Susan Petrilli

Ah, right at the end, this book explains itself. It's a Festschrift for Sebeok's 80th birthday. It makes perfect sense for that purpose. It mostly talks about how Sebeok had a grand vision for semiotics, without talking much about what that grand vision actually is. I didn't really know what semiotics is before I read this book, and now that I have read it, I still don't know! Maybe this is characteristic for a field of science that has not really gotten properly underway. The field has to show more define itself before it can really start building. This is like a skyscraper - the more time they spend down below surface level, pounding in steel I-beam pilings, the taller the building is going to be. Anyway this book is mostly a bunch of promises.

One thing I either learned or anyway got a concrete idea about, even if it's a wrong idea, but maybe a good enough wrong idea to set me on my way... Peirce's notion of abduction has always been a mystery. But if I perceive something and I just think, "That's a tree" - I did not come up with this proposition via deduction or via induction. That's abduction! Well anyway this book led me to that notion.

Something that really bugs me about Sebeok's thinking, or anyway a facet that this book presents as Sebeok's thinking... the idea that human beings have some special distinguishing mental capacity... basically: language. If the notion where that humans are simply defined as organisms with language ability, OK, then maybe dolphin are humans too. There would be no logical identity between humans and homo sapiens. What about extraterrestrial intelligence? They could be human too! But, no, the notion here is that homo sapiens somehow necessarily is characterized by language ability. It's a bit crazy really. From an evolutionary standpoint, defining a species is rather iffy. When precisely homo sapiens arose from whatever preceding species... drawing these lines is quite arbitrary. Perhaps language ability is also an iffy notion?

Well, there was enough fun stuff here, e.g. about the importance of dialog, that maybe I won't sell off my Sebeok collection immediately. But neither am I moving it to the top of the pile! show less

Confession time: I only read this book because it was ~80 pages and counted for bookrace 2013. All I can say is that I'm very glad that semiotics exist, because like Baudrillard's Disneyland, it is the nonsense that makes my discipline real.