A requirement for discourse on development requires a critique of semiosis. This derives from the double articulation of development, in that it proceeds from two kinds of premises. The first often finds justification in the popular-scientific conception of evolution. This position views development as a form of supplanting: of one unfit form by a more fit other, whether in social, economic or political (ideological) terms.

In contrast is the equally popular-scientific understanding that sees development as subject to certain laws - usually economic and ideological. When applied to development, these laws are understood universally to result in a specific kind of change. Thus the object of development changes from a given prior (pre-modern) to an expected (predictable) posterior (modern) condition. The latter is always understood to be more amenable to the economic and ideological conditions necessary for smooth relations with the metropolitan centres.

The two kinds of scientific understanding clash with each other by virtue of an internal ideological inconsistency in the Western intellectual heritage: our tradition cannot make up its mind as to where the experiencing subject fits into our self-proclaimed intellectual marker of Science. Richard Rorty has pointed out that there is in Western thought a very specific kind of dialogue within which valid knowledge-claims can be made, and that this debate draws its agenda from the judgement we today pass on those who, like the Inquisition's Cardinal Bellarmine, sought to refute Galileo's cosmological claims. For our modern culture, claims which fail to conform to a specifc mode of justification we tend to dismiss as the equivalent of Bellarmine's "priest-craft".

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