Semiotic epistemology and the matter of the observer in Peirce and Lotman approaches

Abstract

This article discusses how the gnosiological subject of knowledge, or the observer, can be understood through two different semiotic perspectives: the one by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and the other by the semiotician of the School of Tartu-Moscow Yuri Lotman, as well as the correlation and the tension between both approaches. Both theorists share the rupture with the Cartesian conception about the dualistic relationship between the subject and the object of knowledge by situating the mediation-exerted action in the process of knowledge construction. Peirce does not favor the observer’s figure in his work; however, according to our reading, an eminently logical understanding of the observer’s idea can be pointed through the relationship among sign, object and interpretant. On the other hand, Lotman makes a set of allusions to the observer’s figure throughout his writings, whose understanding is directly related to the epistemological perspective of studying culture linked to the semiosphere. Through the dialogue between the authors, or yet, through the epistemological complementarity between their ideas, considering the approximations and distances between them, we delimited the following contact points: the sign mediation present in the process of knowledge construction; the constitution of the observer in the midst of semiosis; the validation of knowledge and, finally, the objectivity.