Linguistic modality acts in existential semiotics: the epistemological turn from “being-in-the-world” awareness to “lived-through-world” experience

Abstract

Against the background of deliberations about the conception of worldhood as developed in existential semiotics on the basis of linguistic modality acts, this paper proposes merging mundane and transcendentalist phenomenology with epistemology as a theory of knowledge, in general, that alludes to pragmatic sources of human knowledge about the world, in particular. From the epistemological perspective, the reality of the human “life-world” is considered not only as a static position of the individual subject’s being-in-the-world, but also as his/her/its experience of living-the-world or things-of-the-world. Against the background of epistemology, defined in terms of ontological and gnoseological assessments pertaining to the knowledge of how things exist and how they are cognitively accessible, and epistemology as an activity of acquiring knowledge about an object of cognition, the author puts forward a hypothetical deductive scaffold of the linguistically and phenomenologically rooted documentary epistemology of practice, which refers to the practicing researchers’ knowledge as a set of texts created for the purposes of communicating in the first person about the awareness of lived word-ness and lived sign-ness of the transmedial and multimodal means and ways of how the world is perceived.