Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas, Brazil
This volume is the fourth in a series titled Semiotics, communication and cognition, edited by Paul Cobley. It treads a fine line between the Enlightenment-inspired intellectuals who, in John Deely’s view, ‘have not the foggiest idea of what objectivity properly consists in’ (12) and the postmoderns who he thinks hold the key but do not always know where to insert it or when and how to turn it.
The book consists of two parts. Part 1, ‘What objective reality is and how it is possible’, consists of seven chapters of varying lengths. Part 2, ‘Background to the text’, consists of three chapters of roughly twenty pages each. Each of these, as the ‘Foreword’ to the book informs us, ‘derives from lectures’ given by D at the New Bulgarian University of Sofia in 2002. With chapter headings such as ‘What difference does it make what a sign is?’ and ‘The amazing history of sign’, Part 2 might strike the reader as something of an excrescence or at best an afterthought.
In a section called ‘Terminological prenote’, the author asks for the reader’s forbearance in the face of ‘old words used in new ways’ as well as new words being introduced. He acknowledges that the task at hand does call for some word-wringing. With all their enthusiasm and diligence, Enlightenment thinkers failed to properly grasp the character of objectivity, D says, despite Bishop Berkeley’s timely warnings to the moderns that ‘the primary qualities could have no other status than the secondary ones’ (4).
D’s own solution to the mental gridlock is the distinction between coenoscopic and ideoscopic knowledge, originally proposed by Jeremy Bentham and reworked by Charles Peirce, with slight orthographic reformulation at his own initiative. D conducts the reader through a most rigorous discussion, implacably splitting hairs along the way.
Arguably, his style does not always match the seriousness of the content. The opening sentence of the very first chapter is an example: ‘The word itself summarizes the problem today: ”objectivity”. Pray, tell me, what is it you are talking about?’ (14). Such casual interjections jar with such other convoluted locutions as ‘a core of experiential awareness that cannot be gainsaid without denying to the whole edifice of human understanding the status of something more than a solipsistic bubble, wherein the starry heavens that we believe in can yet never be attained through experience and knowledge’ (5). Such stylistic lapses aside, the book does provide stimulating food for thought.