A sign and a symbol

PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

There exist rather contradictory interpretations of the concepts of sign and symbol. The author explores a number of approaches to their distinction in order to indicate the most appropriate one. Before proceeding to the approaches, the author turns to the concepts of a sign, sense and denotation, and comes to a conclusion that one of the reasons for the ambiguity of the relationship between a sign and a symbol lies in following the understanding of a sign and denotation provided by Frege. To study the problem outside of Frege’s theory, the author defines a sign as nothing more or less than what makes sense, and also expands the denotation by introducing the concept of an actual situation. Then, based on the proposed understanding of a sign and also the features of the category of sense, it is indicated what a sign or a symbol cannot be. In the course of consideration of various approaches to the distinction between a sign and a symbol, the author comes to a conclusion that the most promising of them is the separation of a special symbolic meaning. Despite the fact that both the sign and the symbol, provided it becomes possible to distinguish between them, will be the same at the level of the very presence of sense, we see the possibility of distinguishing a special, symbolic, sense based on its depth or sublimeness. However, these concepts are vague, so the first thing to do is to define a clear criterion that would make it possible to distinguish this symbolic sense among other senses, without narrowing the concept of a sign in order to artificially create a symbolic sense in the empty space left after such a narrowing.