Chapter 3: Semiosis: The Subject Matter of Semiotic Inquiry
Chapter 3: Semiosis: The Subject Matter of Semiotic Inquiry

Summary/Abstract: If we ask what it is that semiotic studies investigate, the answer is, in a word, action. The action of signs. This peculiar type of action, corresponding to the distinctive type of knowledge that the name semiotic properly characterizes, has long been recognized in philosophy in connection with investigations of the various types of physical causality. But in that connection, the “ideal” or objective factor, the pattern according to which the investigations themselves were able to establish the material, formal, and determinative dimensions of causality in the productive or “efficient” sense, appeared as something marginal. This objective factor pertains more to the observation than to the observed in its independent existence. Hence this factor was not clearly pertinent to the results of investigations which did not have as their aim the establishment of any essential connection as such between observer and observed, such as would make “observation” — an extrinsic formal connection between subject knowing and subject known — even possible in the first place.

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