Epistemological Implication of The Intercultural Semiotic Movement: Towards A New Enlightenment in

                                                                           Theoretical Practice  of Mankind

(this paper was read in the séance “Semiotics and Theory” of the 8th IASS Congress of Lyon, July 9, 2004)
   Summary

General semiotics could be taken as a scholarly reorganizer of knowledge or as a general perspective for readjusting the discourse of the humanities at the three cultural domains: the western traditional, the non-western-traditional and the globalization-intercultural (comparative). The viewpoint is not based on what semiotics is at present but on how to make a desirable use of the term semiotics from a global perspective in future. So the intercultural or international semiotics will be conceived in comparison with the changed situation of entire human sciences. Therefore semiotics represents a spiritual ambition to reexamine and reorganize the mechanism of the current compartmentalized academic practice. This is what signified by theoretical semiotics today.　Any successful single-disciplinary-based knowledge must produce certain positive results whose scholarly eligibility is based on the preconditions and operative frameworks of that discipline. The single-disciplinary-based scholarly results are frequently misused beyond those operative restrictions. One of the purposes of semiotics lies in reexamining the disciplinary-established restrictions through comparative or interdisciplinary studies. In other words, semiotics is helpful for analytically and synthetically reorganizing discursive products in terms of the academic disciplinary system. The author maintains that we are today faced with the necessity of a new scientific Enlightenment on a global level. And semiotics is requested to lead this global academic drive.　There are two different conceptions of knowledge: the content and the use of content. If science in general involves the former and general semiotics would involve the latter. For this purpose semiotics is requested to strengthen its　comparative studies through cross-disciplinary operations.
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Contents

Preface
1. Semiotics as the Interdisciplinary Operation
2. Semiotics as a Pan-Semantics regarding Understanding and Communication in Social and Human Sciences
3. Intercultural Semiotics is the One of Central Parts in Semiotics -Globalization
4. Significance of Structuralism and Contemporary Pan-Positivist Epistemology
5.  Interaction of the Western and the Non-Western Humanities: Towards the Theoretical Globalization of Social and Human Sciences and towards a New Enlightenment of Human Knowledge

Preface
Semiotics could be much more important than it indicates itself in the actual professional activity today. Every semiotics player could be faced with two different conceptions of semiotics: Semiotics as what we are performing in the concrete academic fields and semiotics as what we can creatively conceive from a broader intellectual perspective. Therefore we can and should also pay an attention to the theoretical potential of the entire semiotic practice with respect to its multiply interdisciplinary and intercultural developments. We may regard these regular semiotic studies as ones operating at the tactic level and the second ones as those at the strategic level. While for properly grasping semiotics in its second sense we should trace back to the modern history of semiotics on one hand and reexamine the situations of entire social and human sciences on the other. Without a conception of the latter we can hardly grasp the profound theoretical potential of semiotics. In brief, the term “semiotics” can be used in two different ways: the one as the regular practice prevailing in various fields today, which is characterized by their methodological originality; the other as an index referring to the general epistemological studies in connection with the entire human knowledge.

 In other words, our problem is how to use this academic designator in a more productive way. This paper intends to point out that the following three existing scientific developments request us to estimate anew the potential of semiotics: The interdisciplinary direction of semiotic operation; the necessity of restructuring the Western human sciences; and the necessity of the globalization of human sciences of mankind. The three developments are essentially interconnected with each other. It is Western semiotics itself that raises the problem of the necessity for restructuring Western human sciences. It is the latter that makes semiotics much more important than what it looks like in its current professional practice. China has a history of 25 years for studying semiotics. Chinese semiotic practice started with a passionate attention to the achievements of those great Western thinkers who were concerned about major topics in social and human sciences.

1. Semiotics as Interdisciplinary-Directed Scientific Operation

Semiotics produced from interdisciplinary studies is essentially related to how to more reasonably use knowledge obtained in various scientific disciplines. Semiotics in a general term plays a key role in three modern major theoretical streams in the Twentieth century: The (Anglo-American) analytic/pragmatic-philosophical, the (Swiss-French) semantic/structural-sociological, and (Austria-German) phenomenological/psychoanalytical-psychological. The modern semiotics founders along different directions lived in and together with the modern history of social and human sciences such as philosophy, linguistics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, literary theory and many others. Moreover, the earlier main representatives of contemporary Western semiotic theoreticians all of them cherished great intellectual ambitions of various kinds to deal with major theoretical problems in connection with contemporary science and society alike. It is obvious that the contemporary semiotic movement in Europe and North America departed simultaneously with French structuralism. If all branches of modern semiotic practice indicate the tendency of interdisciplinary operation, French structuralism showed a stronger or more typical character of this type. That means French structuralism as a semiotic practice was involved in multiple fields of knowledge and their interaction.

Why interdisciplinary? When great thinkers try to search for some new track in the old disciplines, they tend to find more effective methods from neighboring disciplines. Thus, interdisciplinary practice arises. The essence of the interdisciplinary practice lies in the restrictive norm and rules of the current academic compartmentalization. If professional practice must rely on disciplinary specialization, intellectual originality may appeal to interdisciplinary operation; namely they need to recombine their epistemological and methodological tools originating from the entire academic traditions. In this sense semiotics indicates a more revolutionary character in comparison with all other academic methodologies; it is this intellectual tendency and the organizing power that tend to restructure the topography of human knowledge.

Another consequence of the interdisciplinary operation of semiotics is reflected in the basic character of the semiotic theory. Traditionally, theoretical substance in various disciplines mostly comes from different philosophical schools. The basic theoretical content is equivalent to the philosophical propositions. By contrast, the interdisciplinary-directed semiotic theory tends naturally to be the de-philosophical-centralized. In this sense, semiotic theory should be differentiated from any philosophical fundamentalism. In fact, we can no more base a theory for semiotics on any philosophical school or principle, even that in terms of a philosophy of language. Getting rid of a philosophical frame semiotics searches for its new theoretical-epistemological foundation from an interdisciplinary angle. Historically speaking, semiotic theory has, at least partly, grown up from philosophy but it has to step beyond it later on, stretching over various theoretical practices in different fields. Accordingly, semiotics absorbing from theoretical reservoir of different disciplines cannot limit itself to any single-disciplinary frame, including the linguistic, despite its close link with the latter.

If any semiotic practice implies the interdisciplinary aspect, there is still a necessity to divide between the interdisciplinary semiotic operation within one discipline and that among multiple disciplines; or the division between the disciplinary-centered interdisciplinary operation and the inter-disciplinary interdisciplinary operation. The latter can be naturally extended to the intercultural interdisciplinary operation. In fact, at the above two levels intercultural semiotics plays its relevant role.

One of the key steps in the strategic operation is a systematic anatomy of the cultural contexts, the theoretical presuppositions, the operative pre-conditions and the frameworks in and with which disciplines operate. Thus, disciplines will be disorganized into different elements at lower levels during semiotic analysis in order to be handled in a more consistent and commensurable way.  For every discipline works on certain conditions and within certain context only, its meaning and effect are multiply determined. The fact obstructs its effective comparison with other disciplines regarding the shared problems.

2. Semiotics as a Pan-Semantics for Understanding and Communication in Social and Human Sciences
The pan-semantic analysis is logically based on interdisciplinary approach. Any discipline is settled in definite conditions and framework. The meaning and effect of propositions and judgment in it organically depend on those conditions and framework. For the sake of making meanings and effects of sentences in different disciplines more commensurable and communicable we have to dismantle their respective disciplinary conditionings. In terms of this we understand why any of the traditional philosophical schools can hardly become the valid theoretical basis for our thinking, if the latter involves the multi-formed material. The professional philosophers tend to apply their theories formed in definite frameworks to the objects existing outside those frameworks. The ordinary terms formed and used in daily life are employed in both the special and common fields without the strict restrictions. Therefore the everyday terms naturally become the source of semantic ambiguity of philosophers’ discourse. Within their own special fields the terms could be more precisely defined and used; but in other fields the same terms could be more practically or more casually used. The words and sentences employed in the two applied fields remain to be the same while the meanings of them are widely changed yet. In the result, the same shape of the employed words help cover the ambiguity committed by those rigorous philosophers because of the improper application of their theoretical language. For example, that is why the stricter phenomenological-psychological terminology can be used in a less strict way in some phenomenological-cultural discussions. The same case is with analytic philosophy that extensively works in philosophical logic and traditional philosophy. The latter is full of ordinary words used for thousands of years while their intelligent contexts have changed from time to time. On one hand analytic philosophy is characterized by its clarity and rigor in its special discourse. On the other, however, it indicates a simplistic tendency to deal with complicated cultural problems. The rigor of discourse in ones proper field covers ambiguity or simplicity of discourse in another fields. The self-confidence in the former becomes the support for that in the latter. One reason, among others, is exactly that they pay a less attention to the restrictive conditions of disciplinary-based discourses.

On one hand semiotics is ambitious in promoting a wide communication among different disciplinary discourses; on the other it is modest in dealing with the substantial part of knowledge. Its object is concerned with signifier and signification, the latter is the relation between the former and signified. As regarding the objective of entire knowledge concerned semiotics must cooperate with the scientific part, namely the part of signified and referent which is organized according to the empirical-scientific procedure. So there are two kinds of positivism: the semantic (representation)-directed one and the scientific (verification)-directed one. Both refer to the empirical universe containing different domains such as physical, psychological, axiological and pragmatic. The point lies in that the pan-semantic operation should not be mixed with the scientific one. In this regard semiotic semantics should be different from analytic semantics that deals with truth problem.

As a reorganizer of the existing academic structure, semiotics involves various kinds of semantic practice: such as the linguistic, behavioral, psychological, conceptual and communicational.  Its semantic practice make different kinds of discourses communicable, leading to shape the ground for all-round intellectual dialogue among a number of disciplines. The traditional academic boundaries in the humanities could be broke up by various interdisciplinary-directed semiotic processes available. Furthermore, semiotics can lead to re-interconnection of social and human sciences through firstly anatomizing the latter. The interdisciplinary operation of semiotics plays a double role in both disconnecting and reconnecting procedure in the humanist knowledge. Therefore the great significance of semiotics is perceived by its innate links to the entire human knowledge. To fully estimate the potential of semiotics we should keep a glance to the structure of human knowledge as a whole. So semiotic epistemology is the essential part of the epistemology of social-human sciences. Thus, we may recognize that  “general semiotics” or general theory of semiotics functions as a general organizer in restructuring human sciences. It is not something performed within a new discipline called the semiotics but something operatively related to the entire knowledge, especially to the humanist knowledge that is characterized by its traditional semantic ambiguity.

3. Intercultural Semiotics is the One of Central Parts in the Globalization of Semiotics

Economic-political globalization must bring about an academic and intellectual globalization as well. General semiotics naturally plays a central part in this tendency. The globalization here contains two aspects：geographic and social-cultural. Far from a mere global spread of the western knowledge to various nonwestern areas, academic globalization is a process of cultural interaction. Also far from being a so-called multiculturalism, which is grasped as practical coexistence of different cultural traditions, the semiotic globalization means the intellectual result obtained during the theoretical and practical interaction of the western and nonwestern humanities. The semiotic globalization is in fact a dialectic process: the effect of the Western tradition on the nonwestern one and the feedback of the latter on the former. It is a double process of theoretical operation: first, the western influences and changes the nonwestern; and second, the changed nonwestern influences and changes the western in turn. The point is that the theoretical interaction between the western and the nonwestern can only happen when the nonwestern is firstly modernized along the modern direction. So totally, there are two processes in the globalization of semiotic theoretical operation； the first theorizing process (the western to the nonwestern) and the second theorizing process (the westernized nonwestern to the western). The relationship can be especially used to describe that between the western and the Chinese. It is semiotics that can more effectively modernize the traditional Chinese discursive system; it is also semiotics that can make Chinese semiotics be able to help readjust the reorganization of the present western academic discursive system. In this respect Chinese semiotics is essentially different from Sinology or China Studies in the West that remains to be generally a pre-theoretical practice of doing research. So Chinese semiotics as a theoretical reformulation of traditional Chinese discourse attempts to modernize the academic direction of either the National Learning (Guo Xue) in China or Sinology in the West. In their respective professional fields the both have reason and possibility to subsist and they no doubt continue existing that way further, while Chinese semiotics will be directed towards a more scientific or more theoretical direction in dealing with the traditional learning and national-historical culture, promoting the latter to a more universally communicable mode of thinking. So-called Chinese semiotics in its narrow sense is equivalent to a scientific reformulation of the traditional Chinese discourses with an intention to effectively immerse itself into the global dialogue of thought and scholarship. Chinese semiotics will reformulate the traditional discourse in the fields such as the philosophical, literary, historical and artistic, leading to the disclosure of the mechanism of the historical, social and cultural mechanisms of China. The result will provide a freshly new experience of human existence with which the Western is not familiar. Accordingly the Western main trends in thought and scholarship have to pay an attention to the new forms of human experience in order to enlarge or readjust their knowledge attained purely from their own historical experience. In the frame of a traditional Far-Eastern Orientalism the western main scholarship can co-exist peacefully with the latter as an intellectual autonomy still connected with the western civilization. The Western main trends of scholarship must reconsider their relationship with the non-western intellectual experience that will become more communicable in the era of our global village. Practically speaking, the intellectual change made by Chinese semiotics could make the both western-main stream of thought and the Sinology-directed studies uncomfortable in face of this possible new scholarly development. But they would gain benefits later when taking a more suitable attitude towards this new synthetic type of scholarly development. It is the same case with the western semiotics that, besides its regular practice shaped in the Western context, has a chance to be faced with its significant “Other”. On the other side, Chinese semiotics therewith obtains two tasks as well: to modernize the traditional Chinese academic discourse as well as to join the international dialogue at theoretical level. Mankind in the new century, together with the rise of the intercultural semiotics, is faced with the task of restructuring the entire humanities on the globe. Limiting in the traditional and professional framework, scholars would not feel the necessity to deal with the humanities in a revolutionary way like what we try to propose here. Any workable academic practice can be accepted as suitable or workable for operation either in a scientifically specialized or a professionally defined sense. With the motive for scientific truth in mind instead, semiotics scholar will look to the situation beyond their habitual professional tracks. It is because that the humanities with their traditional shortcomings indicates the serious weakness in dealing with some basic problems, especially those in ethical and historiographic fields.

Therefore the so-called Chinese semiotics, different from its historical source, will be a field where the historical material is transformed into the scientifically intelligible discourse, becoming the suitable partner of Western theory in scientific communication. Chinese semiotics becomes a synthetic entity consisting of the Chinese historical and the Western theoretical aspects. On the ground of Chinese semiotics could be realized a multiply interdisciplinary-intercultural semiotic interaction.

Why especially is Chinese semiotics mentioned with respect to the entire nonwestern semiotic world? Because it contains the richest and the most “strange” thesaurus consisting in written traditional discourses in her long history, presenting the most remarkable records of typology of writings. If the semantic-directed semiotics is especially related to the relational analysis between the written sign systems and the signified objects the Chinese written systems are naturally the object of comparative or intercultural semiotic studies. French semiotics, because of its pan-semantic direction, is therefore especially helpful for the development of Chinese semiotics. Chinese semiotics becomes accordingly a double-mirror and a double-blade scalpel for the both Chinese and western academic modernizations.

4. Significance of Structuralism and Contemporary

 Pan-Positivist Epistemology

Regarding the above mentioned three main theoretical trends in the Twenties century all of them indicate a pan-positivist tendency. Therefore all of them, to certain degree, keep a reference to the tangible reality at different levels in their intellectual operations. The positivist position in its broad sense is in contrast with that of fictive, metaphysical and artistic practice, either with respect to the object or to the operation. Positivism is defined by both object and the operating way. Thus we can have the reality concerning respectively physical world, logical world, linguistic world, psychological and deep-psychological world, cultural world, as well as an axiological world.  Reality is not limited in the perceptual domain. All kinds of real world are characterized by the shared empirical experience of human beings. Despite various non-empirical factors involved in the trends of thought, the main part of them is positivist-empirical-directed. When semiotics is called a cultural logic it refers to a cultural reality that is also multiply constituted. We can say French structuralism is represented by its multiple-laired analysis of cultural and academic reality attempting to approach a deep reality. That means structuralism eventually refers to the certain real experience rather than to the fictive or nonrealistic phenomena, except a real experience about fictive or unreal conceptions.

Despite the different sources in modern semiotic history we are inclined to emphasize the special contributions of current French structural scholars.  I mean the theoretical consequence of French structuralism. Regarding the contemporary semiotic movement the French plays a leading role. This is a historical fact. All other great semiotic trends have their important influence in different aspects. But in the proper field of the typical semiotic operation no any other efforts can be compared with the French one in the epistemological dimension. Why we need to estimate anew this special contribution made by French structuralism? Because what we want to stress in the conceived new movement of semiotics are much more implied in the French trend yet. In my opinion, there are four main features displayed by the French cultural semiotics: the interdisciplinary, the intercultural, the positivist tradition and the pan-semantic direction. The four features are exactly what we request for promoting the new intercultural semiotic movement in the new century. The scientific is the positivist that is taken as the realist with respect to human experience.

First, it is generally recognized that, compared with other semiotic practices, French structural movement is characterized by its multiply interdisciplinary practice. This original tendency to first escape and then recombine the elements of existing academic institutions proves to be the very reason why it can launch an revolutionary movement in the post-war humanities, that has eventually influenced the whole academic world. Second, the French achievements are in fact in connection with the entire related Western academic traditions. Exactly, it is the synthesis of the three main theoretical trends in the West: the Anglo-American analytical-positivist, the Austrian-German philosophical-psychological positivist and the French cultural-sociological-positivist. The last can be traced back to the Enlightenment which itself was a synthesis of the English and French empirical-rationalist traditions. As a matter of fact, French structural movement implies a pan-positivist tendency originating from different Western positivist sources in contrast with various metaphysical-ontological trends prevailing in the Twentieth century. We can even say that French structural semiotics implies an anti-metaphysical feature that is directed and linked to both the new semiotic practice in particular and the new human sciences in general. Its cultural and historical semantic-directed practice is performed in different academic fields. Therefore French structural semiotics properly embodies the guiding spirit of the semiotic operation. Semiotics must be interdisciplinary-directed and therefore linked to the general aim of mankind for reorganizing and renovating human knowledge. What we pay a special attention here to is mainly about the general spirit of French structuralism but not necessarily convinced in the concrete conclusions by the structural scholars. When any original intellectual creations become the new dogmas or new disciplines in the professional world they would easily lose the potential for furthering intellectual creation. The fact indicates that semiotics players should keep an attention to a larger intellectual panorama. The western and nonwestern intercultural semiotics provides such a chance for reflecting on the more desirable semiotic tasks now.

In face of the global academic commercialization a semiotic epistemology should maintain a positivist or scientific conception of truth that is widely neglected or dismissed by the post-modernist thought. There is a typology of truth rather than a single dogmatic form of truth. French positivist tradition is all the time directed to the some kind of reality. Without the concept of reality the semiotics player is no more a scientific researcher but a mere artistic gamer. For reaching different modes of truth and reality, like what Barthes or Foucault attempted to disclose, or for becoming a scientific scholar, we should resume the rational terms in our semiotic epistemology. Semiotics is a rational practice. The artistic use of the practice should not exclude its proper way of the academic operation. We should pay a serious attention to the logic links between global commercialization and irrational ways of performing scholarship today. The both are undermining the proper orientation of semiotics. Some French think the French thought exhibits a national theoretical talent. From an intercultural point of view we prefer to say that French structural semiotics indicates an international way of thinking, performing a successful interdisciplinary and intercultural synthesis based on the achievements of entire modern Western science. The synthesis can be realized in France; it can also be realized in other areas. It can be realized in IASS stages as well. So-called epistemology of semiotics implies a strong critical-theoretical tendency in its scientific practice. This critical-theoretical part is in contrast with any established theoretical foundations shaped in the traditional disciplines, especially the philosophical one. Semiotic theoretical practice is linked to and even based on the theoretical results of all disciplines but it presents itself as the reorganizer and synthetic user of all theoretical material, including the philosophical, rather than the passive follower of the latter. Therefore epistemology of semiotics is essentially contrary to any philosophical fundamentalism. Its critical character is exhibited in its disconnection with any philosophical dogmatism. Any attempt to settle general semiotic theory within some philosophical school or discipline is against the spirit of the semiotic operation. The utility of semiotics is due to the academic necessity of breaking up and recombining compartmentalized disciplines in modern history. So the constructive part of French structuralism should not include those related philosophical dogmas. For example, the contribution of Althusser ’s theory is not his philosophical speculation but his structural-positive analysis of social-cultural phenomena. Compared with other positivist-directed trends in the West the French one is more directed to the entire scope of human intellectual practice or to the cultural-semantic practice in general.

The transformation from structuralism to post-structuralism is a change from the positivist to the anti-positivist turn. An appeal to the structural trend is a reemphasis on the positivist-directed epistemological tradition. All structural scholars search for the “truer”(deep) reality in comparison with the naturalist type of superficial reality. The intellectual orientation of one trend is different from the detailed content produced in the trend. There are a great number of wrong judgments and conclusions in the structural scholarship just like in many other scholarly achievements, but their epistemological line is directed to the positivist-directed objective. By contrast, there are evidently much less wrong judgments in the proper contexts of analytic scholarship, because the latter operates in a narrowly chosen scope regarding the pan-physical world. We should distinguish between two kinds of positivism: the natural one and the structural one. So structuralism attains an epistemological achievement characterized by its special conceptual direction, operative manner and theoretical objective.

5.  Interaction of the Western and the Non-Western Humanities: Towards the Theoretical Globalization of Social and Human Sciences and towards a New Enlightenment of Human Knowledge

Value and efficiency of most humanist scholarly products can only be fixed under certain conditions and operative frameworks of related disciplines, fields and schools. The point is that scholars tend to extrapolate their specialized results to irrelevant subjects making the latter lose their original efficiency and theoretical value because of this discursive replacement. One of the tasks of general semiotics lies in reexamining those operative conditions and more reasonably redefine and rearrange the related scholarly results through reorganizing the related operative frameworks.

We apply the term semiotics in such a general way because the basic nature of semiotic studies is consistent with the direction of restructuring human sciences represented by the above-mentioned tendency of our era. So we can easily expand and advance the scientific practice of semiotics. In other words, we should continue or resume the original ambition of the semiotics masters according to the current changed contexts and new conditions. This use of the term makes semiotics work in a more operative term than a substantial one; it refers to a general strategy or becomes an intelligent organizer facing the general goal to renovate human knowledge in this new century.

From a practical point of view semiotics scholars will be doubtful of the possibility and value of intercultural semiotics. The new situation requests a more reasonable way to view and arrange semiotic projects; semiotic family further stresses the more cooperative way to do semiotics than ever before. The intercultural semiotics doesn’t mean a mere geographic spread of semiotic practice; it means also a new attitude and methods formed according to the new intellectual context.  The specialized and the general knowledge should be further involved in a more reasonable combination to treat the new objects, problems and objectives. Each semiotics scholar, besides its customary scholarly specialty, should learn more from neighboring fields in an indirect way or at a general level in order to form a useful expanded theoretical horizon. That is why we need the international semiotic dialogue to help scholars approach these two different semiotic aims.  Therefore, on one hand each semiotics scholar needs to perform his or her specialized theoretical projects through learning from neighboring disciplines and on the other he or she needs to pay attention to or to share in promoting the development of the semiotics movement in general.　Both the discipline-centered interdisciplinary research and cross-disciplinary-directed interdisciplinary research work along the same semiotic-strategic orientation: to perform theoretical and practical studies in terms of reorganized operative frames and procedures with respect to the current academic structure. The semiotic studies based on definite fields become the effort to combine their own disciplinary methodology with those of the neighboring fields, embodying a more creative epistemological and methodological combination in their own designed projects.

The semiotic operation in the second sense is characterized by its strategic practice directed to the entire area of human knowledge and serves that general task. With this perspective in mind all semiotics players should be more open-minded and intellectually more sympathetic by keeping a more cooperative attitude in contacting different kinds of semiotic performance, including those in different disciplines and different cultures. Any semiotics player has a double role in our family: as the professional specialist and as the promoter for the common mission. The latter makes him or her the scientific organizer and movement agent. We need to make semiotics a new new-movement with its intercultural or globalization turn. It is no doubt that the center for theoretical development of semiotics remains in the West in the near future but it has to pay a sufficient attention to what is going on in the nonwestern areas. There is requested a new form of intercultural cooperation among semiotics players in our intercultural century.

Epistemologically speaking, semiotics is the renovating force and traditional agent at the same time. In the sense of the latter it stands by the traditional rationalism in contrast with the current post-modernism. The semiotic task of reorganizing the humanities is directed to the traditional rationalism that should be further elaborately improved along a more reasonable line. In the same sense, current semiotic direction should not be satisfied in collecting all related scientific achievements merely in a semiotic terminology and framework; it should be a reorganizing force directed to the entire academic world of mankind.  Semiotic practice at epistemological level should be a performance made by collective efforts. Far from being the creation of a few talented scholars, it is realized at a collective level. So the goal of the semiotic movement lies in maintaining the collaborative or dialogic ground providing players with the systematic opportunity for developing general semiotic epistemology, the latter can only emerge at the collective level.

Accordingly every semiotics player plays a double role: the one in concrete fields and the other in the collective concern with the common goal of the movement.  Semiotics becomes also a term for such a scientific practice. Besides being involved in some concrete projects called semiotic studies a semiotics player is also engaged in promoting the general progress of human knowledge called the semiotic movement. The expanded mission of a global semiotics movement emerges in an Internet era when the mankind expects for a new Enlightenment of human knowledge. Accordingly, an emerging intercultural semiotics is intellectually linked to a much greater task facing the human civilization as a whole. Or, we will have the urgent reason to apply semiotics in such an expanded context and perspective. So we can say the epistemological problem of semiotics is exactly the central part of that in the entire human knowledge. With the achievements of the specialized sciences for the past two centuries human beings are able to start another holistic reorganization of human knowledge, especially with respect to the relatively less successful fields in social and human sciences. Semiotics belongs to the kernel of this totally revolutionary-directed academic exploration. That is why we terribly need semiotics; that is why semiotics is so important for us. Let’s put it this way: semiotics is simply the way to promote interdisciplinary theoretical communication, namely the exchange among various disciplinary theories. The existing disciplines in human sciences can effectively subsist under the present academic market rooted in the global commercialized society. There exist two different academic orientations: the intellectual-scientific and the commercial-pragmatic ones. The two mechanisms of scientific practice follow the two different criteria and directions. It is the former that remains to be directed to the truth-search objective; so we can say semiotics should continue advancing itself along the traditional rationalism energetically represented by the Enlightenment