Sign Levels: Language and Its Evolutionary Antecedents: 96 (Philosophical Studies Series, 96) - Tapa dura

Reseña del editor

Since the revolution in philosophic method that began about a century ago, the focus of philosophic attention has been on language as used both in daily conversation and in specialized institutional activities such as science, law, and the arts. But language is an extremely complex and varied means of communication, and the study of it has been increasingly incorporated into such empirical disciplines as linguistics, psycho linguistics, and cognitive psychology. It is becoming less clear what aspects of language remain as proper subjects of philosophical study, what are to be "kicked upstairs" (J. L. Austin's phrase) to the sciences. This work is a study of those logical features of language that remain central to philosophy after completion of kicking up. It conducts this study by describing similarities and differences between signs at differing levels, starting with natural events as primitive signs in the environments of their interpreters, and proceeding to pre­ linguistic signaling systems, elementary forms of language, and finally to the forms of specialized discourse used within social institutions. The investiga­ tion of comparative features requires isolating basic mental capacities that are present in the most primitive forms of organisms capable of sign interpretation. The problem then becomes one of tracing the emergence from these capacities of such categories as substance, attribute or quality, and quantity that we apply to natural languages. The study of sign levels is thus the construction of a genealogy of logical categories marking the develop­ ment of natural languages.

Reseña del editor

Through a variety of logical/linguistic investigations, the past century witnessed some of the most important advances in the history of philosophy. The outcome, however, has been the largely isolated results of a piece-meal approach to philosophy. In his landmark work Sign Levels, D.S. Clarke provides readers with an integrative framework designed to overcome this lack of sustained focus. Drawing on the pragmatist tradition of semiotic of Peirce and Morris, he traces the development of the logical categories of language to the more primitive sign levels of natural events and signals. The concluding chapters discuss the unique features introduced by spoken natural languages and the written specialized languages used within social institutions.
This bold venture into synthetic philosophy provides:

* a methodology for comparing language to primitive sign levels that avoids reductionism;

* comparisons and contrasts between sign levels that enable distinctions between necessary and contingent features of language;

* an integrative framework for relating isolated results in linguistic philosophy, experimental psychology, and ethology;

* a means of resolving some of the principal metaphysical disputes derived from linguistic investigations.