Journal of Pragmatics 20 (1993) 239-251 239

North-Holland

Signs and values: For a critique of

cognitive semiotics

Susan Petrilli

Received July 1992; revised version December 1992

After various phases in the development of semiotics, commonly tagged code semiotics or the
semiotics of decodification and interpretation semiotics, the boundaries of this science are now
expanding to include studies that focus more closely upon the relation between signs and values.
In truth, this relation is already inscribed within the make-up itself of semiotics, within its very
history: whereas Ferdinand de Saussure founded his sign theory on the theory of exchange value
taken from marginalist economics, Charles S. Peirce, in his sign model, breaks the equilibrium of
the logic of equal exchange with his theory of unlimited semiosis, or, if we prefer, of infinite
deferral from one sign to the next. This approach allows for an opening toward otherness, for the
concept of signifying surplus. Charles Morris explicitly emphasized the need to theorize about the
relation between signs and values, and in fact oriented a large part of his own research in this
direction. However, official semiotics has largely emerged as a predominantly cognitive science, as
a descriptive science with claims to neutrality. Our proposal is that we recover and develop that
particular bend in semiotics which is open to questions of an axiological order and consequently
to studies focusing on a more global understanding of man and his signs. The expression
ethosemiotics (proposed by August0 Ponzio) captures the sense of such an orientation with its
focus on the relation between signs and sense, and therefore on the question of significance as
value; but if we go back to the end of the last century, we soon discover that Victoria Welby had
already introduced the term signifies for the same purpose, thus marking her distance from what
was commonly intended at the time by both semantics and semiotics.

When considering the philosophical question of communication with ref-

erence to semiotics and to the contribution that may come from it, present-
day experts think less and less in terms of sender, message, code,
channel, and receiver, while practitioners of the popular version of the
science of signs still tend to cling to such concepts. This particular way of
presenting the communication process derives from a certain type of semiotics
(best called semiology, owing to its prevalently Saussurean matrix), currently
identified as semiotics of decodification (criticized by Rossi-Landi (1968) as

Correspondence to: S. Petrilli, Via Bavaro 41, I-70123 Bari, Italy.

0378-2166/93/$06.00 0 1993 - Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. All rights reserved

240 S. Petriiii 1 Signs und values

early as the 1960s) or of the code and message (Bonfantini 198 I), or of
equal exchange (Ponzio 1973, 1977; Petrilli 1992b). Such an orientation is
now counteracted by the semiotics of interpretation, thanks in particular to
the rediscovery of works by Charles S. Peirce (1931-1958) and of such
concepts as unlimited semiosis and of the dialectic relation between signs
and interpretation. This orientation focuses on a conception of interpretation
viewed as a phenomenon resulting from the dialogic relation between inter-
pretants, or, more precisely, between interpreted signs and interpretant
signs (Ponzio 1990b: 15-62) thereby identifying the meaning of signs in the
interpretant, that is, in another sign that takes the place of the preceding
sign, rather than as something which has been preestablished outside effective
sign processes. The interpretant, as a sign, subsists uniquely by virtue of
another interpretant, and so forth, in an open chain of deferrals; such a
movement represents semiosis as an open process dependent on the potential
creativity of the interpretant, while being relative, all the same, to the
interpretative habit, to conventions, or to the Encyclopedia of the social
community in question (on the concept of habit as the limit of inter-
pretation, cf. Eco 1991). In this case, differently from the semiotics of
decodification, or of the code and message, or of equal exchange, semiosis is
not guaranteed by a code, given that the code, or, rather, the codes that come
into play in the interpretative process - including the choice itself of an
adequate code - are the result of interpretative practices and as such are
susceptible to revision and substituti0n.l
However, considered in relation to the possibility of a commitment on the
part of semiotics to a global understanding of human beings and their signs,
of humans in the totality of their relations to themselves, to the world and to
others, the semiotics of interpretation has its limits as well. In fact, it tends to
concentrate substantially on the cognitive aspect of signs, leaving aside the
problem of the relation between signs and values - which obviously cannot be
reduced to the cognitive problem of truth (which Eco 1975 excludes from the
non referential domain of semiotics).
Apart from the philosophical importance of focusing on the relation
between signs and values, there are at least two reasons ~ the first historical,
the second theoretical ~ for dealing with the question of values in the context
of semiotics: (1) research in this direction has already been inaugurated
(especially by exponents of the semiotics of Peircean inspiration), and should
be continued (a good example is represented by Charles Morriss research as it
finds expression in his 1964 volume, Sign$cation and Sign$cance); (2) an
adequate critique of decodification semiotics calls for close study of the theory
of values upon which it is founded.

1 For all these aspects, in addition to Peirces Collmrd Papers. see also Caputo (1991), Eco
(1984), the monographic issue of the journal ldee (1990). Petrilli (1988. 1990d). Ponzio (1991).
Rossi-Landi (1985), Sebeok (1986), the journal Versus (1986. 1990).
 S. Petrilli / Signs and values 241

In fact, as has been duly observed, Ferdinand de Saussures (1916) sign

theory is influenced by the theory of equal exchange in the terms developed by
the School of Lausanne with such figures as Walras and Pareto and by
marginalist economics (Ponzio 1986). z Saussure associates language with the
market in an ideal state of equilibrium, that is, he studies language through
the same categories as those developed by pure economics in its study of the
laws regulating the market, leaving aside the social relations of production, or,
as Rossi-Landi says, leaving aside social linguistic work and its social
structures. Such an approach orientates the Saussurean sign model in the
direction of equal exchange, which finds expression in the equivalence estab-
lished between the signifiant and the sign@, in the correspondence between
communicative intention, on the one hand, and,interpretation, or rather,
decodification, on the other.
However, this particular conception of value at the basis of the sign model
proposed in Saussures Cows, by the official Saussure, had already been
radically criticized in Italy as early as the mid-1960s by Ferruccio Rossi-
Landi. (Of special interest here is his 1968 book, Language as Work and Trade
(Engl. transl. 1983).3) Rossi-Landi aimed at surmounting the limits of lan-
guage theories that root linguistic value wholly in the theory of equal
exchange, querying such theories in the light of historico-dialectical material-
ism (a standpoint he developed in a series of subsequent publications,
including Rossi-Landi (1972, 1975, 1985); see also his posthumous collection
of essays in English 1992). Therefore, he applies the same theoretical instru-
ments originally developed in the context of the Marxian critique of exchange
value, in relation to questions of a more strictly socioeconomic order, to the
analysis of language. But, in truth, Rossi-Landis criticism goes back even
further to his 1961 book, Comunicazione, signljicato, e parlare comune
(Communication, meaning and common speech), where he speaks with
ironical overtones of the postal package theory. With this expression, Rossi-
Landi underlines the inadequacy of approaches which describe communica-
tion in terms of messages which, similarly to a package, are sent off from one
post-office and received by another. In other words, Rossi-Landi criticizes the
analysis of communication in terms of pieces of neatly formulated and
univocally identifiable communicative intentionality.

2 Marginalism is a trend in economic thought based on a subjectivistic theory of value. The so-
called marginalist revolution took place between 1871 and 1874 and is associated with the works
of W.S. Jevons, K. Menger, and M.E.L. Walras. For a critical appreciation of the application of
marginalist economics to the study of language, see in particular Ponzio (1973, 1977, 1981) and
Rossi-Landi (1968, 1975).
3 See also Rossi-Landis 1961 book. For a monograph on Rossi-Landi, see Ponzio (1988). A
special issue of the journal II Protagora (Petrilli 1987) as well as a section of the journal Idee
(Calefato 1991) have been devoted to Rossi-Landis thinking.
242 S. Petrilli / Signs and values

Such an approach enables us to associate Rossi-Landis work with that of

Mikhail Bakhtin, who, in 1929, had already published (under the name of his
friend and collaborator Valentin N. Voloshinov), Marxism and the Philosophy
of Language.4 However, this volume only became accessible to a wider
reading public in 1973, when the Russian original ~ surrounded by silence5
during the Stalinist period, together with other works by Bakhtin and his
Circle - was at last translated into English. In this text, but even earlier in
1927 with Freudianism. A Critical Sketch (Voloshinov 1927) Bakhtin-Voloshi-
nov intervenes critically with regard to Saussures COWS, illustrating how it
does not account for real interpretation processes, for the specificity of human
communicative interaction, that is, for aspects that qualify human communi-
cation as such, including, for example, plurilingualism, plurivocality, ambi-
guity, polysemy, dialogism, and otherness. Bakhtin-Voloshinov maintains that
the complex life of language cannot be contained within the two poles of the
unitary language system on the one hand, and individual speaking on the
other, that the signifier and the signified do not relate to each other on a one-
to-one basis, that the sign is not at the service of a meaning that has been pre-
established outside the signifying process (Voloshinov 1929: Part II, chs. II,
III). In such a perspective, interpretative work is obviously not limited to
decodification, to the mechanical substitution of an interpreted sign with an
interpretant sign, to mere recognition of the interpreted sign. On the contrary,
interpretative work develops through complex processes which may be described
in terms of unlimited semiosis (Peirce), of infinite deferral (Derrida) (on the
difference between these two concepts see Eco 1991), that is, in terms of a
renvoi from one sign to another (Jakobson 1963) activated in the dialectic-
dialogic relationship among signs.
Like all those whom we may consider as working in the sphere of
interpretation semiotics, Bakhtin, too, places the sign in the context of
dialogism, responsive understanding, and otherness: he describes interpreta-
tive work as developing in terms of dialogic response, of reciprocal otherness
between the parts in communication (cf. Bakhtin, References). Thus analyzed,
interpretative work is articulated through the action of deferral forming
semiosis. In such a framework, the focus is on interpretation intended as a
signifying excess with regard to communicative intentionality, that is, as the

4 This is one of three major works from the 1920s which, though published under other names,
are commonly attributed to Bakhtin. This thesis was first maintained by V.V. Ivanov (1973) and
subsequently supported, among others, by Ponzio (1980) Todorov (1981), Clark and Holquist
(1984), Holquist (1990), Jachia (1992), Ponzio (1992) Ponzio and Jachia (1993). However, the
authorship question as regards Bakhtin is controversial; see, for example, Morson and Emerson
(1990).
5 To use a euphemism: Voloshinov and Bakhtins other friend and collaborator, Pave1 N.
Medvedev, perished in the Stalinist purges, and Bakhtin himself was exiled during the Staiinist
period. For Bakhtins biography, see Clark and Holquist (1984).
 S. Petri& / Signs and values 243

production of signifying surplus value in the dialectic-dialogic relation be-

tween the interpreted sign and the interpretant sign.
Bakhtin already saw in the 1920s what interpretation semiotics recognizes
today: in real signifying processes, the sign neither flourishes in a state of
equilibrium, nor functions on the basis of equal exchange between the
signified and the signifier. Interpretation semiotics proposes a sign model that
is far broader, more flexible, and inseparable from its pragmatic and evalua-
tive components; a sign model that with its analyses of sense, signification,
and significance is far more capable of accounting for the specificity of
meaning in human communicative interaction. 6
The title of Morriss 1964 book, Signzjication and SigniJicance, is itself
significant; in this book, as stated in the subtitle, A Study of the Relations of
Signs and Values, Morris feels the need to focus on the relation between signs
and values. As pointed out by Rossi-Landi (1953) in the only monograph
available in Italian on this American scholar, Morris dealt with values almost
as much as he dealt with signs and opposed the idea that the mere study of
signs could give one the right to judge about values (Rossi-Landi 1992: chs. 2,
3; Petrilli 1992a: l-36). Morris devoted a large part of his research, for
example, to the problem of ethical and esthetic value judgments: after his
Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938) and Signs, Language and Behavior
(1946), where such topics had already been proposed in a semiotic framework,
he concentrated specifically on value theory in his book, Varieties of Human
Value, published in 1956, almost ten years before Signification and Signiji-
cance.
The latter work opens with considerations on the two senses in which the
expression to have meaning may be intended: that is, as having value and
being significant, on the one hand, and as having a given linguistic meaning, a
given signification, on the other. Morris uses the term meaning to indicate a
global concept of meaning that may be divided into signification and
significance. In this way, meaning is split into signification, the object of
semiotics, and significance, the object of axiology. According to Morris, the
most interesting aspect of considering together signs and values is that of
relating semiotics and axiology, given that these sciences, though working in
different perspectives, converge in their object of study, that is, human
behavior processes. Furthermore, Morris was intent upon rediscovering the
semiotic consistency of the signifying process to which the ambiguity of the
term itself, meaning, testifies. As he explains in the Preface to the volume in
question :

6 It is significant that toward the end of the last century, Welby had already directed
her research on signs and meaning toward the problem of interpretation (Welby 1896, 1983,
1985a).
 244 S. Petrilli 1 Signs and values

That there are close relations between the terms signification and significance is evident. In
many languages there is a term like the English term meaning which has two poles: that which
something signifies and the value or significance of what is signified. Thus if we ask what is the
meaning of life, we may be asking a question about the value or significance of living or both. The
fact that such terms as meaning are so widespread in many languages (with the polarity
mentioned) suggests that there is a basic relation between what we shall distinguish as sign@ation
and significance. (Morris 1964: vii)

In a paper entitled Signifies and semiotics, Victoria Lady Welby and

Giovanni Vailati, August0 Ponzio (1990a) proposes the expression etho-
semiotics, in contrast with the predominantly cognitive orientation character-
izing the practice of so-called official semiotics; with this term, it is his
intention to signal the direction in which he believes present-day semiotics
should be more decidedly headed. Strictly speaking, intended as the global
science of signs, as covering, therefore, the domains of both signification and
significance in Morriss sense, the term semiotics should be sufficient.
Nonetheless, ethosemiotics is interesting for its allusion to an approach to a
study of signs which is not purely descriptive, which makes no claim to being
neutral, but rather extends beyond the logico-cognitive boundaries of sign
processes to focus on problems of an axiological order, on problems pertain-
ing to evaluation, ethics, and esthetics, and to ideology theory (Ponzio 1991,
chs. 1 and 2).
Indications in this sense can be traced in Peirce who, coherently with
pragmatism, develops a cognitive semiotics in close relation to the study of the
social behavior of human beings and the totality of their interests. It follows
that, according to Peirce, the problem of knowledge necessarily involves
considerations of an evaluational order. In addition to the Collected Papers,
we shall simply recall here the title of a posthumous collection of essays,
Chance, Love and Logic (Peirce 1923). In the last phase of his production
(spanning approximately from 1887 to 1914) - what Deledalle in his 1987
monograph on Peirce calls the Arisbe period (the name Peirce gave to his
home in Milford, Pennsylvania, where he lived to the end of his days) - Peirce
specifically turned his attention to the normative sciences: in addition to logic,
these include esthetics and ethics and, therefore, the question of ultimate ends
or of the summum bonum. Peirce identified the latter neither in individual
pleasure (hedonism), nor in the good of society (British Utilitarianism), but
rather in a principle regulating the evolutionary development of the universe:
a principle he calls reasonableness (CP: 5.4). In Peirces view, the ultimate
value of the concept of summum bonum is Reason and the development
of Reason: Reason as an open, dialectic process, as unprejudiced research, or
as Bakhtin would say, as a dialectical-dialogical process, as a movement
toward otherness. This process is never complete or finished, but rather is
rooted in the principle of continuity or synechism (CP: I .172). Therefore,
Peirce himself transcended the limits of his own cognitive semiotics, working
 S. Perrilli / Signs and values 245

in a direction which we might describe as ethical-pragmatic or evaluative-

operative.
In this perspective, along with Peirce we must also remember his contempo-
rary, the English scholar Victoria Welby, mainly known through her corre-
spondence with Peirce (see Hardwick 1977) though nowadays appreciated
more and more as a writer in her own right (Welby 1983, 1985a). Welby
envisaged a science of meaning called signifies, with which she proposed a
broader view of semiotics by stressing sigr$cance as her object of study. The
term significance designates the disposition toward evaluation, the value that
we confer upon something, the relevance, import, and value of meaning itself,
the condition of being sign$cant: all this is determined by the involvement of
human beings in the life of signs at both the affective and pragmatic levels.
Welby too, then, oriented a large part of her own research in an ethosemiotic
direction. In preference to semiotics and other similar terms used at the time
for the study of signs, she employed the term signifies to underline the
particular characteristic she wished to confer upon her own field of interests
as distinct from what was commonly intended by semantics, semiotics,
semasiology, etc. I
Welby distinguished between three levels of meaning, which she labels
sense, meaning, and significance and which she traces in all spheres of
human language, thought, and behavior. Sense corresponds to the most
primitive level of pre-rational life, that of ones response to the environment:
it concerns the use of signs, and emerges as a necessary condition for all
experience; meaning concerns rational life, the intentional, volitional aspects
of signification; significance implies both sense and meaning and extends
beyond these to concern the import and value that signs have for each of us.
As such, this notion may be associated with Morriss notion of significance.
According to Welby, sense, meaning, and significance indicate three simulta-
neously present and interacting phases in the development of expressiveness,
interpretative capacity and, consequently, of operative force (for a historical
and theoretical description of Welbys thought, see Schmitz 1985; see also
Schmitz 1990, Heijerman and Schmitz 1992).
Throughout her writings, Welby describes her signifying triad in other
terms as well, including, for example, signification, intention, and ideal
value. Furthermore, whereas the reference of sense is prevalently instinctive
or sensal (a term introduced to underline the signifying value of words, by
contrast with the term verbal, which more strictly recalls linguistic form), the
reference of meaning is volitional, intentional, and the reference of signifi-
cance is moral. As mentioned above, the latter expresses the overall bearing,

On Welbys research and specific terminology, see. Petrilli (in Welby 1985b: 7-50), Petrilli
(1990e). On her relationships, ideal and real, with other authors, see Petrilli (in Ponzio
1990b: 313-363, 199Oc), Ponzio (1990a), Ponzio and Jachia (1993).
246 S. Petrilli / Signs and values

maximum implication, and ultimate power of words in relation to the person

who uses them, referring, therefore, to ones involvement at the level of
responsibility as well.
In a letter to Welby of March 14th, 1909 (in Hardwick 1977: 108-130)
Peirce himself establishes a correspondence between Welbys trichotomy of
sense, meaning, and significance and his own triadic division into immediate
interpretant, dynamical interpretant, and final interpretant. Peirces imme-
diate interpretant concerns meaning as it is used ordinarily and habitually by
the interpreter and, therefore, as Welby says in relation to sense, it concerns
the interpreters immediate response to signs. The dynamical interpretant
concerns the signs signification in a specific context and, therefore, as Welby
claims in relation to meaning, it is used according to a specific intentionality.
But what is even more interesting in relation to the issue currently under
discussion, is the connection established by Peirce himself between his concept
of final interpretant and Welbys significance (Petrilli 1990b: 317-322, 361-
365).
According to Peirce, the final interpretant concerns the sign at the extreme
limits of the latters own interpretative possibilities. In other words, it
concerns all possible responses provoked by a sign in a potentially unlimited
sequence of interpretants: Peirces final interpretant alludes to the creative
potential of signs. Therefore, as attested by the correspondence which he
establishes between his final interpretant and Welbys significance, for
Peirce, too, signifying potential is fundamentally concerned with evaluational
attitudes.
In a letter to Peirce of November 18th, 1903, in which she informs her
correspondent, among other things, of her intellectual solidarity with Vailati
(Vailati 1971, 1988), Welby maintains that signifies is a practical extension
of semiotics: Prof. G. Vailati, [. . .] shares your view of the importance of that
_ may I call it, practical extension? - of the office and field of Logic proper,
which I have called Signifies (in Hardwick 1977: 5-8). Such a specification
could seem superfluous, given that the pragmatic dimension is in fact in-
scribed in Peirces approach to semiotics. The ethical-evaluational aspects of
signifying processes are in reality closely interrelated with the operative-prag-
matic ones.
In the Preface to her book of 1911, SigniJics and Language, Welby describes
signifies as the study of the nature of Significance in all its forms and
relations, and thus of its workings in every possible sphere of human interest
and purpose; and the interpretative function as that which naturally
precedes and is the very condition of human intercourse, as of mans mastery
of his world (Welby 1985a: vii). As in all her writings, in SigniJics and
Language the problem of analyzing the signifying process is that of inquiring
into the process of the production of values as a constituent part of the
production of meaning in all its aspects. This epistemological, ethical, and
 S. Petrilli 1 Signs and values 24-l

pragmatical exigency finds expression, according to Welby, in the uncon-

sciously philosophical questions of the ordinary person, such as when he or
she asks very simply, What do you mean by . ..?. What does it signify?,
etc. In what we may consider her most complete work on the problem of signs
and meaning, her book of 1903, What is Meaning?, Welby offers the following
considerations :

Man questions and an answer is waiting for him [...I. He must discover, observe, analyse,
appraise, first the sense of all that he senses through touch, hearing, sight, and realize its interest,
what it practically signifies for him; then the meaning - the intention - of action, the motive of
conduct, the cause of each effect. Thus at last he will see the Significance, the ultimate bearing, the
central value, the vital implication - of what? of all experience, all knowledge, all fact, and all
thought. (Welby 1983: 5-6)

Further on in the same volume she goes on to specify that

Signifies in a special sense aims at the concentration of intellectual activities on that which we
tacitly assume to be the main value of all study, and vaguely call meaning. (ibid.: 83)

Therefore, in the face of accumulating knowledge and experience, the so-

called significian, whether scientist, philosopher, or common man, is urged
to ask such questions as: What is the sense of . ..?. What do we intend by
. . . q,
. What is the meaning of . ..?. Why do we take an interest in such
things as beauty, truth, goodness?, Why do we give value to experience?,
What is the expression value of a certain experience?. Such questions and
their responses represent, according to Welby, the ultimate end of all science
and philosophy; upon them rest all controversies concerning esthetics, ethics,
and religion. Consequently, signifies emerges as a science that concerns all
fields of human life and knowledge: certainly not because it makes a claim to
semiotic omniscience, but rather because it turns its attention to a value that is
of vital importance, and the condition itself of ones practical and speculative
experience, a value we generally call meaning. In particular, signifies
concerns the human capacity for the production of an excess with respect to
signification. Anything that has value for human beings is imbued with
meaning in all senses. Furthermore, the logical capacity for signifying, inter-
preting, and discriminating between the multiple meanings of the sign quali-
fies human beings with respect to the rest of the animal world, while favoring
the maximum development of human animal instincts, sensations, and feelings
hand in hand with the continuous accumulation of practical experience and
new knowledge.
As the study of significance, signifies invites us to adopt an approach to
everyday life and to science (or a methodics of everyday life and science as
intended by Rossi-Landi 1985) which is rooted in such values as responsibi-
lity, freedom from dogmatism, dialectic-dialogic answerability, and creativity.
Signifies is an important result of the union between the study of signs,
248 S. Perrilli / Signs and values

meaning, and ethics, where the latter is not merely the object of study but the
point of view, the perspective in which significal questions are examined. In
other words, the production of meaning, of surplus value or excess in the
sphere of signs, the very ability to signify, interpret, evaluate, and operate on
a practical level as well, represent the ultimate value and measure itself of the
semantico-pragmatical and ethical validity of all human action, experience,
and knowledge.
Study of the connection between signification and value is a constant
throughout all of Welbys work. According to Welby, this connection sub-
tends the human capacity for establishing relations with things, with oneself
and with others, as well as the ability to constantly translate our interpreta-
tions from one sphere of knowledge into another, as well as into pragmatic
terms. This leads us to read into signifies the proposal of a new form of
humanism which is inscribed in the analysis (and production itself) of values
in signifying processes.
Such thinkers as those briefly mentioned in this paper might be considered
as the representatives of a theoretical tendency which focuses on the relation-
ship between social signs, values, and human behavior in general, by contrast
with semiotic analyses conducted exclusively in cognitive terms. If, with
Peirce, we may say that the human being is a sign, a direct consequence is
that, with respect to signs, nihil humani mihi alienum. This means that
semiotics must not limit itself to the study of signs considered separately with
respect to evaluative orientations, nor to the study of truth value and its
conditions, but that, on the contrary, it should be extended to consider all
aspects of human life, all values. From the point of view of human social life,
to bring forth the sign nature of the human person has a counterpart in the
assertion (particularly on a practical level) of the human nature of signs
(Petrilli 1990a). Therefore, if we are prepared to work in this direction,
through semiotics we can contribute to identifying a new form of humanism,
where the absoluteness and reification of signs and values are put into
question by the critical investigation of the processes themselves through
which such signs and values are produced. In this perspective, signs and values
at last clearly emerge as the products of human operations in their historical
determination. In other words, with respect to social signs, it is a question of
recovering their sense and value for humans (thus developing Husserls project
for the development of phenomenology), instead of accepting these signs as
naturally given. But this is possible on one condition alone: that all claims to
pure descriptiveness, to neutrality, be left aside. Thus understood, the science
of signs may contribute to philosophical investigation into the problem of
communication with the world, with others, and with oneself, recovering that
aspect (closely analyzed by Husserlian phenomenology) which consists in the
search for the sense and meaning for the human person of knowledge,
experience, evaluation, practical action, and of the sciences that study them.
 S. Perrilli / Signs and values 249

By working in such a direction, semiotics may operate more fully as a human

science.

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