“It is extremely difficult to speak about meaning and to say something
meaningful about it. We could do so only by constructing a language that means
nothing” [“Il est extrêmement difficile de parler du sens et d'en dire quelque
chose de sensé. Pour le faire convenablement, l'unique moyen serait de se
construire un language qui ne signifie rien..."]. A.J. Greimas, Du
sens, 1970 (p.7)
“I prefer to think about literature and language as a continuum that includes everything from birdsong to linear algebra and
symbolic logic. Most of that continuum, or all of it, is occupied with stories”.
Robert Bringhurst (The Tree of Meaning, 2006, p.167)
“If the brain were simple enough for us to understand it, we would be too simple to understand it.”
Ken Hill (quoted by György Buzsáki in Rhythms of the Brain (Oxford University Press, 2006, p.vii)
“We will never understand anything until we have found some contradictions.”
Niels Bohr (quoted by Hans Christian von Baeyer in
Information: The New Language of Science, 2003, p. 204)
“Signs per se do not exist; rather they exist only as forms within the operations of a system that uses them”.
Niklas Luhmann
(Signs as Forms p. 48, in Problems of Form,edited by Dirk Baecker, Stanford University Press.1999)
“Semiotic holds a unique place among the sciences… [It] is not merely a science among sciences but an organon or instrument
of all the sciences”. Charles Morris [1938] (Writings on the General Theory of Signs, 1971:67)
