Abstract
The chapter surveys key distinctions from antiquity to the Middle Ages that influenced, and evolved into, the approaches to semiotics that inform the field today. Two key distinctions emerge from the chapter: (1) inference vs. representation and (2) natural vs. cultural approaches to the study of signs.
While early thinkers such as Hippocrates, Aristotle and the Stoics regarded signs as inferential phenomena within the sphere of the natural world alone, later thinkers such as Augustine and Bacon expanded these accounts to include representation and the cultural/linguistic sphere. Bacon also introduced process thinking into the study of signs and included mental concepts within the sphere of signs