Semiotics between science and philosophy. A strategic epistemological duplicity

Abstract

Semiotics has a complex and delicate epistemological position: ascribed to the ranks of the language sciences, or sometimes to the information and communication sciences, it often emerges as a discipline with philosophical accents or pretensions, even though for some it should limit itself to an ancillary role, offering itself as a pure methodological contribution to other disciplines. The “disproportionate” contributions of semiotics - overflowing in its themes and overly sophisticated and jargonistic in its argumentations - may suggest the idea of finally renouncing the institutionalization of an autonomous discipline; on the other hand, it is believed that the task of considering all languages and their intertwined uses would be excessive in itself. This renunciation would favor the recognition of the semiotic as an anthropological domain of symbolic mediations, a domain that can be approached from different classical disciplinary perspectives, or at least from those that are better able to specify their object and the limits of their descriptive pertinences. In this contribution, we seek to propose some arguments for moving in an opposite direction, in order to reaffirm the project of semiotics as a sui generis discipline that seeks to articulate philosophy and science from a specific angle, that by which a semiotic critique of thought should articulate with a critical thinking of mediations.