Believing and knowing: precedence and hierarchy relations

Abstract

According to French Semiotics theory, one of the main parameters to establish a precedence relation between the modalities believing and knowing is found in the enunciation instance. The syntactic antecedence of believing regarding to knowing is pointed out by Fontanille (1987, p. 55) as one of the unavoidable points of Greimas’ paradigmatic distinction between believing and knowing in Du Sens II (1983). In fact, it’s possible to identify the relevance and application of believing syntactic antecedence when it comes to the initial conditions of intersubjective comunication, where an “I believe that” and, correspondingly, a “you must believe that I believe that” are presupposed. By establishing this kind of precedence, we necessarily create a hierarchy concerning the terms that ordains their occurrence in the discourse chronological axis. However, in this approach both modalities are in the same level at the generative path of meaning. At the same time, the arrangement believing-knowing shows us that these modalities can occupy different levels at this path, what is only possible due to the believing capacity of rule other modal enunciation, a peculiarity that distinguish believing from all the others modalities, as highlighted by Zilberberg (2006, p. 160). Thereby, we aim to discuss and analyze precedence and hierarchy relations that believing and knowing can assume according to Paris School of Semiotics.