The various " linguistic " and " cognitive " turning points in the twentieth century, their impasses, and the outline of a response in the terms of Peircian ontological and realist semiotics

Abstract

In the first lecture, we reminded you of the impasse reached in the ^20th century by certain " tournants ", particularly in linguistics (semiology, structuralism, philosophy of language, phenomenology) and cognition, before indicating the three major problems we had to face:

That of the relationship of language to the world ;
The relationship of our mind to the world, particularly insofar as our mind perceives the world ;
And finally, the relationship of language and signs tohuman action.

The aim of these lessons has been made clear: the aim is not to review the various directions taken by contemporary thinking on language or, even more generally, on the vast territory now marked out by signs, but to show how, on the basis of these three propositions and by favouring certain approaches which, historically, may appear to be antecedents of the ontological and realist semiotics deployed with an amplitude unequalled to date by Charles Sanders Peirce, it becomes possible to draw out an original perspective on the relationships between mind, signs and the world

The lesson ended with a few indications of how the metaphysician and semiotician from Milford, at the end of the ^19th century and the very beginning of the ^20th century, envisaged, not without a certain systematicity, a project of this type, which, as we shall see later, inspired many authors and can still serve as a guide today. Finally, we look at the extraordinary contribution made to his thinking on signs and ontology by a triple reading of Kant, George Boole and, above all, the medievals (notably Ockham and Duns Scotus).