Archaeology of Concepts’ as research method

Deely’s book is concerned with the history of logic as seen from the point of view of semiotics (part 1) and with cornerstones of semiotic philosophy, such as ‘language’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘experience’ (part 2). The first part of the book clearly strengthens the Peircean heritage of semiotics by contextualizing it within the broader history of logic and relating it to the work of other key thinkers who, like Peirce, ended up ‘doing’ semiotics while developing logic. On the other hand, part 2 of the book appears to lay out the foundations for a number of key later developments in semiotics, both in Deely’s own work and in the work of other semiotic scholars. Overall, this review suggests that part 1 is the key part of the book since the ‘archaeology of concepts’ whose workings it demonstrates appears to be an aspect of Deely’s writing that remains largely unacknowledged in the literature, hence underexploited. ‘Deely’s method’, I argue, is relevant to any kind of interdisciplinary research, including but not limited to semiotics research, and its potential as a mainstream qualitative research method for the humanities is one that should be tested further in interdisciplinary research projects.