On the dynamics of culture

Abstract

One of the most important assumptions in semiotics is the existence of a space before or outside semioticization, against which the fundamental concepts of semiotics are defined. Such an approach is entirely justified from a heuristic point of view. The error consists in the mixing of principles that occurs when we begin to confuse logical conventions for empirical reality. A similar convention is the assumed existence in dynamic processes of some kind of starting point, a relative zero, although a “zero state” is never available to us in empirical reality.