Charybdis of Semiotics and Scylla of Rhetoric. Peirce and Gorgias of Leontini on the Rhetoric of Being
Abstract
In the history of rhetoric (or in the complementary history of semiotics), we can find two strong arguments about the structure of being and its connection to language. The first one is very old, negative and became famous as a kind of a nihilistic perspective: the trilemma from the fragment of On Nature or the Non-Existent by Gorgias of Leontini.
This formation of arguments (together with other texts by Gorgias, the foremost of them being Encomium on Helen) is a base for non-essentialist rhetoric guided by kairos as its radical (non)principle. We can find the second ontological (contra)argument in the so-called mature semeiotic of C.
S. Peirce.
In his postulate of three general categories (of firstness, secondness and thirdness). Peirce s position and strategy is completely different here: from his perspective, we can establish a speculative rhetoric (methodeutic or critical logic), which can show us the formal and general principles of "the general conditions of the reference of Symbols and other Signs to the In interpretants" (CP 2.93).