Symbol og skema i neo-kantiansk semiotik

Peirces og Cassirers filosofier: bidrag til en semiotik, der indebærer en teori om erkendelsen

Abstract

This paper presents the concepts of symbol and schema in Kant's work in order to follow their elaboration in two central neo-Kantians, Ernst Cassirer and Charles Peirce. In Kant, the schema united concepts and intuition and hence becomes the condition of possibility for objective science, while the symbol is an indirect schema - in the language of our days, a metaphor. In Cassirer, the symbol becomes a general concept covering all articulations of the human spirit, while the schema preserves its central place, now as the driving force in Cassirer's three-step vision of human civilization, ranging from Ausdriicke over Darstellung to reine Bedeutung. An important step in this process is the so-called »symbolic pregnance«, allowing schematism to make stable signs in the flux of Ausdriicke.
In Peirce, a similar schematic role is played by the diagram which unites the similarity-based sign-category of icons with the symbols which in Peirce's theory are general, thought-like signs. In his systems, diagrams are the very conditions of possibility for any thought, thought being always general but able to subsume under itself
a continuous range of individual iconic cases. Both neo-Kantians, it is argued, shares several interesting epistemological point of-views. On the one hand, they so to speak »phenomenologize« Kant: The object is no longer seen as a produet of the mind's ability to synthesize; rather, it is presented as an undifferentiated whole which can in tum be analyzed in various ways by use of schematisms. On the other hand, they aim at a semiotics which imply an epistemology
in so far the very Kantian concept of schematism entails an analysis of the intrinsic architecture of the sign's signified: It contains necessarily a schematism combining thought and imagination. In this respect, these neo-Kantian semioticians
transgress the Saussurian concept of the sign, in which the precise definition of the signified was always opaque, this leading to semiotic scepticism as a common consequence.