The Sign and the Symbol
On how a ten-thousand-year-old solar symbol was annihilated by twelve years of political use, what that demonstrates about the irreversibility of semiotic contamination, and why the reclamation argument is correct about history and wrong about semiotics
The Sign and the Symbol
On Yuri Lotman's concept of the cultural space made entirely of signs, how meaning is generated at the boundaries between different sign systems, and why every culture is defined as much by what it excludes as by what it contains
The Sign and the Symbol
On Charles Sanders Peirce's triadic model of the sign, why his three categories represent genuinely different relationships between sign and world, and how understanding them reveals the mechanics of persuasion, religious experience, and the power of the image
The Sign and the Symbol
On Ferdinand de Saussure's discovery that there is no natural bond between word and thing, what follows from that discovery for the nature of language and reality, and why arbitrariness is a more radical idea than it sounds