Ideology and social sciences

Eliseo Veron (1)

1 Département Communication

One of the obvious levels of empirical reality of what we call science corresponds to the PRODUCTS of scientific activity: bodies of linguistic materials consisting, in different proportions, of propositions made up of signs of a natural language and elements of artificial or formal languages. With regard to any system of signs, there is a traditional distribution of areas: (a) SYNTACTICS, the study of the relationships among signs themselves. Syntactics has been characterized as the study of the rules for constructiong “acceptable” expressions within a given language system, irrespective of their meanings, (b) SEMANTICS, the study of how signs are related to what they stand for, refer to, or ‘represent’. Semantics is supposed to state the rules of correspondence between signs and their denotata. (C) PRAGMATICS, the study of the relationships between signs and their human users, i.e., those who send and receive the signs available in particular situations. From this point of view, therefore, the science of sign-phenomena comprises three basic chapters: the analysis of the formal relationships between signs, the analysis of meaning, and the analysis of use. An empirical science considered as a linguistic system and studied without taking into account the associated processes relating sings to the communicators, could be described by the set of its syntactic-semantical construction rules.

Mots clés: Ideology; Social Sciences; Communication; Semiotics

Domaines: Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie

Eliseo Veron. Ideology and social sciences: a communicational approach. Semiotica, 1971, III (1), pp.59-76. ⟨halshs-01482843⟩