On the padadigm of experience appropriate for semiotics

pp. 427-437

in: Michael Herzfeld, Margot D. Lenhart, Semiotics 1980, Berlin, Springer, 1982

Abstract

The thesis of my paper is that it is doubtful that any distinction should be drawn between empirical and non-empirical semiotics or even between experimental and non-experimental semiotics. This tends to reproduce within the semiotics movement the present academic distinction between the sciences and the humanities which semiotics should aim at discouraging, rather than reinforcing. But to overcome this undesirable dichotomy, it is necessary to disentangle the conceptions of the experiential, the experimental and the empirical from certain other complexes of ideas with which they have become associated by accident rather than necessity.