Sign Levels: Language and Its Evolutionary Antecedents

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Through a variety of logical/linguistic investigations, the past century witnessed some of the most important advances in the history of philosophy. The outcome, however, has been the largely isolated results of a piece-meal approach to philosophy. In his landmark work Sign Levels , D.S. Clarke provides readers with an integrative framework designed to overcome this lack of sustained focus. Drawing on the pragmatist tradition of semiotic of Peirce and Morris, he traces the development of the logical categories of language to the more primitive sign levels of natural events and signals. The concluding chapters discuss the unique features introduced by spoken natural languages and the written specialized languages used within social institutions. This bold venture into synthetic philosophy provides: a methodology for comparing language to primitive sign levels that avoids reductionism; comparisons and contrasts between sign levels that enable distinctions between necessary and contingent features of language; an integrative framework for relating isolated results in linguistic philosophy, experimental psychology, and ethology; and a means of resolving some of the principal metaphysical disputes derived from linguistic investigations.