number of scientific workers. It does not seem too much to say that, under the pressures of this influence, we have witnessed the coming into being, alongside the term sémiologie, the newer term sémiotique, a term which, without displacing "sémiologie" entirely, has come to dominate over it and, to a certain extent, replace it, without, however, so far removing the intractable bias toward glottocentrism and philosophical idealism that characterized semiotic development in the Romance areas.

This bias and developing influence, of course, is by no means restricted to the Romance areas. Within current philosophy, David Clarke (1987: 8; cf. 120-121, 137, and passim) has made a belated attempt to define semiotic itself in the restrictive terms already established as proper to semiology: an "attempt to extend analogically features initially arrived at by examining language use to more primitive signs, with logical features of language becoming the archetype on which analysis of these latter signs is developed". It is simply a misnomer to title a book based on such a thesis Principles of Semiotic. To try to reduce semiotic to the status of a subalternate discipline within the dimensions of current linguistic philosophy already evinces adherence to the modern perspectives of idealism which semiotics points beyond.

Among modern philosophers, the one who struggled most against the coils of idealism and in the direction of a semiotic was Martin Heidegger. His failure to free himself from the modern logocentrism is, to be sure, a testimony to its pervasiveness in modern culture, and to the scale of the task semiotic in its fullest possibilities has to face. Yet in the debate between realism and idealism, he is the one who perhaps most clearly brought to the fore the fact that (1927: 207), whatever its drawbacks and "no matter how contrary and untenable it may be in its results", idealism "has an advantage in principle" over realism. That advantage lies in the simple fact that whenever we observe anything, that observation already presupposes and rests within a semiosis whereby the object observed came to exist as object—that is to say, as perceived, experienced, or known—in the first place.

No one, including Heidegger, realizes this fact better than the semiotician. Indeed, at the heart of semiotics is the realization that the whole of human experience, without exception, is an interpretive structure mediated and sustained by signs. So it is perhaps not surprising that much of the original semiotic development in our time has taken place along the tracks and lines of a classical idealism in the modern sense, an environment and climate of thought within which the structuralist analysis of texts and narratives is particularly comfortable.

Yet we are entitled to wonder if such a perspective is enough to allow for the full development of the possibilities inherent in the notion of a doctrine of signs—to wonder if the "way of signs" does not lead outside of and well beyond the classical "way of ideas" of which Locke also spoke. We are entitled to wonder if what we need is not rather, as the recent collaborative monograph by Anderson et al. calls for (1984: 1), "a semiotics which provides the human sciences with a context for reconceptualizing foundations and for moving along a path which, demonstrably, avoids crashing headlong into the philosophical roadblock thrown up by forced choices between realism and idealism, as though this exclusive dichotomy were also exhaustive of the possibilities of interpreting human experience".

Such a development seems to be what is taking place in the tradition of semiotic. This tradition, in fact, given its name by Locke, had reached the level of explicit thematic consciousness and systematically unified expression only very late—as far as we currently know, not before the Tractatus de Signis essayed in 1632 by the Iberian philosopher of Portuguese birth, John Poinsot (Sebeok 1982; Deely 1988). But, as Sebeok remarks (1976: 1), what we are faced with, under many different names fragmented by the perspectives from which those names spring, is "an ancient discipline" developing through many channels and byways toward the era of its full thematic systematization and baptism under its own name and according to the perspective proper to itself. For this same discipline in nucesemiotic as the doctrine of signs—is discernible in the most ancient origins of Greek medicine, philosophy, and linguistic reflections, as recent work has begun to exhibit (Romeo 1976, 1977, 1979; Deely 1982, 1985; Eco and Deely 983; Eco 1984; Eschbach and Trabant 1983; Doyle 1984).

This tradition of Poinsot-Locke-Peirce, unlike that of Saussure, does not take its principal and almost exclusive inspiration from human language and speech. It sees in semiosis a broader and much more fundamental process, involving the physical universe itself in human semiosis, and making of semiosis in our species a part of semiosis in nature. Abduction, the process whereby alone new ideas are seized upon—ideas further to be developed deductively and tested inductively, beginning again the cycle, or, rather, spiral (Deely 1985a: figure 2; 1985b)—is first of all a phenomenon of nature. It works with constructed signs, but not only with constructed signs, and not with constructed signs first of all.

We have here two traditions or paradigms, which have to a certain extent handicapped the contemporary development by existing within it under sociological conditions of opposition, an opposition not only uncalled for logically, but one which depends on a perverse synecdoche where a part is mistaken for the whole. Semiotics forms a whole of which semiology is but a part.

Let me try to clarify the relationship by applying a linguistic metaphor. Philosophers of Latin times made the distinction between what they called ens reale and ens rationis a staple of their discourse, and they assigned in general a very clear sense to this dichotomy. They nowhere took effective notice, however, of the fact that the so-called beings of reason have a kind of reality in their own right, and that there is something curious about a distinction so drawn that one of its terms includes the other—something that requires further explanation. From the standpoint of human experience, the greater part of what we call culture, also social roles, is constituted precisely by so-called being that, from this same standpoint, "reality"—what we experience directly in everyday life—is a mixture irreducible to so-called ens reale.

Certainly the themes and objects of what I have here called "semiology", that is, the texts and themes of literature and language-constituted phenomena generally, belong to the order of entia rationis in the Latin sense. But, in the Latin sense, this object domain was also shown to be dependent upon a larger whole and ordered to that larger whole—namely, the universe of nature as we experience it. As autonomous, the sphere of human culture is but relatively autonomous, as transcending, but only by incorporating and resting upon, a physical environment shared with all the forms of biological life in a larger network—biosemiosis—of mutual dependence. The understanding of that larger whole precisely in terms of semiosis defines the complete task of which cultural semiotics forms a part.

The perspective of semiotic is the perspective in which "real being" and "being of reason" come together, not the perspective in which they are opposed. As John Poinsot, the first semiotician to thematize this point, put it (1632a: 118/2-6):

We are discussing the sign in general, as it includes equally the natural and the social sign, in which perspective even those signs which are mental artifacts—namely, stipulated signs as such—are involved.

not only a reconfirmation of the evolutionary processes which went on before man appeared on the scene, but continues as a dual semiotic consecution that can scarcely be uncoupled in practice: one track language-free (or zoosemiotic), the other language-sensitive (or anthroposemiotic). Semiosis must be recognized as a pervasive fact of nature as well as of culture.

Within this framework, Sebeok (1984a: 3) reminds us, the tradition of semiology is a subordinate part in relation to semiotics to the extent that semiology is fixed upon "that minuscule segment of nature some anthropologists grandly compartmentalize as culture."

Let me cite Sebeok's original description of terms on this theme of the two traditions (1977: 181ff.):

The chronology of semiotic inquiry so far, viewed panoramically, exhibits an oscillation between two seemingly antithetical tendencies: in the major tradition (which I am tempted to christen a Catholic heritage), semiosis takes its place as a normal occurrence of nature, of which, to be sure, language—that paramount known mode of terrestrial communication which is La-marckian in style, that is, embodies a learning process that becomes part of the evolutionary legacy of the ensuing generations—forms an important if relatively recent component....

The minor trend, which is parochially glottocentric, asserts, sometimes with sophistication but at other times with embarrassing naivete, that linguistics serves as the model for the rest of semiotics—Saussure's le patron générale—because of the allegedly arbitrary and conventional character of the verbal sign.

This theme of "the two traditions" is one that needs to be developed very carefully if it is to be rightly understood. It is not at all a matter of "two traditions": one ('Anglo-Saxon') arising from Peirce, the other ('Continental') arising from Saussure, which "seem to have developed separately and without interpenetration", as Parret erroneously asserts (1984: 220). Such an assertion is true neither sociologically nor theoretically. Nor is it a matter (Watt 1984: 104, 106, glossing Percival 1981) of Saussure's "longterm position in semiotic history, and his present utility", on the ground that "almost everything that is based on Saussure can just as well be based on older sources, and nothing is lost by doing so". Still less is it a question of whether (ibid.: 130, glossing Atkins 1981) "Derrida has not unseated 2000 years of 'Western metaphysics': at most he has (unwittingly) exposed a few of Saussure's inadequacies, a very different matter."

What is at issue simply is the intent and scope of the term semiotic as Locke introduced it, and of the notion of "reality" as the perspective Locke labelled opens unto it (Deely 1986b). The "major and minor traditions", rightly understood, are no more opposed than are "ens reale and ens rationis" in the perspective proper to a doctrine of signs.¹ It is not a relation of exclusion that obtains but a relation of part to whole—and of a pars pro toto fallacy that prevails when proponents of the part mistake it for or try to set it in opposition to the whole.

If in Europe, as we have seen Pignatari allege (1971: 27),"semiotics is called semiology", we see that, in Europe, something false is directly spoken, but something true is also indirectly spoken and through a metonymy. Inheritors of the Iberian university traditions, both Portuguese and Spanish, are in a privileged position to contribute to this truth, through a recapturing and making vital to the contemporary development of semiotic of the reflections on the sign undertaken by their own thinkers between Ockham and Descartes.