On the Paradigm of Experience Appropriate for Semiotics

Position paper

“…For our purposes here, we reject the two-cultures view of scientist and scholar (Snow 1959(Snow , 1964. Only when 'scientist' is constrained to be 'inductive', 'empirical', or 'experimental' (see Ransdell 1982), can this antinomy even be imagined. The basic relationships in the necessary triadic abduction/deduction/induction preclude the pedestaling of any one process.…”

“…Moreover, these diverse fields can be broached and integrated with semiotics and other systems sciences. The paramount and, we posit, essential contribution of semiotics to this emerging synthesis lies in Peircean semiotic (Ransdell 1977(Ransdell , 1985a(Ransdell , 1985b and its acknowledgement of the panoply of sign relations and the participation of the interpretant -a doctrine rather than a science of signifying.…”

“…Any boundaries which become the justification for their contents demand incessant maintenance, at the cost of internal investments in metabolism and fantasy, Much venom has been expended, in accusation as well as in defensive jest, declaiming semiotics as a colonizer of well-established academic disciplines. At the same time, confusion reigns both among and beyond the cognoscenti as to whether semiotics is an approach, a field, a discipline, a method, a theory, a science, or a disease (Deely 1976(Deely , 1982aEco 1976Eco , 1980Ransdell 1979;Key 1973;Scruton 1981;Sebeok 1977b). Above all, semiotics must be a perspective.…”