Semiotics 2020/2021 Signs of Ambiguity and Uncertainty pp. 197–213 © 2022, Semiotic Society of America doi: 10.5840/cpsem2020/202117 The Book of Nature, Abductive Inquiry, and Herman Bavinck’s Philosophy of Revelation 12 Michael R. Kearney Duquesne University John Deely’s account of the history of semiotics designates the era between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries as “cryptosemiotic”—a time in which the assumptions of a modernist paradigm of knowledge obscured genuine semiotic inquiry (2006: 217). Deely’s label expresses a conviction that the era of the Enlightenment missed something about the world in its efort to construe an empirically knowable reality. Historically, the efect of this conviction has been a reactionary philosophical movement termed postmodernity, which Deely separates into two senses. Te frst sense involves a wholesale abandon- ment of a quest for the transcendent. Te second, with which Deely aligns his own semiotic project, involves an intentional return to an “early modern” era in order to demonstrate “that the idea of reading the book of nature on its own terms . . . was not a chimerical idea at all, but rather one well-founded” (2004: 118). Tis second sense of postmodernity nurtures the emergence and discovery of a semiotic universe (see Arnett 2021; Deely 2001). Te notion of revelation or the revelatory provides a philosophical en- trance into postmodern semiotic inquiry (Arnett 2006; Crosby 2013; Hackett 2016; Hefer 2013; Langbiir and Mancino 2017). Semiotics as a philosophy of communication involves a phenomenological focus of attention on the revelatory potential of the “carrier of meaning” in a particular communica- tive context (Arnett and Holba 2012; see Mancino 2020). Revelation counters both a modernist insistence on rationalistic arrival at universal truth through scientifc method and a postmodern (in Deely’s frst sense) conclusion of the unknowability of the transcendent. Rather, revelation refects a sensibility that is at the same time medieval and contemporary, echoing Deely’s second sense of postmodernity.