Return to Saussure

Introduction In his essay On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense , Friedrich Nietzsche delivers a radical challenge to our understanding of truth, knowledge, and language. He provocatively asks: What is a word? What, then, is truth? These questions form the core of his critique, suggesting that truth is a human invention, shaped by language and metaphor. For Nietzsche, words are not neutral tools that reflect reality but distortions—metaphors we’ve created to make sense of a complex world. This unsettling idea forces us to confront how much of what we consider "true" is nothing more than a linguistic convention, deeply embedded in human culture and far removed from any absolute reality. His essay stands out in contemporary philosophy for its daring exploration of how language shapes our experience of the world. It challenges not only the possibility of objective truth but also the assumption that language can ever fully capture reality. His view that language is an arbitr...

Introduction This article aims to explore the connections between Charles Sanders Peirce’s typology of signs—icons, indices, and symbols—and key concepts from cognitive development, specifically Piaget’s notion of object permanence and Pavlov’s signaling systems. By examining how these distinct types of signs align with stages of cognitive growth, we can gain a deeper understanding of how human communication and abstract thinking evolve. In our previous work, we highlighted the central role of object permanence—a milestone in early cognitive development where infants begin to understand that objects continue to exist even when not directly perceived. This ability marks the shift from immediate sensory responses to more complex mental representations, setting the stage for abstract thinking and symbolic communication. We linked this transition to Pavlov’s signaling systems: the first system is tied to direct, reflexive responses to sensory stimuli, while the second encompasses a...