SEMIOTICS AND THE SCIENCE OF MEMORY, Paul Bouissac

SEMIOTICS AND THE SCIENCE OF MEMORY, Paul Bouissac

"Semiotic models are indeed often introduced and delivered through a rhetoric of philosophical persuasion and the way some of these models have spread among fairly large constituencies owes a great deal to the charisma of a few individuals and the institutional pressures they create. Like sects, some semiotic models offer a theory of everything rife with tautological predications and self-fulfilling prophecies.
~snip~
Memory has been a topos of western philosophical discourse at least since Plato. If innate ideas constitute a sort of ontological memory, recoverable through anamnesis, signs are only shadows of shadows and what is learned and remembered through sensorial experience can only be accidental and superficial. The relative significance of these two kinds of memory -- ontological and accidental -- in Aristotle and Augustine is endlessly debated in the Middle Ages."