Research Catalog

Title

Sign, textuality, world / Floyd Merrell.

Author

Merrell, Floyd, 1937-

Publication

Bloomington : Indiana University Press, ©1992.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xviii, 264 p. : ill.; 24 cm.

Summary

Sign, Textuality, World is an explication of Charles Sanders Peirce in the context of current intellectual concerns, including post-structuralism, science and the philosophy of science, and various notions of textualism, rhetoric, and theories of fictionality. Part I contrasts Peircean semiotics with Saussurean semiology, while examining both in terms of the contemporary discourse in the philosophy of science, logic, and mathematics. Part II uses key Peircean ideas in a general critique of three important texts: Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, Christopher Norris's Contest of Faculties, and Thomas Pavel's Fictional Worlds. Part III is a brilliant investigation of the work of Group Mu, in the light of the use of metaphors and models in Western thought, with emphasis on the age-old notion of language as a picture-mirror-model representing the world. Peirce's signifying process, semiosis, is shown to be an enabling mediator and moderator in the construction of a pluralism of "semiotically real" worlds, which, rather than "representing" the "real," enjoys a greater or lesser degree of commensurability with it. Thus Merrell emphasizes the relevance of Peirce's philosophy, logic, and cosmology--all signs. For him, as for Peirce, the idea of semiosis cannot be divorced from the pragmatics of concrete human interaction.

Series Statement

Advances in semiotics

Uniform Title

Advances in semiotics

Subject

• Peirce, Charles S. 1839-1914
• Saussure, Ferdinand de 1857-1913
• Peirce, Charles S
• Saussure, Ferdinand de
• Semiotics
• Discourse analysis
• pragmatics
• Semiotik

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [238]-258) and index.

Contents

Introduction: Whither Semiotics? -- Pt. I. Sign -- 1. Semiology-Structuralism Confronts Semiotics -- 2. The Consortium of Signs -- 3. Singularities or Mere Unthinkables? -- Pt. II. Textuality -- 4. The Heyday of Master Narratives -- 5. At the Edge of Uncertainty -- 6. Fiction, Fact, Phalanx, Phantasm -- Pt. III. World -- 7. How General Can Rhetoric/Semiotics Be Anyway? -- 8. Mapping Signs and Signing Models -- 9. By Way of an Afterthought.

ISBN

• 0253337488
• 9780253337481

LCCN

91026984

OCLC

• ocm24107760
• 24107760
• SCSB-1963938

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library