Semiotics in Great Britain
pp. 229-251
in: Thomas Sebeok, Jean Umiker-Sebeok (eds), The semiotic sphere, Berlin, Springer, 1986Abstract
There is a sense in which every intellectual enterprise, beyond a certain point of self-conscious development, produces and includes a form of semiotic activity. To reflect on the methods, meaning, or history of any given discipline is to ask what precise significance it possesses and how that significance has been both produced and effectively understood. Semiotics in this broad sense has a claim to represent the master-science and explanatory matrix of all cultural activity. Such is the ambitious and all-embracing synthesis proposed by recent theorists like Umberto Eco.1 The semiotician surveys the whole world of human communicative behavior and can therefore say, with boundless confidence: humani nil a me alienum puto.
