The Sign Science and
the Life Science
Thomas A. Sebeok
Indiana University
In the celebrated passage in which Saussure referred to une science qui étudie la vie des signes au sein
de la vie sociale, the term science is, as a rule, loosely, arguably, and, in my view, misleadingly rendered
by the English quasicognate "science" (for example, by Harris, in Saussure 1983:15). Saussure went on to say that
this science __that is, semiotics (alias semiology) __ "does not yet exist," nor can one "say for certain that it will
exist." If so, the status of semiotics as a science (in the strict sense, rather than meaning simply savoir) would be
comparable with that of, say, exobiology, a sanguine term coined by Joshua Ledeberg at a meeting in Nice in 1957
for the study of extraterrestrial life (Ponnamperuma 1972: viii); but this "science" of exobiology remains, to this
day, devoid of a palpable subject matter.
Such is not, however, the case if semiotics is defined __ as all of us echo here, after the variegated usage of the
Schoolmen, the Latin expression doctrina signorum __ according to Locke in 1690, Berkeley in 1732, Peirce in c. 1897,
and others, as a "doctrine" (cf., generally, "On the Notion 'Doctrine of Signs'" Deely, 1982:127-130). When viewed
as a "teaching manoeuvre combined with a learning stratagem" (Sebeok 1986d), semiotics is found to be at least as
richly infused with content as what is today practised under the label "cognitive sciences," the domain of which is
in fact essentially conterminous in gist and problematic, if not necessarily in methodology, with that of
semiotics.
In this essay, I juxtapose, as a framing and heuristic device, "sign science" with "life science." The latter is
a general phrase "comprehending all the Sciences ... that have to do with the structures, performances and
interactions of living things." These are enumerable as the conventional biological sciences but additionally subsume
several "interfacial" sciences, such as biochemistry, biophysics, and bioengineering, the last of which, Medawar and
Medawar (1977:7), claim, "also establishes a common frontier between biology and communications
theory."
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This piece was written for Modern Semiotics/Nyere semiotik, ed. Jorgen Dines Johansen and Svend Erik Larsen,
where it appeared in 1991 under the Danish title "Videns-kaben om tegn og videnskaben
om liv," and later in the author's A Sign is Just A Sign. It is reprinted here with
the kind permission of Dr. Thomas A. Sebeok.
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