Burghard Rieger:
In: Gunzenhäuser, R. (Hrsg.): Semiotik (Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 27/28), Frankfurt/M. (Athenäum) 1977, S. 55-68
The set-up of recent theories both in the sciences and the humanities tend to exhibit new epistomological characteristics one of which is their increasingly semiotic tendency. Its most prominent feature can be described as the absence of a clearly cut distinction between what is believed to be factual reality which hence may (or may not) be observed and analysed, as opposed to those phenomena which are considered to be in fact constituted only by the very process of experience, observation or analysis. Some advanced theories of linguistic semantics prove to be border-line cases in this respect, failing, however, to topicalize the basic (semiotic) aspect of any (natural or formal) language's usage, namely semantisation. Paradigmatically enacted in verbal communication, the notion of semantisation is introduced as a continuous process of choice restriction constituting `meaning' by gradually increasing acuity from one semiotic dimension to the other (pragmatics - semantics - syntactics - phonetics) successively.
lt is argued that any system modelling this process has to have both, formally and empirically adequate means to cope with problems of (phonetic) variety, (syntactic) ambiguity, and (semantic) vagueness. Fuzzy sets theory together with procedures of statistical text-analysis serve these purposes comprehensively, giving rise to a new type of theory that allows semiotic (and as such, essentially fuzzy) phenomena to be modelled or emulated without distortion in a precise way.
HTML Format
PDF Format (279 Kb)