Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher
Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Signs," 1938, p. 3
“The Greeks, who were apparently strong on visual aids, originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier. The signs were cut or burnt into the body and advertised that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor — a blemished person, ritually polluted, to be avoided, especially in public places. Later, in Christian times, two layers of metaphor were added to the term : the first referred to bodily signs of holy grace that took the form of eruptive blossoms on the skin; the second, a medical allusion to this religious allusion, referred to bodily signs of physical disorder. Today the term is widely used in something like the original literal sense, but is applied more to the disgrace itself than to the bodily evidence of it. Furthermore, shifts have occurred in the kinds of disgrace that arouse concern. Students, however, have made little effort to describe the structural preconditions of stigma, or even to provide a definition of the concept itself. It seems necessary, therefore, to try at the beginning to sketch in some very general assumptions and definitions.”
— Erving Goffman, book Stigma
Source: 1950s-1960s, Stigma, 1963, p. 1-2 Lead paragraph
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Erving Goffman29
Sociologist, writer, academic 1922–1982Related quotes
Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher
Source: Writings on the General Theory of Signs, 1971, p. 301
Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher
Source: Signs, Language and Behavior, 1946, p. 19
Pierre-Simon Laplace book Philosophical Essay on Probabilities
p, 125
Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1902)
“The time has come
to loose the burden
to clear the stigma, the sign
from my poor heart”
Mara Balls (1983) Finnish musician
“The terms of this new religion, though based on Hebrew models, were Greek terms.”
Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer
Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian
Context: The terms of this new religion, though based on Hebrew models, were Greek terms. Christ, Ekklēsia (Church), Baptism, Eucharist, Agapē (Lovingkindness)—all of Christianity's central words were Greek words. Christian patterns of thought... could indeed be traced to their origins in the coastal Levant, but they often shone with a Greek patina.
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist
On The Algebra of Logic (1885)
Context: If the sign were not related to its object except by the mind thinking of them separately, it would not fulfil the function of a sign at all. Supposing, then, the relation of the sign to its object does not lie in a mental association, there must be a direct dual relation of the sign to its object independent of the mind using the sign. In the second of the three cases just spoken of, this dual relation is not degenerate, and the sign signifies its object solely by virtue of being really connected with it. Of this nature are all natural signs and physical symptoms. I call such a sign an index, a pointing finger being the type of the class.
The index asserts nothing; it only says "There!" It takes hold of our eyes, as it were, and forcibly directs them to a particular object, and there it stops. Demonstrative and relative pronouns are nearly pure indices, because they denote things without describing them; so are the letters on a geometrical diagram, and the subscript numbers which in algebra distinguish one value from another without saying what those values are.
