The contribution that may come from the general science of signs, semiotics, to the planning and development of education and learning at all levels, from early schooling through to university education and learning should not be neglected. As Umberto Eco claims in the “Introduction” to the Italian edition of his book Semiotica and Philosophy of Language (1984: xii, my trans.), “[general semiotics] is philosophical in nature, because it does not study a particular system, but posits the general categories in light (...) of which different systems can be compared. And for general semiotics philosophical discourse is neither advisable nor urgent: it is simply constitutive.” To the title of their book Semiotic Theory of Learning, at the centre of our attention in the present text, Andrew Stables, Winfried Nöth, Alin Olteanu, Sébastien Pesce, and Eetu Pikkarainen, rightly add the subtitle New Perspectives in the Philosophy of Education. This multivoiced contribution to research in learning and education in a semiotic framework has a unifying reference in the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce, but without disregarding an array of other distinguished exponents of the teaching and education sciences from different disciplines, semioticians and philosophers alike. This book, a polyphonic effort, with its appeal to “act otherwise,” and to do so investing in learning and education, no doubt makes a significant contribution in such a direction: education for transformation, for humanizing social change. Beyond evidencing what to us are particularly interesting aspects of the topics under discussion in Semiotic Theory of Learning, we also propose to continue and amplify this multivoiced dialogue. While highlighting still other aspects and contributions made by the same semioticians and philosophers presented by the authors of this book, involving such figures as Charles Peirce, Charles Morris, Thomas Sebeok, John Deely, etc., we have further introduced other voices made to resound throughout, whether directly or indirectly, like that of Victoria Welby, Mikhail Bakhtin, Emmanuel Levinas, Adam Schaff, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Marcel Danesi, Augusto Ponzio, and Genevieve Vaughan. (shrink)

Intersemiotic translation (IT) was defined by Roman Jakobson (The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, London, p. 114, 2000) as “transmutation of signs”—“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” Despite its theoretical relevance, and in spite of the frequency in which it is practiced, the phenomenon remains virtually unexplored in terms of conceptual modeling, especially from a semiotic perspective. Our approach is based on two premises: (i) IT is fundamentally a semiotic operation process (semiosis) and (ii) (...) IT is a deeply iconic-dependent process. We exemplify our approach by means of literature to dance IT and we explore some implications for the development of a general model of IT. (shrink)

There is a steady and maybe growing impulse in biosemiotics to open itself to the arts and humanities. Recent events and publications indicate a desire expressed by biosemioticians and non-biosemioticians to engage in a dialogue concerning the manner in which living systems are cast, understood and dealt with, a dialogue that will determine the future course of those fields of research. In this article, I react to two recent monographs on the subject, Paul Cobley’s Cultural implications of biosemiotics and Wendy (...) Wheeler’s Expecting the earth. Life, culture, biosemiotics. After a close reading of these two books, I then briefly present certain issues that shed a different light on cultural biosemiotics: human pressure on other-than-human organisms, domestication and reproductive rights. (shrink)

Eetu Pikkarainen describes the educational thinking of Johann AmosComenius (1592-1670) from a perspective of Bildung -theoretical problems. Comenius has had a remarkable influence on modern education, particularly through his language-learning and general didactical methods and principles. However, Comenius’ broader pansophic views have had somewhat more benign later effects. Comenius developed a reformation programme concerning the ‘main areas’ of reality, from theology and education to philosophy and language to social questions and world peace. This program has important connections to the modern (...) theories of Bildung. Comenius connects individual human growth with global issues such as the growth of scientific knowledge, the justice of political systems, and world peace. In his philosophy, Comenius strongly criticises the problems of the rising modern thinking such as trapping to dualisms. From that angle, Comenius appears an almost postmodern thinker with surprising similarity to the thoughts of C S Peirce. (shrink)

Studying the origin of semiosis is a task obscured by terminological and metaphysical issues which create an ambiguous set of definitions for biosemiotics when referring to the concept of emergence. The question is, how emergent can semiosis be? And what are the conditions for semiosis to be an emergent of a certain type? This paper will attempt to briefly deal with the general terminology of emergence from a philosophical point of view and will discuss the characterization of semiosis as an (...) emergent phenomenon based on the distinctions made by Bedau, Kim and Chalmers. Accordingly, we will consider the possibility of strong and weak emergence in an attempt to bring some clarity to what it means for something in biosemiotics to be an emergent and how the philosophical concepts play out when applied to biosemiotic research. In inquiring into the metaphysical status of semiosis, we change our semiotic theories to correspond to the assumptions contained in the elementary objects of our theories. This being the case, the way semiosis–the constitutive element that it is for semiotics–is taken to be with regards to its possible ontology, will conduct to different research objects for the long-term investigation of its origins and necessary conditions. (shrink)

The paper deals with the problem of Peirce’s theory of signs, placing it within the context of modern semiotics (comparing it with Saussurean semiology, in particular), and considers Peirce’s semiotics from the point of view of his theory of categories (phaneroscopy) and in the terms of his classification of signs. The article emphasizes the complicated system of Peirce’s late, “mature”, semeiotic and his theory (classification) of Interpretant.

The Four ages contains a brief explicit discussion of the issue of Christian philosophy, referencing the Middle Ages and the 1930s French debates about Christian philosophy. Closer attention to the debates reveals a plurality of positions rather than unanimous agreement on Christian philosophy, indicating that the quite complex issues were not resolved. In this review article, I contest Deely’s interpretation of Maritian’s position, provide an exegesis of Maritain’s position, argue that Deely’s explicit position is identifiable as very close to Neo-Scholastic (...) opponents of Christian philosophy during the debates, and briefly discuss Gilson’s and Blondel’s criticisms of such positions articulated during the 1930s debates. I also indicate that despite his opposition to Christian philosophy, Deely shares several key insights with its proponents, and I end by suggesting but not developing a few ways Deely’s semiotic approach could bear additional fruit for postmodern Christian philosophy’s ongoing projects of self-understanding. (shrink)

In this article I trace some of the main tenets of the struggle between nominalism and realism as identified by John Deely in his Four ages of understanding. The aim is to assess Deely’s claim that the Age of Modernity was nominalist and that the coming age, the Age of Postmodernism — which he portrays as a renaissance of the late middle ages and as starting with Peirce — is realist. After a general overview of how Peirce interpreted the nominalist-realist (...) controversy, Deely gives special attention to Thomas Aquinas’s On being and essence and the realism it entails. A subsequent discussion of the Modern Period shows that the issue of nominalism and realism is very much tied up with di¤erent conceptions of the intellect. Deely credits the theory of evolution with bringing us a conception of the intellect that is closer to that of the Middle Ages and that opens the way for a truly realistic ‘‘fourth age’’ of the understanding. (shrink)

Jean Baudrillard, the scholar and critic of postmodernity, struggled with questions of postmodern ontology: representation of the real through the semioticprocess of signification is threatened with the rise of simulacra, the simulated real. With this rise, seductive semiotic relationships between signs replace any traditional ontological representamen. This struggle has implications for environmentalism since the problems of contemporary environmental philosophy are rooted in problems with ontology. Hence the question of postmodern ecology: can the natural survive postmodern simulation? Baudrillard’s communicative analysis of (...) semiotic postmodernity can both support and extend ecosemiotic theses in response to these questions, questions that must be answered in order to explore our paradoxical understandings of the natural and confirm an understanding of environmentalism for postmodernity. In this paper I will argue for the merit of a semiotic understanding of postmodernity, develop the idea of ecology in this context, and then compare Baudrillard’s approach to the contemporary development of ecosemiotics. (shrink)

A sign is something that refers to something else. Signs, whether of natural or cultural origin, act by provoking a receptive system, human or nonhuman, to form an interpretant (a movement or a brain activity) that somehow relates the system to this "something else." Semiotics sees meaning as connected to the formation of interpretants. In a biosemiotic understanding living systems are basically engaged in semiotic interactions, that is, interpretative processes, and organic evolution exhibits an inherent tendency toward an increase in (...) semiotic freedom. Mammals generally are equipped with more semiotic freedom than are their reptilian ancestor species, and fishes are more semiotically sophisticated than are invertebrates. The evolutionary trend toward the production of life forms with an increasing interpretative capacity or semiotic freedom implies that the production of meaning has become an essential survival parameter in later stages of evolution. (shrink)

This study looks at the relation between mathematical discovery and semiosis, focusing on the famous Fibonacci sequence. The serendipitous discovery of this sequence as the answer to a puzzle designed by Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci to illustrate the efficiency of the decimal number system is one of those episodes in human history which show how serendipity, semiosis, and discovery are intertwined. As such, the sequence has significant implications for the study of creative semiosis, since it suggests that symbols are hardly (...) arbitrary products of human reason, but rather unconscious probes of reality. (shrink)

Peirce’s philosophy can be interpreted as an integration of mysticism and science. In Peirce’s philosophy mind is feeling on the inside and on the outside, spontaneity, chance and chaos with a tendency to take habits. Peirce’s philosophy has an emptiness beyond the three worlds of reality , which is the source from where the categories spring. He emphasizes that God cannot be conscious in the way humans are, because there is no content in his “mind.” Since there is a transcendental (...) 3 nothingness behind and before the categories, it seems that Peirce had a mystical view on reality with a transcendental Godhead. Thus Peirce seems to be a panentheist. 4 It seems fair to characterize him as a mystic whose path to enlightenment is science as a social activity. (shrink)

This essay interprets the meaning of one of the cards in aTarot deck, "The Magician," in the context of process philosophy in the tradition of Alfred North Whitehead. It brings into the conversation the philosophical legacy of American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce as well as French poststructuralist Gilles Deleuze. Some of their conceptualizations are explored herein for the purpose of explaining the symbolic function of the Magician in the world. From the perspective of the logic of explanation, the sign of (...) the Magician is an index of nonmechanistic, mutualist or circular, causality that enables self-organization embedded in coordination dynamics. Its action is such as to establish an unorthodox connection crossing over the dualistic gap between mind and matter, science and magic, process and structure, the world without and the world within, subject and object, and human experience and the natural world, thereby overcoming what Whitehead called the paradox of the connectedness of things. The Magician represents a certain quality that acts as a catalytic agent capable of eliciting transmutations, that is, the emergence of novelty. I present a model for process∼structure that uses mathematics on the complex plane and the rules of projective geometry. The corollary is such that the presence of the Magician in the world enables a particular organization of thought that makes pre-cognition possible. (shrink)

When putting semiotics and phenomenology in juxtaposition, the first task necessarily is to find out what a study of meaning, conceiving of itself as an empirical science, has to do with a philosophical school, the business of which it is to secure the epistemological foundations of all the sciences (broadly understood). Our answer, in short (but we will go at some length to show it), is that since all results of phenomenology also count as contributions to phenomenological psychology, the phenomenological (...) method constitutes a part of the panoply of methods offered to semiotics. Our second task will be to review the fragmentary semiotics proposed, originally employing that term, by Edmund Husserl, to gauge its value for contemporary semiotics. Since our investigation of Husserl’s semiotics will demonstrate that it sometimes concerns the sign in a narrow sense, and sometimes broadens up to a study of meaning in general, our third and final task, in this paper, will be to consider a proposal made by a close follower of Husserl, Alfred Schütz, whose idea of a system of relevancies, wedded to Husserl’s notion of sedimentation, might be amended when considered in connection with Umberto Eco’s idea of the encyclopaedia. (shrink)

While there are interesting connections between literature and evil, there is as of yet no systematic collection of models of evil to study literature. This is problematic, since literature is among other things an evaluative discourse and the most basic evaluative category is the polarity of good versus evil. In addition, evil shows important affinities with basic narratological principles. To initiate a discussion of models of evil for the analysis of literature, this article organizes a dozen models of evil into (...) four groups. The first consists of a core model which coincides with basic narratological elements in character analysis and narrative tension. The second group contains two pre-modern models of evil, defilement and moral-natural evil. The third group takes its cue from personality theory and proposes the five-factor model of personality and an enriched “dark triad,” and, to balance description against narration, a model which categorizes kinds of murder. The last group organizes six models around the thematic opposition between nature and society, an opposition which forms the backbone of Western philosophy and narrative. To test their validity, the models are applied to a series of literary examples/characters, above all Grendel, Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” and Carol Oates’ short story “Heat.”. (shrink)

How anything acts depends upon what it is, both as a kind of thing and as a distinct individual of that kind: “agere sequitur esse” — action follows being. This is as true of signs as it is of lions or centipedes: therefore, in order to determine the range or extent of semiosis we need above all to determine the kind of being at stake under the name “sign”. Since Poinsot, in a thesis that the work of Peirce centuries later (...) confirmed, the proper being of signs as signs lies in a relation, a relationship irreducibly unifying three distinct terms: a foreground term representing another than itself — the representamen or sign vehicle; the other represented — the significate or object signified; and the third term to or for whom the other-representation is made — the interpretant, which need not be a person and, indeed, need not even be mental. The action of signs then is the way signs influence the world, including the world of experience and knowledge, but extending even to the physical world of nature beyond the living. It is a question of what is the causality proper to signs in consequence of the being proper to them as signs, an indirect causality, just as relations are indirectly dependent upon the interactions of individuals making up the plurality of the universe; and a causality that models what could or might be in contrast to what is here and now. To associate this causality with final causality is correct insofar as signs are employed in shaping the interactions of individual things; but to equate this causality with “teleology” is a fundamental error into which the contemporary development of semiotics has been inclined to fall, largely through some published passages of Peirce from an essay within which he corrects this error but in passages so far left unpublished. By bringing these passages to light, in which Peirce points exactly in the direction earlier indicated by Poinsot, this essay attempts a kind of survey of the contemporary semiotic development in which the full vista of semiosis is laid out, and shown to be co-extensive with the boundaries of the universe itself, wherever they might fall. Precisely the indirect extrinsically specificative formal causality that signs exercise is what enables the “influence of the future” according to which semiosis changes the relevance of past to present in the interactions of Secondness. Understanding of this point (the causality proper to signs) also manifests the error of reducing the universe to signs, the error sometimes called “pansemiosis”. (shrink)

The notion of “semiotic scaffolding”, introduced into the semiotic discussions by Jesper Hoffmeyer in December of 2000, is proving to be one of the single most important concepts for the development of semiotics as we seek to understand the full extent of semiosis and the dependence of evolution, particularly in the living world, thereon. I say “particularly in the living world”, because there has been from the first a stubborn resistance among semioticians to seeing how a semiosis prior to and/or (...) independent of living beings is possible. Yet the universe began in a state not only lifeless but incapable of supporting life, and somehow “moved” from there in the direction of being able to sustain life and finally of actually doing so. Wherever dyadic interactions result indirectly in a new condition that either moves the universe closer to being able to sustain life, or moves life itself in the direction not merely of sustaining itself but opening the way to new forms of life, we encounter a “thirdness” in nature of exactly the sort that semiosic triadicity alone can explain. This is the process, both within and without the living world, that requires scaffolding. This essay argues that a fuller understanding of this concept shows why “semiosis” says clearly what “evolution” says obscurely. (shrink)

The current article is the first in a series of review articles addressing biosemiotic terminology. The biosemiotic glossary project is inclusive and designed to integrate views of a representative group of members within the biosemiotic community based on a standard survey and related publications. The methodology section describes the format of the survey conducted in November–December 2013 in preparation of the current review and targeted on the terms ‘agent’ and ‘agency’. Next, I summarize denotation, synonyms and antonyms, with special emphasis (...) on the denotation of these terms in current biosemiotic usage. The survey findings include ratings of nine citations defining or making use of the two terms. I provide a summary of respondents’ own definitions and suggested term usage. Further sections address etymology, connotations, and related terms in English and other languages. A section on the notions’ mainstream meaning vs. their meaning in biosemiotics is followed by attempt at synthesis and conclusions. Although there is currently no consensus in the biosemiotic community on what constitutes a semiotic agent, i.e., an agent in the context of semiosis, most respondents agree that core attributes of an agent include goal-directedness, self-governed activity, processing of semiosis and choice of action, with these features being vital for the functioning of the living system in question. I agree that these four features are constitutive of biosemiotic agents, and stipulate that biosemiotic agents fall within three major categories, namely 1) sub-organismic biosemiotic agents, 2) organismic biosemiotic agents and 3) super-organismic biosemiotic agents. (shrink)

While Peirce is a seminal figure for contemporary semiotic philosophers, it is axiomatic of a fully semiotic perspective that no philosopher or philosophy can provide any final answer, as signs are always interpreted and the context of interpretation always varies. Semiosis is evolutionary: it may or may not be construed as progressive but it cannot be static. While Peirce offers a way out of the mind-body divide that both permeates and separates classical rationalism and empiricism, he himself is read in (...) this article as closer to the rationalist tradition exemplified by Kant and Hegel that he critiques than to either thoroughgoing empiricism or post-Nietzschean relativism. From a contemporary perspective, Peirce thus falls short of qualifying as a fully semiotic thinker, notwithstanding his key role in the development of semiotic philosophy. (shrink)

In an earlier paper, I set out to apply to animal mimicry the definition of the sign, and, more specifically, of the iconic sign, which I originally elaborated in the study of pictures, and which was then extended by myself and others to language, gesture, and music. The present contribution, however, while summarizing some of the results of those earlier studies, is dedicated to the demonstration that animal mimicry, as well as phenomena of the human Lifeworld comparable to it, are (...) in a sense the opposite of signs. It has often been observed, not only within speech act philosophy, but also by the semiotician Luis Prieto, that as sign can only function as such once it is recognized to be a sign. Animal mimicry, camouflage, and the like, in contrast, only work as such, to the extent that they are not perceived as signs. Unlike what speech act philosophy claims, nevertheless, the “difference which makes a difference” is not the recognition of a purpose attributed to the subject producing the sign. A footprint, for example, has to be recognized as a sign in order to function as such. Nevertheless, to the extent that a purpose is attributed to the subject setting the sign, it may be considered a sign, but one that hides its nature, a fake footprint. Mimicry and camouflage, however, are similar to such “natural meanings” as footprints in entertaining a different relation to the agent initiating the act and the agent perceiving it. Classical studies of mimicry distinguish its varieties according to what is rather vaguely called function. In this paper, we will investigate whether these classifications can be recuperated from a semiotic point of view, or whether a semiotically valid classification should start from scratch. (shrink)

In 2014, Morten Tønnessen and the editors of Biosemiotics officially launched the Biosemiotic Glossary Project in the effort to: solidify and detail established terminology being used in the field of Biosemiotics for the benefit of newcomers and outsiders; and to by involving the entire biosemiotics community, to contribute innovatively in the theoretical development of biosemiotic theory and vocabulary via the discussions that result. Biosemiotics, in its concern with explaining the emergence of, and the relations between, both biological ‘end-directedness’ and semiotic (...) ‘about-ness’, would seem a fertile field for re-conceptualizing the notion of intentionality. The present project is part of a systematic attempt to survey and to document the current thinking about this concept in our field. (shrink)

Semiotics, in the guise of the limited Saussurean semiology, has been widely used in the humanities and in cultural studies for the past 20 to 30 years at least. With the advent, nearly 20 years ago, of the environmental humanities, including the new field of humanities animal studies, the weaknesses of this mode of analysis became increasingly clear. This essay forms part of a larger attempt to develop a Peirce-informed biosemiotic theory capable of affording conceptual tools for the broad-based study (...) of human and nonhuman natural and cultural developmental ecologies. It is particularly concerned to develop a biosemiotic, and hence non-reductive, account of aesthetic experience in which function consists in the growth of knowledge. Based on the role of chance, and thus creativity, in natural and cultural evolutionary systems, this essay uses poetry and poetic theory in order to argue that chance is a habit-upsetting happenstance whereby something which has the potential to become a sign , or to become a bearer of meaning, actually does become a sign to some living thing. (shrink)

This paper is informed by Charles Sanders Peirce’s philosophy as semiotics or the doctrine of signs. The paper’s purpose is to explore Peirce’s category of abduction as not being limited to the inference to the best explanation. In the context of the logic of discovery, abduction is posited as a necessary although not sufficient condition for the production of meanings. The structure of a genuine sign is triadic and represents a synthesis between precognitive ideas and conceptual representations. The novel model (...) of reasoning is offered, based on the mathematical formalism borrowed from Gauss’ interpretation of the complex number. It is suggested that this model in a form of a diagram not only represents a semiotic process-structure but also overcomes the long-standing paradox of new knowledge. For Peirce, it is a diagram as a visual representation that may yield solutions to the otherwise unsolvable logical problems. What appears to us as a paradox is the very presence of abductive, or hypothetical, inference, as Peircean generic category of Firstness within the Thirdness of the total thought-process. Firstness , Secondness , and Thirdness together constitute a dynamic structure of experience. (shrink)

If the central problem in philosophical ethics is determining and defining the scope of moral value, our normative ethical theories must be able to explain on what basis and to what extent entities have value. The scientific foundation of contemporary biosemiotic theory grounds a theory of moral value capable of addressing this problem. Namely, it suggests that what is morally relevant is semiosis. Within this framework, semiosis is a morally relevant and natural property of all living things thereby offering us (...) an ecological, as opposed to merely environmental, ethic. A consequence of this semiotic theory is that living things are accorded inherent moral value based on their natural relational properties—their ability to signify. This consequence establishes a hierarchy of inherent moral value based on the scope of signification: the larger the Umwelten, the greater the value. This paper argues that a robust semiotic moral theory can take into account a much wider scope of inherent value.. These consequences have positive ramifications for environmental ethics in their recognition of the natural ecological networks in which each organism is bound. This presentation of a biosemiotic model of value offers a justificatory strategy for our contemporary moral intuitions concerning our semiotic/moral relationships with living things while also productively pushing our normative ethical boundaries. (shrink)

This paper presents a critical analysis of code-semiotics, which we see as the latest attempt to create paradigmatic foundation for solving the question of the emergence of life and consciousness. We view code semiotics as a an attempt to revise the empirical scientific Darwinian paradigm, and to go beyond the complex systems, emergence, self-organization, and informational paradigms, and also the selfish gene theory of Dawkins and the Peircean pragmaticist semiotic theory built on the simultaneous types of evolution. As such it (...) is a new and bold attempt to use semiotics to solve the problems created by the evolutionary paradigm’s commitment to produce a theory of how to connect the two sides of the Cartesian dualistic view of physical reality and consciousness in a consistent way. (shrink)

Jean Baudrillard, the scholar and critic of postmodernity, struggled with questions of postmodern ontology: representation of the real through the semioticprocess of signification is threatened with the rise of simulacra, the simulated real. With this rise, seductive semiotic relationships between signs replace any traditional ontological representamen. This struggle has implications for environmentalism since the problems of contemporary environmental philosophy are rooted in problems with ontology. Hence the question of postmodern ecology: can the natural survive postmodern simulation? Baudrillard’s communicative analysis of (...) semiotic postmodernity can both support and extend ecosemiotic theses in response to these questions, questions that must be answered in order to explore our paradoxical understandings of the natural and confirm an understanding of environmentalism for postmodernity. In this paper I will argue for the merit of a semiotic understanding of postmodernity, develop the idea of ecology in this context, and then compare Baudrillard’s approach to the contemporary development of ecosemiotics. (shrink)

With the publication of this inaugural issue of the internationally peer-reviewed journal Biosemiotics, our still-developing young interdiscipline marks yet another milestone in its journey towards adulthood. For this occasion, the editors of Biosemiotics have asked me to provide for those readers who may be newcomers to our field a very brief overview of the history of biosemiotics, contextualizing it within and against the larger currents of philosophical and scientific thinking from which it has emerged. To explain the origins of this (...) most twenty-first century endeavour effectively, however, will require tracing—at least to the level of a thumbnail sketch—how the ‘sign’ concept appeared, was lost, and now must be painstakingly rediscovered and refined in science. To relate this long history, this article will appear in Biosemiotics in three instalments, examining, respectively: (1) The History of the Sign Concept in Pre-Modernist Science, (2) The History of the Sign Concept in Modernist Science, and (3) The Biosemiotic Attempt to Develop a More Useful Sign Concept for Contemporary Science. In this instalment, we begin our introductory ‘stroll through the woods of sciences and signs’ by following the development of the sign concept within the context of scientific inquiry, in necessarily broad outline, from the beginnings of such inquiry in sixth century BCE, through its long development in the Middle Ages, and up unto the onset of modernity. For only within this larger historical context can our contemporary attempt to develop a naturalistic understanding of sign relations be understood. (shrink)

The recent development of biosemiotics has revealed the achievement of knowledge and the development of science to be the results of the semiosis of all life forms, including those commonly regarded as cultural constructs. Education is thus a semiosic structure to which evolution itself has adapted, while learning is the semiotic phenomenon that determines the renewal of life itself. Historically, it was a semiotic paradigm that determined the emergence of institutions such as universities and that underpinned the development of liberal (...) education. The present article considers the history of education in terms of sign emergence and evolution, regarding education as currently being conceived and practised as a stage in the general evolutionary action of signs. This approach differs from the prevailing modern approaches to education, which are mostly applied psychology and sociology. (shrink)

IRBs and REBs use specialized language. A process of definition and re-definition of the situation occurs. That process of interpretation can usefully be considered from the perspective of interpretive social science models involving Symbolic Interaction, Semiotics and Hermeneutics. Seven examples are provided to flesh out the nuances of contextual decision making and the “casuistic” aspects of a balanced approach to complex problems. While many decisions are relatively unproblematic and can follow a template, it is not possible simply to apply a (...) fixed and mechanical approach. Hence, a socialization process occurs in which committee members must learn the actual application of the rules as opposed to the formal requirements. A “tightrope” between overly rigid and overly lax interpretations must be crossed and the more we understand the process of semiosis and the semiotic context the more likely it will be that truly ethical decisions will be “accomplished.” The lack of adequate survey data makes it all the more important to have good theoretical understanding of process. (shrink)

In the sense of phenomenology, actions are special cases of acts of consciousness. Within semiotics, first Jan Mukařovský and then A. J. Greimas have established, in different terms, a distinction between instrumental actions and actions which carry their meaning in themselves. But this is insufficient to account for the variety of actions which comprises everything from the creation of artefacts, dance, sporting events, theatre, rituals, and much else. Already those actions mentioned relate in different ways to instrumentality and intrinsic meaning, (...) as well as to iconicity and plasticity. In this paper, I will be particularly concerned with dancing, especially classical ballet, trying to delimit it from sporting events and theatre. Apart from the sign function and the spectacular function, I will notably have recourse to what I have elsewhere term secondary iconicity as well as to plasticity. In the process, I hope to be able to throw some light also on the nature of sport, by comparing and contrasting it to dance, as well as to the theatre as well as, more incidentally, to some other types of action. In a wider perspective, my ambition is to contribute to a general inquiry into the semiosis of actions. (shrink)

It is suggested that Charles Sanders Peirce's triadic semiotics provides a framework for a diagrammatic representation of a sign's proper structure. The action of signs is described at the logical and psychological levels. The role of (unconscious) abductive inference is analyzed, and a diagram of reasoning is offered. A series of interpretants transform brute facts into interpretable signs thereby providing human experience with value or meaning. The triadic structure helps in de-mystifying the relations between Penrose's three worlds when the latter (...) are considered as constituting a semiotic triangle. (shrink)

This article explores how De-sign can be utilized as a navigational trajectory toward the integration of cultural sensitivity and environmental sensibility. It affirms that intentionality makes it possible for human beings to make meaning of their world. Navigating through trajectories for the purpose of seeking desired outcomes is a reiterative de-sign process that is constantly adjusting pragmatically. Because de-sign outcomes are only invariant aspects of the unfolding process of synechism and palingenesia, every de-sign situation is a unique journey toward infinite (...) possibilities of creation. De-signers, as agents of intentional change, become envoys of meaning-making that can integrate cultural sensitivity and environmental sensibility. De-sign intentionality makes our trajectories move toward envisioning a meaningful reality, one that goes beyond the schism between culture and nature, between built environment and natural environment. Trajectories innate to the de-sign process transform us into not only lifelong-learners competent of questioning absolute knowledge but also changing agents capable of moving beyond merely being inquisitive, to being reflective, contemplative knowers, genuinely integrating all aspects of the great biosemiosphere. (shrink)

This paper aims to explain how semiotics and constructivism can collaborate in an educational epistemology by developing a joint approach to prescientific conceptions. Empirical data and findings of constructivist research are interpreted in the light of Peirce’s semiotics. Peirce’s semiotics is an anti-psychologistic logic and relational logic. Constructivism was traditionally developed within psychology and sociology and, therefore, some incompatibilities can be expected between these two schools. While acknowledging the differences, we explain that constructivism and semiotics share the assumption of realism (...) that knowledge can only be developed upon knowledge and, therefore, an epistemological collaboration is possible. The semiotic analysis performed confirms the constructivist results and provides a further insight into the teacher-student relation. Like the constructivist approach, Peirce’s doctrine of agapism infers that the personal dimension of teaching must not be ignored. Thus, we argue for the importance of genuine sympathy in teaching attitudes. More broadly, the article also contributes to the development of postmodern humanities. At the end of the modern age, the humanities are passing through a critical period of transformation. There is a growing interest in semiotics and semiotic philosophy in many areas of the humanities. Such a case, on which we draw, is the development of a theoretical semiotic approach to education, namely edusemiotics. (shrink)

As the accompanying articles in the Special Issue on Semiotic Scaffolding will attest, my colleagues in biosemiotics have done an exemplary job in showing us how to think about the critically generative role that semiotic scaffolding plays “vertically” – i.e., in evolutionary and developmental terms – by “allowing access to the upper floors” of biological complexity, cognition and evolution.In addition to such diachronic considerations of semiotic scaffolding, I wish to offer here a consideration of semiotic scaffolding’s synchronic power, as well (...) – and in particular the ability that it can afford its users to access new and other sign relations “horizontally” as a function of the way that multiple semiotically scaffolded relations intertwine to result in a “definite semantic topology that determines the ways that symbols modify each other’s referential functions in different combinations”.Taking up, in turn, Terrence Deacon’s later challenge that what the sciences of cognition – and biology more generally – needs to “come to grips with [is] the process of semiosis; the dynamic of interpretive activity by which semiotic relationships emerge from other semiotic relationships [as] intrinsically dynamic phases in a generative process”, I attempt here to show how Deacon’s own Peirce-inspired matrix of referential sign relations as presented in The Symbolic Species, when viewed as a semiotic scaffold of interactional constraints and possibility biases, provides the key to understanding the essentially thirdness-manifesting nature of symbol reference, formation and growth. (shrink)

Here we publish an interview with Jesper Hoffmeyer, conducted in 2012–2014.

This essay discusses the semiotic scaffolding of modern science, the roots of which lie in the Protestant Reformation and the latter’s repudiation of the “semiotics of nature” upon which medieval theology depended. Taking the fourteenth-century battles between realism and nominalism as the semiotic scaffolding of the Reformation which was subsequently built on nominalist principles, and the Reformation as what made possible the development of early modern science, this essay argues that nominalism, Protestantism, and early modern science were all infected by (...) the gnostic influences which had always accompanied Christianity from the start. Indicating that forms of creative discovery, in the arts, humanities and sciences, are closer to poetic forms than they are to the Baconian model which informed modern science, the essay goes on to link the latter gnostic-influenced metaphysics, motivated by a Reformation anxiety about sin and error, to the development of the modern “megamachine” as described by Lewis Mumford in The Myth of the Machine volumes 1 and 2. Finally the essay suggests that semiotically revivified life sciences might be capable of resolving some of the systemic and ecological problems which Mumford identifies. (shrink)

So when we are balanced between danger and opportunity and the future is unknown, how do we think usefully about the future? … If we imagine ourselves living in the cosmos in which novelty is an il...

Here we publish an interview with Jesper Hoffmeyer, conducted in 2012–2014.

Here we publish an interview with Jesper Hoffmeyer, conducted in 2012–2014.