Semiology Glossary

A term sometimes used to denote the verbal or semiotic environment of certain semiotic processes or practices, as opposed to the extraverbal (extrasemiotic) environment of the context. The latter is sometimes called a situational environment. Here is a simple example...

Epistemological rupture or change. Sudden, usually unmotivated transition from one problematique (complex of problems) to another. In literary theory and critique, jumping from a psychobiographical approach to a structuralist one would in fact be an epistemological...

According to Charles S. Peirce, criticism is a branch of logic. Critic (sometimes called critical logic) is a section considered along with many forms of argument. Later, Peirce saw logic as a three-part discipline: Speculative grammar - deals with the processes and...

Critical commonsensism is a doctrine defended by Charles S. Peirce, mostly in response to Cartesianism. While René Descartes proposed a method of inquiry that began with universal doubt ("Begin to see as absolutely false any belief in which there is a particle of...

Critique in the broadest sense means "evaluation". This term is often used in a narrower sense, reflecting its use by Karl Marx and subsequent authors who deal with emancipation in one form or another. The influence of Marx and Sigmund Freud on European semiotics is...

Cryptography refers to the secret letter, and cryptology - to the scientific study of this letter.

Culture stands for the totality of institutions and practices (including forms of discourse) developed and established by some specific groups of human beings. Ethnology - this branch of anthropology devoted to the study of culture - is the field from which many...