It seems the semiotician I spoke to had some ontology in mind that most famous semioticians don’t use.
A/The key foundational figure in semiotics was Saussure. His most-cited contribution was to say that words did not operate by referring to things in the world, but to concepts in the mind. He said other things as well, but they’re called structuralism rather than semiotics, I think.
In other words, he proposed that language uses intensional rather than extensional representations.
This is a crucial insight for logic, philosophy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. However, so far I don’t see that Saussure added anything to the notion of intensional representation developed by Frege, Church, and Carnap by 1947, and he had none of their logical rigor.
Saussure seems to have developed the concept independently around 1907. Somehow, despite his fame, his ideas seems not to have been referenced in the development of intensional logic in the decades after his death.
He said other things as well, but they’re called structuralism rather than semiotics, I think.
According to Wikipedia Structuralism is a subtopic of Semiotics.
However, so far I don’t see that Saussure added anything to the notion of intensional representation developed by Frege, Church, and Carnap by 1947, and he had none of their logical rigor.
It seems like Saussure died in 1913. As such he couldn’t really add something to Frege/Church/Carnap but rather presed them.
Sorry, what I meant was that there isn’t much to gain from his thoughts on the matter, because someone else did it more thoroughly, later, independently. Though Saussure’s formulation is much simpler and easier to understand.
Another update:
It seems the semiotician I spoke to had some ontology in mind that most famous semioticians don’t use.
A/The key foundational figure in semiotics was Saussure. His most-cited contribution was to say that words did not operate by referring to things in the world, but to concepts in the mind. He said other things as well, but they’re called structuralism rather than semiotics, I think.
In other words, he proposed that language uses intensional rather than extensional representations.
This is a crucial insight for logic, philosophy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. However, so far I don’t see that Saussure added anything to the notion of intensional representation developed by Frege, Church, and Carnap by 1947, and he had none of their logical rigor.
Saussure seems to have developed the concept independently around 1907. Somehow, despite his fame, his ideas seems not to have been referenced in the development of intensional logic in the decades after his death.
According to Wikipedia Structuralism is a subtopic of Semiotics.
It seems like Saussure died in 1913. As such he couldn’t really add something to Frege/Church/Carnap but rather presed them.
Sorry, what I meant was that there isn’t much to gain from his thoughts on the matter, because someone else did it more thoroughly, later, independently. Though Saussure’s formulation is much simpler and easier to understand.
I think the same is true for most people who died more than 100 years ago.