Semiosis in the Postmodern Age

“Who are we to suppose we are capable of comprehending the world of which we are a part, and what is the world to suppose it can be understood by us, miniscule and insignificant spatiotemporal warps contained within it?” This provocative question opens Floyd Merrell’s study of post modernism and the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce, part of the author’s ongoing effort to understand our contemporary cultural and intellectual environment. Merrell's specific focus in this interdisciplinary study is the modernism/postmodernism dichotomy and Peirce's precocious realization that the world does not lend itself to the simplistic binarism of modernist thought. In Merrell's examination of postmodern phenomena, the reader is taken through various facets of the cognitive sciences, philosophy of science, mathematics, and literary theory. Throughout this work, Merrell is scrupulously aware that we are participants within, not detached spectators of, our signs. We understand them while we interact with them, during which process we, and our signs as well, invariably undergo change.