Giovanni Manetti

This book is a discussion of how signs were taken to mean things, in antiquity from Mesopotamia to St. Augustine (but mostly Greek & Roman). It’s based on divination in the ancient world. I only used a bit out of the Greek divination chapter for my work, but the whole book is interesting from a theoretical perspective. Manetti argues that modern theories of semiotics are all based on the notion of a linguistic sign, in which a word means something by virtue of equivalence to it. So "woman" = "adult female human". But the ancient theory of signs was not based on language or equivalence, but on anything that could 'mean', and on implication. So "red sky at morning" = "sailors take warning". He traces this use of signs, which was based in the sacred (as in, the interpretation of oracles - the god at Delphi does not speak but semainw, "signs", as Herakleitos says), from Mesopotamia through Aristotle, who established a more rigid set of definitions for words meaning "to mean something" (semainw, tekmairomai, and so on), which had had overlapping fields of meaning till then, and on through the Stoics, who are usually thought to have applied logic to the study of divination, but, Manetti says, could really be argued to have developed logic FROM the study of divination. Because the use of "if" in logic, the implicative condition, parallels the use of the sign in divination from earliest times. "If the sky is red in the morning, sailors should take warning". "If a woman has milk in her breasts, then she has just given birth." He argues, finally, that the theory of signs wasn't united with the theory of how words mean things until St. Augustine. After that, semiotics = linguistic semiotics; but not in the ancient world.… (més)