Synopsis
Sign, Textuality, World is an explication of Charles Sanders Peirce in the context of current intellectual concerns, including post-structuralism, science and the philosophy of science, and various notions of textualism, rhetoric, and theories of fictionality. Part I contrasts Peircean semiotics with Saussurean semiology, while examining both in terms of the contemporary discourse in the philosophy of science, logic, and mathematics. Part II uses key Peircean ideas in a general critique of three important texts: Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, Christopher Norris's Contest of Faculties, and Thomas Pavel's Fictional Worlds. Part III is a brilliant investigation of the work of Group Mu, in the light of the use of metaphors and models in Western thought, with emphasis on the age-old notion of language as a picture-mirror-model representing the world. Peirce's signifying process, semiosis, is shown to be an enabling mediator and moderator in the construction of a pluralism of "semiotically real" worlds, which, rather than "representing" the "real," enjoys a greater or lesser degree of commensurability with it. Thus Merrell emphasizes the relevance of Peirce's philosophy, logic, and cosmology--all signs. For him, as for Peirce, the idea of semiosis cannot be divorced from the pragmatics of concrete human interaction.