Prefazione [Preface]

Abstract

The sign, which is the traditional object of semiotics, stems from a selection. The signifying side of the sign never simply reproduces the signified one but singles out an aspect of it. “Aspect” (from the Latin “aspicere”, “to look at”) etymologically designates what appears, what presents itself to the eyes, as well as the way in which this presentation takes place. In English, “aspect” enters the language in the late th century as an astrological term, indicating the relative position of the planets as they appear from earth (i.e., how they ‘look at’ one another). Generally speaking, the aspect in semiotics is everything that pushes reality to turn into signification “in some respect”. The word “respect”, famously chosen by Peirce in his canonical definition of the sign, may be regarded as a cognitive variant of the word “aspect”. If “aspect” is a particular way of looking at things, “respect” is a particular way of thinking of things. The respect is the inward counterpart of the aspect. The aspect is the outward counterpart of the respect. Both, however, refer to the same process: meaning derives from selection, and looking is the model and utmost metaphor of it. Peirce’s distinction between “dynamic object” and “immediate object” could not make sense without involving some form of aspect or respect. Indeed, most interpreters of Peirce describe the immediate object not as some additional object distinct from the dynamic one but merely as some “informationally incomplete facsimile of the dynamic object generated at some interim stage in a chain of signs” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). The fact that this “facsimile” is incomplete is the consequence of the fact that some cognitive and cultural forces shape