Historical Thinking in the Light of the Assumptions of Historical Semiotics. (In The Margin of Boris Uspenskij’s Ego Loquens)

I assumed so far that the notion of historical thinking was a worthy and handy “sponsor” of meta‑historical enquiry. Therefore, I left both thinking and, in particular, historical thinking without even a quasi‑definition. In this paper I make an attempt to operationalize the notion of historical thinking using historical semiotics (semiotics of culture), a domain of humanities developed by the founding fathers of the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School, Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspenskij. The association of cognition and communication not only enriches the study of language but also culture and historiography. Bearing in mind the meta‑historical contexts I found interesting, I significantly reorganized the lecture contents found in Uspenskiy’s Ego Loquens. This interpretation took the form of annotated diagrams, which represent and interpret key categories of Uspenskiy’s philosophy resultant from the semiotic concept of language and culture. Underlying it, there is the act of communication as both the act of anthropogenesis and the genesis of the subject of cognition. We point out the qualities of historical thinking which already flow from the qualities of thinking tout court. Along the way we introduce the problem of the status of the so‑called objective and virtual reality, typical of the philosophical aspects of historical semiotics and crucial for potential meta‑historical analyses.