Nature , custom , and stipulation in the semiotic of John Poinsot

A fundamental fact of human existence is that we have no access to nature or to another mind, or even to our own mind, except through signs. Our cognition of the external world is always mediated by perceptual and conceptual signs, just as our social relations are always mediated by linguistic and gestural signs. As Deely says (1988: 31): There is nothing in thought or in sensation which was not first in a sign'. Given the fact that signs are the basic media of human experience, it is surprising (or, perhaps, to be expected) that there has been so little progress toward establishing a coherent doctrine of signs. The major theorists of signs continue to work from radically different philosophical standpoints: there is still no common framework for research. Deely argues persuasively that the semiotic of John Poinsot represents the most promising theoretical framework available. I accept this claim only on the condition that Poinsot's doctrine be substantially revised in the light of subsequent developments in the philosophical and social sciences. John Poinsot (1589-1644), traditionally known by his Dominican name as John of St. Thomas, was the last of the great Renaissance Aristotelians of the eminent Spanish school which included Cajetan, Soto, Molina, and Suarez. These Spanish Thomists were deeply interested in the theory of signs, and it is no accident that the Spanish Jesuits, according to Schumpeter (1954: 97), were the first to develop economics into a science: the price-system is but one species of sign-system. John Poinsot compiled a comprehensive philosophical system, the Cursus Philosophicus Thomisticus, of which the treatise on signs, the Tractatus de Signis, is a part. Poinsot's treatise on signs was, however, essentially lost to modern philosophy until it was discovered in the second decade of this century by Jacques Maritain, who regarded Poinsot as perhaps the greatest Thomist since Thomas Aquinas himself (see Deely 1988: 46-47). Here we find one major reason for the lack of progress on the theory of signs: modern