Göran Sonesseon “Beyond Methods and Models”

Sonesson, Göran 2008. Beyond Methods and Models. Semiotics as a Distinctive Discipline and an Intellectual Tradition. – Signs vol. 2: 277-319

[…] both  hermeneutics  and  rhetoric  are concerned with the Popperean World 2, that of the subjects, but semiotics  is of course mainly concerned  with  World  3,  that  of  organism-independent  artefacts. (306)

I will here suggest a model of communication (Figure 1), which takes the basic operation of communicating to be, not transference in space, or translation into another code, but the act of interpretation, which supposes an active contribution on the part of the receiver, as well as on  that  of  the  sender,  the  receiver  being  sometimes  more,  and  sometimes  less  involved than the  sender.  Indeed,  the  first  result  of  a  process  of  communication  is  to  produce  a  task  of perception for the receiver, who has to have the means of accomplishing this task. (307)

More  simply,  looked  at  from  this  angle,  rhetoric  is  concerned  with  the  way  of  reating  the message, so as to win the adherence of the other, and hermeneutics is involved with the task of recovering  what  the  other  wanted  to  say  (or  what  a  particular  work  really  may  be  taken  to mean). In between the position of Ego and Alter, semiotics has to elucidate what resources are at the disposal of both participants in the process of communication. (308)

In  the  same  way,  semiotics  points  out,  against rhetoric as it is often practiced nowadays […] that nobody can express himself, except by means of  the  semiotic  resources  given  in  a  particular  society.  This  means  that,  not  only  is communication  only  possible  as  an  interaction  between  sender  and  receiver,  addresser  and addressee,  but  that  even  this  interaction  cannot  take  place,  but  through  the  intermediary  of signs  and  other  meanings.  But  these  meanings  are  really  part  of  the  world  going  beyond both addresser and addressee,  the World 3 of Popperian ontology: that which is only given through consciousness, but has an existence independent of consciousness. (309)