SEMIOTICS HAS given rise to a variety of methods. No doubt this variety, already considerable, is bound to increase under the ingenuity of the growing band of semiotic workers.

But the question is whether semiotics as a whole consists in or can be identified with such methods. The question is whether, in coming into its own, semiotics will continue modern philosophy's obsession with method or will establish its theoretical framework with sufficient richness and flexibility to accommodate itself to the full range of signifying phenomena. Will semiotics, in other words, develop the full variety and flexibility of methods that an eventual understanding of these phenomena will evoke?

A method, after all, implements some aspect or aspects of a point of view; indeed, the systematic implementation of something suggested by a point of view is pretty much what a method is. But a point of view that can be fully implemented by a single method would be, on the whole, a very narrow viewpoint. The richer a point of view, the more diverse are the methods needed to exploit the possibilities for understanding latent within it.

This distinction between method and point of view, therefore, is actually a rather important one. It is like the distinction within logic between extension and comprehension: without the latter, the former would not be possible.

Modern philosophy was characterized by a search for a method. Descartes searched for an introspective method that could yield certainty at the foundation of the sciences. Leibniz searched for a calculatory method for resolving all the problems of philosophy, particularly those that had a bearing on religion and theological dispute. Spinoza sought a geometric method applicable to ethical discussion. Newton sought a mathematical method for interpreting the details of nature. And so on.

I came to think, in my own study of philosophy, that the search for a method was in a certain sense modern philosophy's failure. So engrossed were the moderns by their search for the one true method that they overlooked, in their very assumption of it, the perspective common to all of them that guided their search to begin with and, at the same time, made it futile. The one thread that unified the modern philosophers to me was the fact that they each began with the assumption that our ideas represent themselves.² These philosophers ended unable to explain and absolutely baffled by how we could know anything besides our own ideas, since ideas so construed are each one's own, that is to say, private, ideas.

The situation created by this presupposition was systematized by Immanuel Kant, especially in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787) but also in the whole set of the Critiques. What Kant did was to systematize the modem conundrum in such a way that, while communication as a true sharing of insight is absolutely impossible within the Kantian system, the appearance of communication can be sustained by the fact that the a-priori mechanisms of our sense and understanding are specifies-specific and as such the same in each of us. Thus, it can seem that we are communicating even though in reality the communication appearing to occur is impossible.

And this is not so different from the situation hypothecated by Leibniz, who explained communication ultimately through the hookup of the individual monads with the Divine Monad, the great communications satellite in the sky that made my representations correspond with yours and so on for every other creature forming and projecting its own private representations.

Now I say, in contrast with all of this, that semiotics provides not a method first of all but a point of view. From within this point of view it becomes clear that ideas are not self-representations but signs of what is objectively other than and superordinate to the idea in its being as a private representation. Semiotic is a perspective or a point of view that arises from an explicit recognition of what every method of thought or every research method presupposes. Semiotic arises from the attempt to make thematic this ground that is common to all methods and sustains them transparently throughout to the extent that they are genuine means by which inquiry is advanced. Semiotics, then, or the semiotic point of view, rests on the realization of a unique form of activity in nature, as we will look at in some detail in the chapters following, and for which, as we have seen, Charles Sanders Peirce coined the name semiosis.

This activity, the action of signs, is in fact presupposed by the very idea of method. Signs, that is to say, are required not only for any given method in philosophy or in the sciences, natural or human, but for the very possibility of there being such a thing as method or inquiry of any kind. Semiosis is a process of revelation, and every process of revelation involves in its very nature the possibility of deceit or betrayal. Every method reveals something (hence some truth about the world, some aspect of the world, or some field of investigation), and, insofar as it reveals, is a semiotic method, by which I mean simply that it is, as a communicative modality, something sign-dependent.

Conversely, any method ceases to be semiotic only as and insofar as it betrays its character as a method, by treating the signs upon which it relies as if they were merely objects. So we have bizarre methods, for example, in the recent history of philosophy, such as logical positivism, with its so-called verification theory of meaning, put forward as a means of removing nonsense from philosophy, by a twofold (and doubly arbitrary) stipulation telescoping the signification of dicisigns³ into their truth and further telescoping their truth into the sense-perceptible dimension or aspect as such of their signifieds. Thus, only a dicisign designating sensibly accessible significates could be true, and only true designations of such signifieds could have significance.

No sooner was this method announced than it was rightly denounced as a sham, on patent and blatant grounds that verification presupposes signification, for what cannot be understood can be neither proved (verified) nor disproved. This circularity made the ballyhooed method in fact untenable from the beginning. After more than a quarter of a century of beating around the bush on the point, we find such "greats" of the positivist era as A. J. Ayer informing us that, after all, the verification theory of meaning must be somewhat modified. In order to verify a proposition, the proposition must first be understood. But, if it can be understood independently of being verified, it must have some other "meaning" than that which depends directly on verification—some meaning, indeed, that makes verifi-cation thinkable and possible in the first place. This objection had been stated already in the first week of the debate, and hardly needed Ayer's belated acknowledgment to stick. (Indeed, what calls for explanation is the belatedness of the acknowledgment.)

So the verification theory, though paraded as a method for eliminating as "nonsense" metaphysical concerns from science and from philosophy itself, was rather a method for replacing philosophical questions with ideological commitments disguised as philosophy. The verification theory, in short, insofar as it involved a method, did exactly what any method does: it implemented a theory and point of view—in this case, a dogmatic and ideological one hostile to philosophical tradition and incapable of considering its own foundations without becoming internally inconsistent: a sorry approach indeed. The root incompatibility of the ideology behind the method with a semiotic point of view was already a primary sign of this antinomy at the foundations of the verification theory of meaning. The same would have to be said for Bertrand Russell's so-called "Theory of Descriptions" within logic, or B. F. Skinner's so-called "Behaviorism" (after Watson, for whom, unlike Sherlock Holmes' companion, consciousness counted for nothing): these "methods" did not merely implement a point of view, but paraded the point of view itself in the guise of a method, thereby objectifying the sign processes on which they relied in such a way as to make it appear, or at least enable one to pretend, that no other point of view on the objects considered could have legitimacy.

I distinguish then, first of all, a point of view from a method, and I want to say that semiotics, like logical positivism or behaviorism, is a point of view rather than a method. But, at the same time, unlike positivism or behaviorism, semiotics in its doctrinal foundation is not an ideological standpoint that can be disguised as a method of inquiry while in reality closing inquiry down.

While we can make the objection that, in practice, semiotics can never be ideologically free, as all semioticians as human inquirers hold some ideological stance, the point remains that any such ideological stance, however intrinsic to semioticians' understandings of "semiotics", is nonetheless extrinsic to the doctrine of signs, which does not in itself prescribe a given ideology disguised as a method of inquiry. Semiotics rather depends upon the maintaining of a point of view, which not only is transdisciplinary but also is in a basic sense presupposed to and therefore compatible with every method insofar as the method truly reveals something of the world or of the nature of the subject matter into which it inquires, including the arteriosclerotic ideologies confused with methods. That is to say (since even bad methods truly reveal), the compatibility of semiotics according to what is proper to it as realizing the role of the sign in every method is its capacity for revealing in the method what that method conceals as well as what it discloses—that is to say, the abiding difference between a method as implementing a point of view and the point of view itself implemented. In this way, a semiotic standpoint is able to reveal when too much has been excluded, as is always the case to the extent that an ideological stance is being concealed in the guise of a "method".

To be ideological and to be historically conditioned, therefore, are not necessarily the same. The latter is true of every attempt at inquiry, including semiotics. The former is true of semiotics only to the extent that and whenever the perspective proper to the sign is traded for something else in the subjectivity of the inquirer. But then this trade will inevitably reveal itself objectively in the public deployment of consequent sign-systems (for example, in the speech or writing of the inquirer), where it will become visible to others in the community of inquirers and subject to criticism with appropriate revision or rejection.

Thus, even the "method of verification", like the "method of dialectics", had need of some signs in order to deny other signs. Its illegitimacy lay not in the signs it used but in the signs it refused, to wit, the signs that would have carried the discourse beyond the arbitrarily stipulated boundaries and were covertly relied upon in order to assert the illegitimate boundaries in the first place.

What, then, are we to say the semiotic point of view is? And how is it that this point of view, unlike others, cannot properly be reduced to or converted into an ideology? To answer the questions in order: The semiotic point of view is the perspective that results from the sustained attempt to live reflectively with and follow out the consequences of one simple realization: the whole of our experience, from its most primitive origins in sensation to its most refined achievements of understanding, is a network or web of sign relations. This point of view cannot be reduced to an ideology without losing what is proper to it for the reason that its boundaries are those of the understanding itself in its activity of interpreting dependently upon the cognate interpretations of perception and sensation.

Since this network, which when brought to light through reflection establishes a novel perspective, is first of all a matter of experience, in this book we will stick strictly to the basics. We will begin at precisely that point where semiotics, in its contrast with semiosis—that is to say, as a thematically unified and organic network of knowledge—becomes possible, namely, in the reflective experience of linguistic animals. We will see that the origin of semiotics and the drawing of the line between human and other animals are of a piece, and that, at the same time, the origin of semiotics as the perspective proper to experience by that very fact extends the prospective knowledge semiotics entails beyond the biological boundaries of specifically human animals to encompass all those communicative modalities upon which the deployment and sustenance of specifically linguistic competence depend. Such communicative modalities begin with the obvious involvement of perceptual and sensory modalities hardly uniquely human but include ultimately too the physical environs that sustain these and further communicative modalities beyond the boundaries of what is sensible according to some given biological heritage.

The detailed extensions of semiotics to the living sphere as a whole, and beyond it to inorganic nature, are not matters of common experience ("cenoscopic") but rather matters that depend once formulated on experimental scientific designs for their establishment. As such, they exceed the province of this book, and are left for other works. Here I attempt only a sketch of the foundations and framework which make such detailed extensions feasible. It seems to me, as it seemed to Peirce (1908b: 8.343), "that one of the first useful steps toward a science of semeiotic [as he generally misspelled the term taken from Locke], or the cenoscopic science of signs, must be the accurate definition, or logical analysis, of the concepts of the science." After all, if the basics are grounded well and firmly grasped, their extensions and applications will result inevitably in the course of time.

The basic perspective these chapters aim to establish, then, is the perspective proper to the sign according to the being and activity it reveals in the experience of each of us. As virtual to all experience, the actual perspective in question is, therefore, testable analytically by each reader. Moreover, it is rooted first of all in common experience, precisely as that experience reveals itself as a constructed network built over time both through the biological heritage of the animal species as such (in our case, the species homo sapiens) and through the individual experiences whereby, atop the biological heritage, socialization and enculturation transpire. The basics of semiotics are a question, in the terms Peirce appropriated from Bentham (1816; see Peirce c.1902a: 1.241-242), of cenoscopic rather than idioscopic development, that is, they concern layman and specialist alike, and not specialists first of all.

A favorite metaphor, which I got from Sebeok (1975), and which I think he himself got from Jakob von Uexküll,⁴ is the metaphor for experience as whole as a semiotic web. We are all familiar at least a little bit with spiders and how they spin their webs and with what these webs do, namely, selectively trap other beings in the environment for the benefit and sustenance of the spider (which is why an ideology is the semiotic equivalent of reducing the human Lebenswelt to the praeter-human lines of an Umwelt, as we will see in chapter 5). Of course, the scheme sometimes backfires, as I once had occasion to observe. I was standing in the dining room of Stonecliffe Hall looking out into a small rock garden thinking of these matters when a spider happened to descend into my field of vision on a lengthening silken cord that was intended to be one among the several already drawn threads of a nascent web. As the animal descended, a sudden gust of wind nudged the spider ideways into a tangle with already drawn strands from which the spider proved unable to escape, as I learned from the spider's eventual death in the tangle. So this matter of spinning webs is not without an element of danger.

There are many approximations in the history of science and philosophy to the semiotic point of view. One of the easiest ways to approach the whole subject, indeed, is to trace historically these approximations and developments, as I have sometimes tried to do. Here I want to leave any historical observations to a later, subsidiary point in our study (chapter 7), in order to try to explain directly and with some exactness what this semiotic point of view is and how it develops into a perspective compassing the whole of our knowledge and belief and experience of reality.

One of the richest and fullest contemporary approximations to the semiotic point of view is the movement that is known today as hermeneutics. Springing again from the Continent (like rationalism and phenomenology, which it extends), this movement has come to challenge within philosophy the dominance of so-called linguistic analysis or linguistic philosophy in our universities. Important as it is (and I think it is very important), it yet belongs to what was characterized in chapter 1 as the "minor tradition" within semiotics proper. "Semiotics proper" is identified with the point of view here being explained as compassing the prospective whole of experience and therefore the "major tradition" of intellectual history in general and philosophical development in particular as we move beyond and away from the sterile oppositions of "realism" versus "idealism" (terms that characterize, between them, the Greek, Latin, and classical mode eras of philosophical history).

The major tradition of semiotic development as thus distinguished has this peculiarity, as we have seen: it includes the minor traditions but not conversely. This inclusion holds true of hermeneutics in particular (even though hermeneutics owes little or nothing to Saussure).

The reason is that hermeneutics tends to fasten onto an aspect, to a level or a phase, of the process of interpretation, namely, the linguistically specific phase, a phase that is distinctively human, but that is developed within hermeneutics in ways that tend, by overemphasizing the distinctively human possibilities, to close the distinctiveness of human interpretation in on itself in a kind of autonomous and infinite regress of semiosis. This self-enclosure of the linguistically specific phase of anthroposemiosis disguises and distorts the larger phenomenon of anthroposemiosis in its proper being as a local manifestation or region within the larger semiotic whole that must eventually be, even within interpretation, as broad as the process of semiosis in nature itself. Even that limited aspect of this process we call anthroposemiosis, in any event, assuredly includes within its compass the achievements of the natural sciences no less than those of the human sciences to which hermeneutics is over-adapted.

The semiotic point of view cannot be established theoretically by considerations that not only start from but are also confined to activities species-specifically human. Our activities of interpretation require being situated within the biological community, if we are to see with any exactitude how language emerges as something unique, that is to say, species-specific, to the population of human organisms within a larger semiosis. For this, it will also be necessary to clarify and remove definitively the all but universal confusion of language with communication. Such confusion is what led recent researchers, for example, to think they had taught language to chimpanzees. In fact their researches had merely seduced them into channeling the communications in which the animals had been engaged all along into new modalities designated by the researchers as "linguistic", but which functioned for the animals to be trained ("taught language") as nothing more than exotic communicative modalities to be mastered as a more or less necessary adaptation to environmental novelties being imposed upon them from without by their captors. (It was as if the medievals, on designating a given wall as "seen", mistook "being seen" for a property of the wall taken in its own existence. The old debates about extrinsic denomination soon precluded any fallacy so crude, but those conversations of Latin times were long forgotten by the time trainers of Sarah and Washoe applied for research grants! The animals, of course, like every other form of life, had been communicating all along, for which language remained completely unnecessary. The designation of a communicative modality as language, moreover, does not in any wise make that modality linguistic on the side of the modality used, any more than the designation of a wall as seen locates a property on the part of the wall.)

In these terms, it may be said that the semiotic standpoint results in a framework that gives a context to just the sorts of things that texts provide and that hermeneutics exegetes. This standpoint is particularly useful in showing those working in the area of literary concerns that an exclusive preoccupation with artifacts and the human activities of interpretation at that level is simply too narrow for semiotics as a whole. When such a preoccupation is taken by itself it leads to autism. Not to perceive that a maturely developed semiotic point of view provides a larger context for narrativity as something implied in, rather than defined by, the semiotic standpoint ab initio (as an implication of its adoption, so to say) is behind the persistent confusion (in the works of Ricoeur, for example, and in popular academic culture generally) of semiotics with structuralism. In fact, as we have already seen, structuralism, far from being the whole of semiotics, is only an aspect of semiotics. Indeed, when structuralism is pursued as if it were the semiotic whole, its practitioners simply import into the fresh vistas of semiotics the stale consequences of modem idealism, wherein the only thing known by the mind in all of its contexts is what the mind itself constructs.

One of the main themes and consequences of semiotics in this regard is to provide a strategy for getting beyond the terms of the debate within philosophy, literature, and history generally between realism and idealism (comparable to the terms of the debate between "capitalism" and "communism"). I have seen audiences go into mild shock over the thought that one does not have to choose between the two, but can instead simply move beyond them.

I may put this another way. An essential function of the semiotic point of view, what I think will come to be regarded as its decisive achievement historically, is its having grounded and given rise to a strategy for transcending the opposition in philosophy between the so-called realism of ancient and medieval times and the distinctively modem dilemma characterized by the label of idealism with its many forms (including "materialism", "positivism", and so forth). In other words, the requirements of semiotics cannot be met in the terms of any perspectives already established. The first requirement of semiotics is that it be developed on its own. The attempt to meet this requirement reveals from the outset that semiotics is capable of mediating a change of intellectual epoch and culture as profound and total as was the separating of medieval from ancient Greek times, or the separating of modern times from the medieval Latin era.

The reason for this is that a new definition and understanding of reality, of what we mean by "the real" as providing a focus of concern for and within human experience, is implicit in the standpoint of semiotic. Along with this new or redefinition of reality goes a dramatic paradigm shift in our notion of what is "objective" in its proper contrast with "subjective" being and "subjectivity" of every kind. Something of this has already come to light in our opening discussion. Much more will come into view in the chapters that follow, to be explained at every point in terms that have their bases in each person's own experience.

Thus I hope to show how the semiotic point of view naturally expands, given the simple realization stated above, to include the whole phenomenon of human communication—not only language—and, both after and as a consequence of that, cultural phenomena as incorporative of, as well as in their difference from, the phenomena of nature. The comprehensive integrity of this expansion is utterly dependent upon the inclusion of linguistic phenomena within the scheme of experience in a way that does not conceal or find paradoxical or embarrassing the single most decisive and striking feature of human language, which is, namely, its power to convey the nonexistent with a facility every bit equal to its power to convey thought about what is existent.

Let me make an obiter dictum on this point. When I was working at the Institute for Philosophical Research with Mortimer Adler on a book about language (i.1969-1974, a collaboration which did not work out), I was reading exclusively contemporary authors—all the logical positivist literature, the analytic philosophical literature, all of Chomsky that had been written to that date—in a word, the then-contemporary literature on language. And what I found in the central authors of the modern logicolinguistic developments—I may mention notably Frege, Wittgenstein, Russell, Carnap, Ayer, and even Brentano with regard to the use of intentionality as a tool of debate (Deely 1975, 1978)—was that they were mainly intent on finding a way to assert a one-to-one correspondence between language and mind-independent reality and to say that the only time that language is really working is when it conveys that correspondence. In fact, however, much of what we talk about and think about in everyday experience is irreducible to some kind of a prejacent physical reality in that sense. There is no atomic structure to the world such that words can be made to correspond to it point-by-point. Nor is there any structure at all to which words correspond point-by-point except the structure of discourse itself, which is hardly fixed, and which needs no such prejacent structure in order to be what it is and to signify as it does.

It is wonderful to look at the history of science and culture generally from this point of view, which is, moreover, essential for a true anthropology. The celestial spheres believed to be real for some two thousand years occupied huge treatises written to explain their functioning within the physical environment. Other examples include more simple and shortlived creatures that populate the development of the strictest science, such as phlogiston, the ether, the planet Vulcan; and examples can be multiplied from every sphere. The complete history of human discourse, including the hard sciences, is woven around unrealities that functioned once as real in the thinking and theorizing and experience of some peoples. The planet Vulcan (my own favorite example alongside the canals of Mars) thus briefly but embarrassingly turned up as interior to the orbit of Mercury in some astronomy work at the turn of the last century. But Vulcan then proved not to exist outside those reports at all. The objective notion of ether played a long and distinguished role in post-Newtonian physical science—as central in its own way as the celestial spheres were in the Ptolemaic phase of astronomy's development—before proving similarly to be a chimera.

So the problem of how we talk about nonexistent things, where nonexistent means nonexistent in the physical sense, is a fundamental positive problem with which the whole movement of so-called linguistic philosophy fails to come to terms. This is not just a matter of confusion, nor just a matter of language gone on holiday, but of the essence, as we will see, of human language.

To understand this fundamental insouciance of language, whereby it imports literary elements of nonbeing and fictional characters even into the sternest science and most realistic concerns of philosophy, we will find it necessary to reinterpret language from the semiotic point of view. For this, it is not enough to recognize that language itself is a system of relationships and contrasts between elements. We shall see that language itself as an objective network is part of a larger whole of objective relations, what I will call in chapter 5 the Umwelt or "objective world" of experience integrally taken, in relation to which the linguistic network exists symbiotically—that is, as itself feeding upon and being transformed by the structure of experience as a whole in its irreducibility to the physical environment. In a word, it will be necessary to see how language is a form, but only a form, of semiosis and of semiosis only in its anthroposemiotic modality.

I will proceed as follows. First I will outline in chapter 3 the basic subject matter of semiotic inquiry, which is the activity proper to signs, or semiosis. This, indeed, will establish the outline for the book as a whole, indicating at the same time the scope of the perspective properly called semiotic and the myriad of methods—both traditional and not yet developed—necessary to mine this perspective in full. Then in chapter 4 I will investigate what it is about the sign that makes it capable of acting or functioning in the manner peculiar to it.

From these general considerations providing the outlines of semiotics in its prospective totality, I will move in chapter 5 to the specific consideration of the action of signs within our experience, because it is best to establish the basic notions as the elements of a science cenoscopically considered, that is to say, in terms that are derived from what is accessible to everyone, namely, common experience. At the same time, we will see that what gives experience its irreducible quality is something quite different from what makes experience specifically human. In this way, still proceeding cenoscopically, we will be able to reach, from within anthroposemiosis, by purely analytical means, the central concept of zoösemiosis as well,⁵ the Umwelt or "objective world", inasmuch as the structure of human experience in its fundamental objectivity, though not in all of its specificity, is the common structure and factor in the experience as such of any animal.⁶

The newly opened panorama of semiosis at the plant level, both within and beyond the human environment as such, is as intriguing a concept as it is controversial, well deserving a serious reflection upon its place within the developing scheme of semiotics as a whole. No less intriguingthough even less well established—is the question of the distinctive causality of semiosis as it operates or might be operative in the physical universe at those levels—both microscopic and macroscopic—and in those spheres quite independent of plant life (as the animal and human zones of semiosis emphatically are not). Thus, in order to situate fully phytosemiosis in its prejacency to zoösemiosis and anthroposemiosis, it will be necessary to try in chapter 6 to give some body to the highly abstract but central notion of "objective" or "extrinsic formal" causality-the causality that makes the action of signs sui generis and almost equally at home among existent and nonexistent actors of the here and now—as it applies also to the universe at large on the environmental side of the interaction of bodies.

With this our outline of the subject matter as a whole will be completed. We will have proceeded, in the main, synchronically, with no more than a few diachronic allusions. The allusions need to be drawn together, and this is the task of chapter 7. The whole at this point will have made unmistakable something that is consequent upon the semiotic point of view, if not always unmistakably so, namely, the centrality of history as the anthroposemiotic transmission of culture to the doctrine of signs and to the proper life of human understanding even in its most "scientific" moments and synchronically conceived investigations. Thus, with the basic concepts synchronically and prospectively established, it will be time to close with some retrospective considerations, providing at least briefly and by way of an outline some remarks on the history of semiotics itself, as its shape has begun to form in the mists of the past, from the standpoint of its basic concepts and the "theory" of semiotics.

So the outline for the remaining chapters is as follows: semiosis, signs, zoö- and anthroposemiotics, phyto- and physiosemiotics, and the theory and historical outline of semiotics itself as a distinctive form of human consciousness. Such I deem to be the basics of semiotics, because these subject-areas or themes taken in concert show what is interesting and possible for semiotics as a phenomenon of intellectual culture. These are the concepts that establish the full amplitude of the semiotic point of view and reveal on the basis of that viewpoint the indefinite methodological possibilities for enriching in detail our understanding of a phenomenon as unified and yet as diverse as the action of signs, whereby indeed we exist in community and wherein the mind finds its proper food for thought.