The Semiological Implications of Knowledge-Ideologies: A Harrisian Perspective

Abstract

This chapter reveals the semiological assumptions underlying Eurocentrism – the dominant ideology of knowledge in the current academic world. I argue that it is what Harris has criticized as “the language myth” in Western culture that acts as the semiological foundation of Eurocentrism. Then I compare Harris’s negative views on the language myth and Southern scholars’ rebellious attitudes toward Eurocentric knowledge ideology and draw two relevant points. First, both notions of “the Global North” and “the Global South” are supercategories, namely, second-order abstractions from a Harrisian perspective, and hence discursively made, and by tracking down the communicational activities which these two notions presuppose I offer an integrationist perspective of how and why they come to be what they are now. The other point in question is about a postmodernism common ground in between integrationalism and epistemologies of the South. Finally, I sum up compatible theoretical implications of integrationism and Southern theories.