Before any sentence can mean anything, something has to stand for something else. This course opens the black box: Saussure's arbitrary bond between signifier and signified, Peirce's three-part sign (icon, index, symbol), and the structuralist claim that a word means only by differing from every other word in its system. It ends where every semiotics course eventually has to: on the felt fact of meaning itself, which the sign only ever points at.
IACSInt'l Academy for Consciousness Studies