The Categories “Meaning” and “Invention” in the Context of the Semiotics of Technology

The article summarizes the results obtained by the team of authors when working on a project on the study of semiotic foundations of technology and technical consciousness presented in the reports of the conferences in 2017-18. The notion of meaning is considered in the context of general semiotics as the fulfillment of the semantic rule of semiosis. Semiosis itself is divided into receptive and projective; receptive semiosis is referred to as “cognition”, projective semiosis as “technnology”. The subject of analysis is the transition from receptive semiosis to projective one, fixed in the philosophy of technology through the concept of “invention” and entailing the creation of the “new”. The authors interpret classical works on the philosophy of technology of Peter K. Engelmeyer and Friedrich Dessauer, the concept of invention of Ivan I. Lapshin. The general methodology is transcendental semiotics as reflected in the works of Alexandr Yu. Nesterov. The reasoning is constructed as follows. In the projective activity, the subject consistently performs (1) the semantic rule of semiosis in intellect [intellectus, Vernunft], (2) the semantic rule of semiosis in reason [ratio, Verstand], (3) the semantic rule of semiosis in sensory perception. At the first step, the “new” arises as a new ratio of the imaginable and unthinkable, the new order of the arrangement of thoughts, new thoughts (new hypotheses, phantasms), a new substratum of reflection; at the second step, it arises as a new expression of the expressible and the ineffable in the language, a new order of the arrangement of signs (sentences and texts in one or another language), a new designation, a new substratum of linguistic expression (for example, programming); at the third step, as a new relationship between the possible and the impossible, new rules of activity (laws of nature), new objects of sensory perception (artifacts), new substrata for objectifying activity (for example, creating artifacts in the microworld). The result of the work is formulated in the form of definitions: “meaning” in the context of the philosophy of technology is the consistent fulfillment of the semantic rule in the semiosis of the intellectual, rational and physical activity of man, “invention” is the transformation of the rule of formation and/or the transformation of signs resulting from a change in the pragmatic rule direction of semiosis and entailing a new meaning.

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