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SEMIOTICS AND HERMENEUTICS: DESIGNING A SEMIOTIC-BASED APPROACH TO THEORIES OF INTERPRETATION

INTRODUCTION The critics of semiotics claim that this science has no unified subject matter and can be considered just an interesting hermeneutic practice and not entitled to conceive of itself as a scientific discipline. This article advocates the opinion that semiotics does have a unified subject as well as the status of a scientific discipline: it studies semiosis, that is the action of signs or the process in which something functions as a sign and a potentially endless series of interpretants is generated. Signs being a part of a developing process of information and understanding attached to particular objects 1 , semiosis is actually the action an interpreter must perform in understanding the signs. Interpretation as a problem or even as an explicit issue has tended to become a central concern in both: semiotics and hermeneutics since the earliest treatises on interpretation came forth. Generally acknowledged definition of hermeneutics as “the science of interpretation” 2 reflects the leitmotif of this science which deals with the processes of human understanding and interpretation of texts. Thus the notion of interpretation has always been across the two theories: theory of signs and theory of interpretation. As language is “the fundamental mode of operation of our being-in-the-world and the all-embracing form of the constitution of the world” 3 the article substantiates the inseparable unity of lingual semiotic and hermeneutic studies in the context of the interpretation process. For hermeneutics language is not simply, as modernism believed, a mere means of communication but rather, between word and object there exists an “intimate unity”: “The interpreter does not use words and concepts like a craftsman who picks up his tools and then puts them away.