ABSTRACT
Thus Sebeok’s counsel in this matter of ‘realism’ and ‘epistemology’, again as he himself put it (Sebeok 1985a: 21), is no more than an ‘abductive assignment’ which it is ‘the privilege of future generations to pursue’. Neither ‘realism’ nor ‘epistemology’ are semiotic terms, but are rather, as we shall see, in their main sense today ‘children of the modern mainstream development of philosophy’. Precisely this development with its speculative sub-developments – the mainstream modern developments in philosophy overall – semiotics begins by transcending, at least insofar as semiotics succeeds in discerning and achieving the standpoint proper to and distinctive of the study of the action of signs.
