The Platonic doctrine that universals or essences exist independently of individuals which instantiate them. Realism in this sense is opposed to nominalism. In its extreme form, it supposes that there is some kind of Platonic realm where universals exist timelessly and that particulars are imperfect copies of their universal counterparts. Aristotle’s realism was more moderate. He reversed the Platonic doctrine and held that the fullest reality is found in existing particulars in which universals inhere. But he also attributed reality to universals. Those who accept this doctrine today champion the reality of natural classes and abstract entities and such ‘univerals’ as laws and properties (including moral properties) rather than ‘Platonic forms’.
Another form of realism, external realism, opposes idealism. The principal intuition of those who accept this kind of realism is that the external world exists independently of thought about it – reality exists separately from consciousness or mental representations. Since, on this view, the world is how it is independently of what we believe about it, then whether or not what we believe is true or false will depend on whether it corresponds with the facts of the matter. External realists accept that there may be unknowables, facts that we have no human capacity for cognizing. In its extreme form, external realism tends to merge with nominalism, the view that, though the world is stocked with plenty of real things that are completely independent of what we think about them, our knowledge of the world cannot transcend its linguistic and psychological basis to meaningfully connect with ‘things in themselves’. Michael Dummett has rounded out the modern form of external realism by further characterizing it as the view committed to the principle of excluded middle, and holding that, for any property, an object either must have that property or not. Any view that does not accept all of the assumptions of external realism is said to be anti-realism (Dummett 1978).
There are many other varieties of realism (or anti-realism). Internal realism, advocated by Hillary Putnam, denies that there are incognizables and rejects the correspondence theory of truth in favour of the view that truth must be understood, not as correspondence with the facts, but as the result of inquiry carried out long enough and in the right way (Putnam 1987). Scientific realism covers a wide variety of viewpoints including that scientific theories refer to real features of the world and, also, that a good and useful theory is not necessarily a true one.
Charles S. Peirce advocated a form of realism that resembles in some ways Putnam’s internal realism, particularly in the view that truth must be understood in terms of the projected settlement of belief at the end of inquiry. But Peirce enriched the conception of realism by developing the position advocated by Duns Scotusthat reality includes far more than the existent. Peirce identified three categories of reality: qualia or properties (firstness), facts or events (secondness), and types or laws (thirdness). The first and third categories are general, opposing Peirce to nominalism. It was Peirce’s opinion that the ‘battle’ between nominalism and realism is one of the most crucial struggles in philosophy:
Though the question of realism and nominalism has its roots in the technicalities of logic, its branches reach about our life. The question whether the genus Homo has any existence except as individuals, is the question whether there is anything of any more dignity, worth, and importance than individual happiness, individual aspirations, and individual life. Whether men really have anything in common, so that the community is to be considered as an end in itself, and if so, what the relative value of the two factors is, is the most fundamental practical question in regard to every institution the constitution of which we have it in our power to influence.
(Peirce 1992c: 105)
In the fine arts, realism usually refers to styles and techniques that emphasize common conceptions or ordinary experience. (NH)
Armstrong, D. M. (1978) Universals and Scientific Realism, 2 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haack, S. (1987) ‘Realism’, Synthese, 73: 275–299.
Peirce, C. S. (1992) ‘Review of Fraser’s The Works of George Berkeley’ (1871), in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol. 1, ed. N. Houser and C. Kloesel, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 83–105.
Term commonly used to designate the thing in the world to which signs refer. This consists of available things such as the real chair one is sitting on while one produces the sign, and unavailable things, for example Napoleon: ‘in which case there may be a long list of sign-situations appearing in between the act and its referent: word – historian – contemporary record – eye-witness’ (Ogden and Richards 1923: 11). In light of this definition certain similarities with the concepts of Peirce and certain dissimilarities with those of Saussure should be noted. Peirce’s sign triad includes an interpretant and a representamen as well as an object which itself can be either immediate or, like a referent, dynamic – that is to say, existing in the world but not directly available at the same time and place as the sign. Saussure’s dyadic sign, on the other hand, comprises a signifier and also a signified, the latter being a mental concept. In some accounts of semiology, the signified is confused with a referent or, more frequently, supplemented with the concept of referent as the entity that Saussure neglected. However, Saussure’s Cours focuses on the relation in the sign between a mental sound pattern and a concept, not on the relation between linguistic signs and referents. (PC)
See also OGDEN, POST STRUCTURALISM, RICHARDS, SEMIOTICS and STRUCTU-RALISM.
Ogden, C. K. and Richards, I. A. (1923) The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, with supplementary essays by B. Malinowski and F. G. Crookshank, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
A term deriving from (neo-) Firthian linguistics which focuses on the relation of language and its social environments, and its variations in response to changes in context and use. It sees language as a resource through which its users 1) represent ‘what is going on’ in the world: the field of a text; 2) the characteristics of the social relations between the participants in linguistic interaction: the tenor of a text; and 3) the organization and shaping of language in communication: the mode of the text.
Register names the textual configuration which results from the combined interaction of each of the variables of field, tenor and mode. There may be relative stabilities of social situation, giving rise to relatively stable registers (the ‘sermon’, for instance). In general, register theory assumes a constantly dynamic and fluid arrangement for language in use. Register theory has been hugely influential for a range of developments concerned with language for special purposes, for genre theory, and in language planning. (GRK)
See also SOCIOLINGUISTICS.
Thomas Reid (1710–1796), Scottish philosopher. Reid stands out among moderns in proposing ‘an essentially semiotic theory’ of mind (Henle 1987: 156). Reid in effect argues for the priority of cenoscopy (what Reid called ‘common sense’ – knowledge that does not require new observations with instruments) over idioscopy, those studies depending upon specialized observations instrument-aided and mathematized. Rejecting the modern doctrine that ideas are objects, Reid made his case for direct knowledge of physical things so strong as to be unable to deal with fundamental differences between perceptual objects in their objective constitution through relations, and perceptual objects in what they have of a subjective constitution as things accessible in sensation. (JD)
One of Grice’s maxims of conversation was the maxim of relation, ‘Be relevant’ (Grice 1975). Some of the other maxims could be quite sensibly reduced to this notion of relevance. For instance, the statement ‘There’s a garage round the corner’ in response to ‘I am out of petrol’ violates the maxim of quantity: the explicit meaning of the answer is not enough to guarantee the satisfaction of the expressed need; therefore, assuming the speaker’s co-operativity, the utterance implicates that the garage has petrol for sale and is open. In other words, the response would not be relevant unless those aspects of implicit meaning can be assumed. Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) relevance theory makes this generalized notion of relevance into the overriding principle to formulate a theory of communication and cognition intended to explain utterance understanding.
Relevance theory bears specifically on so-called ‘ostensive communication’, i.e. communication that is intentional and overt in such a way that the speaker does not only intend to convey a specific meaning but is also engaged in efforts to help the hearer recognize this intention. Such forms of communication are said to be governed by a ‘principle of relevance’, which holds that ‘Every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance’ (ibid.: 158). In order for ostensive communication to be successful, an audience has to pay attention to the ostensive stimulus, and an audience will not pay attention unless the phenomenon to attend to seems relevant enough. In contrast to Grice’s maxim, the principle of relevance is not formulated as a norm that can be adhered to or broken, but rather an exceptionless generalization about human cognition. Yet, the principle cannot guarantee that communication will always succeed. Success requires that the first accessible interpretation which a rational interlocutor selects as optimally relevant matches the intended one.
The theory of understanding based on these assumptions distinguishes between implicatures (of the Gricean type) and explicatures, which are the explicitly communicated propositions that (could have) replace(d) those implicatures. It further hypothesizes that a principle is involved according to which needless cognitive effort is avoided. For that reason, expressions carrying implicatures may have additional meanings that can be said to be ‘weakly implicated’. Thus there has to be a reason why a speaker puts a hearer to extra effort in the interpretation process by not expressing him/herself explicitly. For instance, if a speaker responds ‘I have to study for an exam’ in reaction to an invitation to go to the movies, this implicates that he/she does not accept. But the speaker could have said so directly. In addition to this implicature, therefore, the presumption of relevance in relation to the principle of least cognitive effort would dictate that a number of ‘weak implicatures’ – not intended specifically in the same way as the identified implicature – have to be added to the interpretation: the speaker wants to convey that there are good reasons for not accepting the invitation; or he/she wants to communicate a state of mind. (JV)
See also RULES.
Blakemore, D. (1992) Understanding Utterances: An Introduction to Pragmatics, Oxford: Blackwell.
Rouchota, V. and Jucker, A. H. (eds) (1998) Current Issues in Relevance Theory, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1986) Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Oxford: Blackwell.
A representamen conveys information about the object it represents. According to Charles S. Peirce, a representamen is a correlate in a triadic relation with an object and an interpretant. It determines the interpretant to stand in relation to the object as it does, so that the interpretant is mediately determined by the object. Signs, which convey information to human minds, are the most familiar representamens, but perhaps not all representamens are signs. For example, a pathogen may be the representamen of some disease to an immune system without technically being a sign. Usually ‘sign’ is no longer restricted in this way and is used synonymously with ‘representamen’. (NH)
Charles S. Peirce’s term for the first division of his trichotomy of signs that concerns how they are interpreted. A rhematic sign (or rheme) is understood to represent its object in its characters and is thus interpreted as a sign of essence or possibility. Rhemes may be iconic, indexical or symbolic, but they are always understood as representing a qualitative possibility of some sort rather than a fact of the matter or a reason. Rhemes are often associated with grammatical terms or with open predicates. (NH)
The art of using language, or elements of language such as tropes (figures of speech), effectively or persuasively; thus the study of how to influence the thoughts, emotions or behaviour of others through the use of language. One of the three subjects of the Roman trivium: grammar, logic and rhetoric. Classically, the art of rhetoric was divided into five parts: invention, disposition, elocution (diction and style), memory (mnemonics) and action (delivery). In Charles S. Peirce’s semeiotic, speculative (theoretical or pure) rhetoric is the third branch, after speculative grammar and speculative critic. According to Peirce, speculative rhetoric is ‘the science of the essential conditions under which a sign may determine an interpretant sign of itself and of whatever it signifies, or may, as a sign, bring about a physical result’ (1998b: 326). Speculative rhetoric is the study of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the communication of information or of semeiotic content at any level of semiosis or information transfer, whether from person to person or even as a development of individual thought. Rhetoric is sometimes regarded as the imaginative or poetic use of language, that aspect of language that refuses to be limited to the rigorous demands of logic or rational discourse. In its most current sense rhetoric may be taken to be the general theory of linguistic expression or even the general theory of textuality. (NH)
See also GROUND, HABIT and INTERPRETANT.
Liszka, J. J. (1996) A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press (especially Ch. 4).
Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893–1979), literary theorist, linguist and cultural critic, taught at Cambridge and Harvard. Among his numerous books are Principles of Literary Criticism (1925), Practical Criticism (1929), Coleridge on Imagination (1935), The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), How to Read a Page (1942), Poetries and Sciences (1970) and Beyond (1975). In the field of semiotics, however, his most famous book remains his first, co-written with C. K. Ogden, The Meaning of Meaning (1923). In this volume the authors discussed an array of contemporary and near-contemporary theorists of signification including Saussure, Peirce, Russell and Frege, as well as precursors such as William of Ockham and Humboldt. They also outlined a threefold version of signification which is not far removed from Peirce’s triadic theory of the sign. Richards might also be best remembered in literary and sign theory for his investigation of metaphor and the distinction between ‘vehicle’ and ‘tenor’ in this trope.
Richards’ approach to analysis was always eclectic, drawing on linguistics, literature and science, but invariably focusing on the vicissitudes of the sign. Interestingly, this has proved problematic for literary theory which has successively tried to claim his work as an early example of, on the one hand, New Criticism and, on the other, reader-response theory. (PC)
Richards, I. A. (1976) Complementarities: Uncollected Essays, ed. J. P. Russo, Manchester: Carcanet.
Ferruccio Rossi-Landi (Milan 1921–Trieste 1985) has contributed significantly to the development of semiotics and philosophy of language. In the early years of his intellectual formation, Rossi-Landi absorbed ideas and methodologies not only from Italian culture, but also from the cultural traditions of Austria and Germany, as well as from British–American traditions of thought. Several of his essays and books were originally published in English. For many years he lived in countries other than Italy, especially in England and the United States. He taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1962–1963), and at the Universities of Texas, Austin (1963), which he revisited on several occasions, and acted as visiting professor at various universities in Europe as well as in America between 1964 and 1975. He also taught courses in philosophy and semiotics at the Universities of Havana and Santiago (Cuba). After a teaching appointment in Padova (1958–1962), he returned to the Italian academic world in 1975 as Professor of Philosophy of History at the University of Lecce (Southern Italy). In 1977 he became Full Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Trieste.
As an editor and translator as well as author, Rossi-Landi made significant contributions to intellectual life. He served as editor or member of the editorial board of various journals, some of which he had in fact founded: Methodos (1949–1952), Occidente (1955–1956), Nuova corrente (1966– 1968), Ideologie,(1967–1974), Dialectical Anthropology (from 1975) and finally Scienze umane (1979–1981), all of which contain numerous contributions to the theory of signs.
Rossi-Landi’s studies may be divided into three phases (cf. Ponzio 1986, 1989b). The first phase covers the 1950s and includes the monographs: Charles Morris (1953, revised and enlarged in an edition of 1975; see also Rossi-Landi’s correspondence with Morris, 1992a) and Significato, comunicazione e parlare comune (1961, but which in fact was the conclusion of his work of the 1950s, republished in 1980 and again in 1998 in a volume edited by Ponzio).
The second phase belongs to the 1960s and includes Il linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato (1968, English translation 1992b), which proposes a theory of linguistic production and of sign production in general which is also a theory of linguistic work and of general sign work, thereby laying the foundations to study the semiotic homology between linguistics and economics. Semiotica e ideologia (1972, reprinted in 1974, 1994) completes the preceding volume with the addition of important essays such as ‘Ideologia della relatività linguistica’. The latter was also published as an independent volume in English under the title Ideologies of Linguistic Relativity (1973). Finally, Linguistics and Economics (1975) was written in English in 1970–1971 for the book series Current Trends in Linguistics, Vol. 12, and reprinted as an independent volume in 1975 and 1977.
The third period covers the 1970s and includes the book Ideologia (1978, 1982), where Rossi-Landi discusses the problem of the connection between ideology and language with particular reference to linguistic alienation. During this third phase he also authored various essays which were subsequently collected in the volume Metodica filosofica e scienza dei segni (1985).
Several essays from all three periods, including those which had originally appeared in English, were collected posthumously in the volume Between Signs and Non-signs (1992c, ed. S. Petrilli). This volume had been planned by Rossi-Landi himself but was among the many that remained unpublished during his lifetime. (AP)
Rossi-Landi, F. (1977) Linguistics and Economics, The Hague: Mouton.
Rossi-Landi, F. (1990) Marxism and Ideology, trans. R. Griffin, Oxford: Clarendon.
Rossi-Landi, F. (1992) Between Signs and Non-signs, ed. S. Petrilli, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
In logic two types of rules have been traditionally distinguished: formation rules, determining the way in which logical formulae are built from basic expressions, and rules of inference or deduction which determine the steps by means of which one formula can be deduced from another in such a way that truth conditions are preserved. In linguistics the term ‘rule’ has been in popular use since Chomsky (1957), mainly in order to cope with recursiveness: rules determine how one pattern can be expanded into another one. Thus it is possible to speak of rules of grammar; in the area of language use, however, the term ‘rule’ is usually disfavoured and replaced, rather, by principle or strategies (e.g. Leech 1983). In philosophy a distinction is made between regulative rules (regulating pre-existent forms of behaviour, such as rules or etiquette) and constitutive rules (defining forms of behaviour, such as the rules of football). Searle (1969) uses this distinction and describes the rules formulated for speech acts as constitutive rules (thus the act of ‘promising’ is constituted, created or defined by the fact that under certain conditions the uttering of ‘I promise to come tomorrow’ counts as the undertaking of an obligation on the part of the speaker). (JV)
See also GRICE.
A trend in literary theory developed in Russia between 1915 and 1925. The most important continuator of this movement in terms of originality and critique is Mikhail Bakhtin. With the latter’s collaboration, Pavel N. Medvedev weighs up Russian Formalism in his book of 1928, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (Bakhtin and Medvedev 1985 [1928]). Formalism was condemned under Stalin as a bourgeois conception which contrasted with Marxist orthodoxy. The formalists were above all ‘specifiers’ who dealt with the problem of the ‘specificity of the poetic text’ for the first time ever. Two prominent figures in Russian Formalism are Jakobson and Jakubinsky. One of the inaugurating texts of this movement is V. B. Shklovsky’s booklet The Resurrection of the Word (1973 [1914]), while the first attempt at a historical sketch of formalism is B. M. Eikhenbaum’s ‘Teoriia “formal” nogo metoda’ (1926; English translation in Todorov 1965).
Russian Formalism developed in three phases. Its guiding theoretical principles were established in the first phase (1914–1919). ‘Poetic language’ was the specific object of research and to this problematic was dedicated the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (Opoiaz). Poetic language is a special linguistic system. A relation of opposition was established between the laws of poetic and practical language on the basis of specific linguistic characteristics, especially phonetic. Poetic construction was differentiated from practical language and considered extraneous to it through a process of ‘foreignization’. In poetic construction the plot is central whereas the story (fabula) is only an expedient. An important contribution consists in explaining the art work in terms of literary genre instead of referring to the author and his/her life. The second stage (1920–1923) is characterized by a lack of unity and a failure to reconcile itself with Marxist orthodoxy. The third (1924–1925) was the time of disintegration into different theories to the point of engendering as many formalisms as there were formalists. (AP)