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Wellsprings
epistemology

Signs and Inference

σημεῖον

Smoke betrays fire, a scar betrays an old wound — but can a visible thing prove what no eye will ever see?

The Greeks asked how something plainly visible can stand in for something hidden: how smoke reveals fire, or a fast pulse reveals fever. They drew a sharp line between two kinds of signs. A "commemorative" sign points to something temporarily out of sight but knowable in principle (smoke and its fire). An "indicative" sign claims to disclose something permanently hidden from the senses (a bodily symptom revealing an invisible inner cause). Stoics defended indicative signs as the engine of science; Skeptics and Epicureans attacked or reshaped the theory, making sign-inference one of the great battlegrounds of Hellenistic philosophy.

Where this idea shows up

7 Greek sources·2 Jewish-canon citations

Where to read it