Metamorphoses of truth, between meaning and interaction

Abstract

Since the very beginning, Greimas’s semiotics distanced itself from both formal logic and the philosophical tradition, in particular by abstaining to contemplate any ontological problem about truth as such, and focusing instead on the intersubjective and cognitive processes of making believe true. Later on, in its continuation, sociosemiotics, distancing itself, in its turn, from the postulates of standard semiotics, made a step further by denying the primacy of the cognitive dimension and stressing the role of the sensitive factor in communication and interaction, especially in the political field. This led to admitting that alongside citizens who trust preferably in forms of truth founded on proof or negociation, an important minority confides rather in forms of supposedly revealed truth, or forms of certainty which proceed from feeling. In order to account for this diversity, we postulate that each of these regimes of truth finds its source, its coherence and its meaning in the framework of a specific interactional regime that comprises and rules it. The purpose of this article is to outline the principles that determine such correspondences.