The American Journal of Semiotics

Volume 34, Issue 1/2, 2018

John N. Deely Memorial Issue

Elaboration of the Intellectual Sign

Human beings cannot bear very much discontinuity: we innately desire resolution of our experiences, no matter how disparate they are from one another, into a common whole, into a life which “makes sense.” We desire to be persons with identities resolved into coherent wholes. But the socio-cultural world of everyday activity often presents a fragmentary and irresoluble array of experience which seemingly prevents this resolution. At the root of this fragmentation is not, however, the experiences themselves, but rather a lack of understanding concerning human cognition and consciousness. Without clarifying the possibilities of human intellection in the constitution of consciousness, we will remain at a disadvantage in the pursuit of coherent personal identities. It is to this lattermost point—how the intellectual sign is formed and how, in its formation, it in turn produces the horizons of our personal identities—that this article, conceived and reared in the tradition of thought exemplified by John Deely, is directed.