Abstract

This dissertation explores the extent to which Greek writers before Aristotle inquire into signs and our ability to make inferences from them. The first chapter accounts for the contexts in which the earliest Greek authors appeal to signs. It argues that these contexts involve a fundamental relationship between signs and limits, according to which a sign is a visible mark of the binding limits that the immortals have set upon mortals' lives. ;The second chapter discusses an early debate about whether trustworthy signs exist. Aeschylus' Agamemnon and Pindar's Odes deny that signs can provide mortals a reliable means of determining the issues of their lives. The poets embrace this negative view in order to justify their beliefs about how mortals ought to live. This negative view finds opposition in the Prometheus Bound, where Prometheus praises and the signs on which it depends for providing a reliable means of both knowing and directing the future. ;The third chapter discusses the views of signs of writers who defend a sign-based methodology. On the Science explains the nature and function of signs in order to refute the view that medicine has no means to ensure a patient's survival. Thucydides' consideration of signs as a standard of true evaluation challenges the pessimistic tradition that denies the validity of sign-based judgment. But Thucydides defends his methodology of signs within a specific rhetorical context as well. That is, he uses his theory of signs to show why his opponents' evaluations of the past are wrong and why his are correct. ;Thucydides' discussion of signs reflects the practice of fifth and early fourth century writers to explain and classify signs strictly for the purpose of refuting an opponent's sign-based claims and supporting their own. This practice and the use of signs in rhetorical contexts provide the subject of chapter four. This chapter also argues that Plato rejects the idea that sign-based judgments in general can provide a sufficient basis of knowledge on the grounds that they are likenesses, or indications, of a thing rather than the thing itself