Who Were the Sea Peoples?

When the average person viewing a building (who was me until all too recently) sees a problem, that's that: there is a problem. Let's fix it. The door is crooked? Straighten the door. The seals on the windows are broken? Re-seal them. There is a crack in the fireplace? Mortar it! A sloped porch? Level it! Successfully repairing a building, however, requires seeing problems not as (merely) problems, but as symptoms , or signs. (The earliest semioticians were often physicians, and the theory of the sign developed in the context of medical symptoms.) They are, as medieval semioticians would say, aliquid stat pro aliquo : something present standing for something not present. So a crooked door, a cracked fireplace, a broken window seal, a sloped porch? They a problems, true. But they may also be read as symptoms, perhaps as symptoms that, say, the floor underneath the fireplace was not supported when the fireplace was added, and is now collapsing. Not that any bloggers we kno...

C.S. Peirce famously posited a trinitarian division of the sign into indices, icons, and symbols, where an indexical sign works by proximity, and iconic one by similarity, and a symbolic sign by convention. For our purposes here we will be mainly interested in indices and symbols, so let us give an example of each: smoke seen over a distant ridge is an indexical sign of there being a fire over that ridge as well: the smoke, in a sense, "points to" (indexes) the fire. Each of these words I am writing is a symbolic sign: they mean what they do by the conventions of the English language, and may mean something quite different or nothing at all to non-English speakers. I bring this up because in Ron Unz's recent series of pieces on race and IQ at The American Conservative , he has noted that urban populations generally have higher IQs than rural populations, and that urbanization has been a major factor in large IQ increases in a number of people: the Irish urbanization fr...

Rosettta Stone attempts to introduce the ideas of "the real thing" and "a representation of the real thing" (which, given the language-teaching approach to which they have committed themselves, must be done entirely pictorially) by showing, say, the Japanese flag and an aerial photo of Japan. The first, the sentence with the photo says, represents ("rappresenta") Japan, while the second is Japan. Now, I can tell what they are getting at, but... the thing is that an aerial photograph of Japan is really just another representation of Japan (or a sign for Japan), as much as the flag is. The work in different semiotic modes, of course, the photograph being an icon (representing by likeness) and the flag a symbol (representing by convention), but neither is Japan, and it requires an act of interpretation to connect either to Japan. I'm not saying that within Rosetta Stone's self-imposed constraints, I could have done any better -- I'm sure I co...