Naturalness of semiotic categorization: from perceptual genesis to semantic deference concerning the referent

Abstract

As they go back « to the (natural) sources of meaning », Groupe µ’s Principia Semiotica tend to question the whole semiotic tradition, which, by looking mainly at texts, had mostly insisted on the great inventiveness and cultural diversity of sign systems. By putting the stress on the naturalness and non-arbitrariness of semiosis, Groupe µ challenges the « axiom of conventionality » that prevails in contemporary, especially structuralist, semiotics. At the same time, Groupe µ tackles the epistemology of « linguistic (or more generally symbolic) idealism », which became prevalent as a result of some « linguistic turn » in the twentieth century and took conventional categorization as the only source of semiosis and knowledge. By taking a close look at perceptual sources of primal semiosis, Groupe µ restores an epistemology, which is both realist – as it takes the world’s organization to be prior to, and an incentive for, its structuration by language – and empiricist – as it takes sense experience to be the way such an incentive operates and therefore to be the first source of semiosis and knowledge. Because it stresses that the natural cognitive processes which rule such a semiosis are continuous with other material processes within the living world, semiogenetics turns out to stand by an epistemology which is also more naturalistic and materialist than culturalist and language-oriented. Yet, according to Groupe µ, the further stages of semiosis are the locus of an intersubjective semiosis, which is more arbitrary and culture-dependent. Our own work on semantic deference however shows that the division of linguistic labour, which ensures the intersubjectivity of meaning, does not necessarily entail conventionality, but can also, for at least some words, be linked to a realist epistemology, which attaches great value to the naturalness rather than arbitrariness of semiosis.