Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

postulated as the “doctrine of signs” under the name of semeiotiké, or when, in 1764,
Johann H. Lambert wrote a specific treaty called Semiotik. The term, deriving from the
Greek word semeîon (sign) and sema (signal), gave rise to various others, like semeiotica
or semology. The classical period was particularly fervent in terms of philosophical debates
round the issues of the nature of representation. From Platonic Realism (regarding the
existence of universals, i.e. the belief that forms and abstractions such as “humanity” and
“truth” exist regardless of human perception in sensory terms), to Aristotelian Realism (the
view that universals exist simply as types or properties and away from objects of the
external world) the main belief has been that the world is as we perceive it, almost in the
reductive “seeing is believing” sense. This obviously had been the subject of debate (as is
the concept of “real” for that matter), as early as when John Locke stressed this idea in his
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) when he referred to semeiotiké, as “the
business whereof is to consider the nature of signs the mind makes use of for the
understanding of things, or conveying its knowledge to others” (in Deely 1994:109).
It is relevant to say that Peirce states that “we think only in signs” (ibid.) as they
can come with the appearance of words or sounds, images, objects, odours, etc. Peirce,
however, also notes that “nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign”. Therefore, a
sign may be almost anything provided that we decide to attribute a certain meaning to it or
understand it as signifying something, and usually representing something other than itself.
Different systems of conventions are all unconsciously related to the manner we interpret
signs. It is this consequential use of signs which is at the core of the concerns of semiotics.
Before Saussure, the study of language had been mainly diachronic, that is, directed
at its changing forms across history; Saussure distinguishes his area of concern as
synchronic, how a language works at a given moment as a rule-governed system. To do
this he introduces a “dyatic”, two further distinctions, between langue (the system of a
particular language allowing someone to generate a meaningful sentence, according to
rules for word-formation and sentence structure) and parole (what a person utters, their
writing or speech), between signifier (significant, the form which the sign takes) and
signified (signifié, the thing or concept it represents). On challenging this commonsense
notion of “words”, Saussure reactivated the distinction between signifier and signified.
Their relationship is referred to as “signification” and when the two are joined together
they form a sign.
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