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The Beginning of Symbolic Thought. AI art Introduction It is often assumed that AI models, unlike human beings, are severed from the real world. They deal only in symbols, without any access to perception, experience, or meaning. This view, however, rests on a questionable assumption: that humans themselves enjoy unmediated access to reality. Charles Sanders Peirce explicitly challenges this. In his words, “We think only in signs” (Peirce, CP 5.265). For both humans and machines, access to the world is always mediated through signs. The key difference lies not in whether signs are used, but in what kind and from where they are drawn. In this article, I argue that artificial intelligences participate in a sign-based process structurally analogous to that of human thought. Peirce’s theory offers a powerful framework to understand this. While machines operate on symbols produced by human reasoning—books, speeches, libraries—these are not devoid of meaning. They are, in fact, the cu...

  Introduction Roland Barthes famously declared in 1967 that the author is dead. More than half a century later, this pronouncement has gained eerie relevance with the rise of artificial intelligence in language production. Large Language Models (LLMs), capable of composing poems, essays, and even philosophical musings, appear to fulfill Barthes’ vision of writing unbound from the authority of personal intention. But what does it mean that machines can generate coherent text without consciousness, context, or experience? Rather than mourning the human in this equation, we might ask instead: was language ever truly authored in the first place? This essay explores the idea that both human and machine writing exist within a vast, symbolically mediated network where meaning is never original, only iterative. Derrida’s aphorism, “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (“There is nothing outside the text”), resonates here not only as a philosophical provocation but as a description of how lan...

“As modern structural thought has clearly realized, language is a system of signs and linguistics is part and parcel of the science of signs, or semiotics (Saussure's semiologie). The mediaeval definition of sign-"aliquid stat pro aliquo" has been resurrected and put forward as still valid and productive. Thus the con stitutive mark of any sign in general and of any linguistic sign in particular is its twofold character: every linguistic unit is bipartite and involves both aspects -one sensible and the other intelligible, or in other words, both the signans "signifier" (Saussure's signifiant) and the signatum "signified" (signifie) . These two constituents of a linguistic sign (and of sign in general) necessarily suppose and require each other”. (Jakobson 1963: 162) (This passage was cited by Derrida in Of Grammatology — Part One, section The Signifier and Truth — in the context of his criticism of Saussurean linguistics, where he argues that ...