Abstract
We have drawn on the lessons of the previous lecture and recalled the contribution, but also the limits, of etymology to the understanding of language and signs : a reflection present in the Cratylus, which we will find again in Abélard and in the 12th century : language does not give the real at a stroke ; between the thing and the idea comes in third the meaning of words [4]. As far as Aristotle is concerned, we have also recalled : his distinction between sign and symbol, which makes it possible 1) to distinguish between animal and human registers (indissociable from the social and political inscription of human relations based on philia, of which language is the cement ; 2) to broaden the fields of research: that of the symbol being reinvested on the side of the linguistic sign (hence the triple reading that the Middle Ages would make of it, starting notably with Boèce : spoken signs, written signs, expression of the soul, with emphasis on logic, reasoning, syllogism and the space of knowledge). As for signs, they retain their place in rhetoric, poetics and physiognomy, as well as in the structure of enthymemes or certain figures of the syllogism, and in the way they participate in modes of inference such as induction or abduction. The privilege accorded to linguistic signs is not insignificant : a language of things would be futile. By using words as " symbols " of things, we define them in terms of a relation of reference to reality, not of strict parallelism or perfect symmetry, but which links one to many, and not one to one, one and the same name to a plurality of things. Hence the taxonomic function of human language, which depends not on words, but on our cognitive, logical or rational capacities. Words and thoughts are never dissociated from the world : semiotics and ontology are one and the same. Hence the dual role of categories, of these " logoi ", so many " definitions ", in short, " intermediaries " between words and things.
