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CASSIRER Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), a German philosopher and historian of ideas, formulated a programme for philosophy that turned it into a ‘philosophy of symbolic forms’, developed at great length in his trilogy by that name, and that led to a semiotics of cultural forms, culminating in his summary volume, An Essay on Man. This meant for Cassirer that philosophy was to study all the ways that meaning was embodied and appeared in human life. Cassirer saw that meaning was expressed on multiple levels and that the levels were to be distinguished by how close the sign and its meaning were connected. Such a way of thinking allowed him to distinguish expression, representation and pure signification as the three matrices or frames in which human meaning making occurred. Expression joined the sign and its meaning in the closest, inseparable fashion, giving us a realm of ‘symbolic pregnance’. Representa - tion, exemplified first and foremost in natural languages, while wedded to intuition and labile perceptual and imaginal structures, is more flexible. It is the main reason that there is linguistic relativity, that is, alternative ways of interpreting the continuum of experience and making alternative, but not totally arbitrary, cuts in it. Pure signification ‘frees’ itself from its material and perceptual substrates so that the play of signs can focus on a world of

pure relations. The main exemplifications of these frames of meaning are myth, language and science, the subjects of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1953-1957 [1923-1929]).