The thesis introduces and criticizes the discourse on technology, with a specific reference to the concept of AI. The discourse on AI is particularly saturated with reified metaphors which drive connotations and delimit understandings of technology in society. To better analyse the discourse on AI, the thesis proposes the concept of “Expected AI”, a composite signifier filled with historical and sociocultural connotations, and numerous referent objects. Relying on cultural semiotics, science and technology studies, and a diverse selection of heuristic concepts, (...) the thesis delves beneath the surface of AI discourse and demonstrates the hidden political, social, cultural, and ecological dangers of AI. The entanglement of the discourse(s) with (science) fiction, folklore, myth, and religion impacts how AI is perceived and received, as well as the expectations to AI-enabled technologies now and in the future. The thesis also proposes a more ethical and comprehensive ontological model for AI systems. The model describes AI systems as complex figurations, considering their socio-material organisation, global economic-material becoming, and impact on the environment, social institutions, and the semiosphere. The dissertation argues that AI should be understood not just as an object or sociotechnical system, but as its entire product chain encompassing people and cultures, as well as the used resources and impact (both material-ecological and semiotic) on a planetary scale. (shrink)

In this essay I will suggest that part of what makes the young Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson so remarkable is the fact that much of his work – in this age of “anything goes” post-postmodernism – is clearly modernist poetry, in both structure and effect. This structure will be that explained in my expanded version of Michael Riffaterre’s semiotic theory of poetry, which deals with modernist work. I will suggest that one of the distinctive features of the latter is that (...) a modern poetic text is distinguished by two underlying “matricial” propositions, each of which generates a set of variant images having the same underlying semantic structure. This paradigmatic method of signifying is unique to poetry. Each matrix is reassembled by the reader from a comparison of the images of each set. The matrices are linked syntagmatically in a variety of relations such as negation or difference of scale. This bimatricial relation (subject-sign) has an intertextual counterpart (object-sign) of similar structure but different lexicon. The interpretant of these two complex signs has a sociolectic counterpart of similar lexicon but different structure. The semantic contrast thus established produces innovation, which is the other distinctive feature of modern poetry. It turns out that much of Hutchinson’s innovative work is structured in this way. (shrink)

Autocommunication, communication with oneself, may become distinct from communication with an “other” both in form and function. Autocommunication has a special role in the development of thinking in small children, as differentiation of speech for oneself, known as “private speech,” from communication for social purposes entails the child’s organization of her or his own cognition and behavior with the aid of symbols. Recent studies have suggested that speech distinctly for the child him or herself is particularly observable during what is (...) called “crib speech” and thus it appears to support already early language acquisition. The purpose and functions of crib speech in child development have been topics of interest until recently, but they are still debated. In autocommunication, instead of transfer of signs from one mind to another as when in communication with an “other,” there is transfer of signs from one state of mind to another, as in the case of recalling something with the help of signs. Next to this mnemonic type autocommunication, Juri Lotman was interested in the type in which textual devices within a text guide the communicative interpretation in relation to the text itself, particularly characteristic to poetry. The paper provides a semiotic analysis of crib speech in terms of Lotman’s concept of autocommunication explaining its particular appearance both in form and content, as well as what initiates and inspires it for the small child and why does it bring such joy. From the point of view of semiotics, crib speech presents as an exceptionally rich phenomenon. In addition to being small children’s language practice, crib speech appears as language play, if not poetry, serving as a modelling system for enacting and representing the world as it appears for the small child. (shrink)

After the cultural explosion of Web 2.0, digital culture reveals an apparently semiotic paradox associated with the incredibly widespread use of images of faces, while at the same time the reason to trust in the authenticity of these faces is constantly declining. This is because graphic technology has made the sophisticated manipulation of images both possible and easy. After a review of the existing semiotic models and considerations of trust, I am proposing a new approach which emphasizes the value-generating properties (...) of trust by analogy with the money sign, seen as “trust inscribed”. Research from the neurosciences supports the hypothesis that the trustworthiness of the face is judged pre-reflexively and primordially. This, therefore, means that a trustworthy face is a premise for more successful communication than an untrustworthy one, notwithstanding the object of discussion and the cultural context. An example concerning social media influencers serves to show that in the internet-dominated globalizing culture, trustworthy faces are a multipurpose communicative asset that makes a difference. (shrink)

As a result of technological innovations and new cultural practices, the contemporary mediasphere is increasingly populated by digital(ized) faces. The phenomenon is not limited to human faces, but includes a vast universe of fictional animated faces, variously called ‘characters’, ‘mascots’ or ‘kyara’. In Japan, while certainly not new, kyara have been spreading thanks to globalization, digitalization and media-mix strategies. Through the connection between visual design, fictional narratives and socio-cultural consumption, kyara can be considered semiotic figures of in-betweenness, key symbolic mediators (...) in the Japanese mediascape. Their anthropomorphic face design mediates the cultural boundaries between the human and the non-human, the animate and the inanimate, nature and culture. Furthermore, their post-modern narratives mix inspiration from the past and the present, from myths to science fiction. Lastly, they involve an encyclopedic reworking between fiction and reality, mythical references and secularization, between the domains of seriousness and playful make-believe. The article aims to explore the semiotic dimensions of kyara in contemporary Japan, with emphasis on their logic of representation and cultural outcomes. These will be investigated through the analysis of the Pokemon franchise, which will make it possible to describe the emergence of new semiotic patterns of ‘playful visual animism’ in the process of media facialization of everyday life. (shrink)

Both biosemiotics and evolutionary epistemology are concerned with how knowledge evolves. (Applied) Evolutionary Epistemology thereby focuses on identifying the units, levels, and mechanisms or processes that underlie the evolutionary development of knowing and knowledge, while biosemiotics places emphasis on the study of how signs underlie the development of meaning. We compare the two schools of thought and analyze how in delineating their research program, biosemiotics runs into several problems that are overcome by evolutionary epistemologists. For one, by emphasizing signs, biosemiotics (...) needs to delineate a semiotic threshold, which is a problem not encountered by evolutionary epistemologists. Instead, the latter recognizes that all organisms are knowers that evolve knowledge, which they recognize to extend toward phenomena produced by organisms such as behavior, cognition, language, culture, science, and technology. Secondly, biosemiotics attempts at continuing adaptationist notions on how organisms relate to their environment, while especially Applied Evolutionary Epistemology comes to redefine the nature of the organism–environment relationship in such a way that it recognizes the spatiotemporal boundedness of existence, which in turn makes adaptationist accounts obsolete. (shrink)

It is widely believed, among philosophers of literature, that imagining contradictions is as easy as telling or reading a story with contradictory content. Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight, for instance, concerns a knight who performs many brave deeds, but who does not exist. Anything at all, they argue, can be true in a story, including contradictions and other impossibilia. While most will readily concede that we cannot objectually imagine contradictions, they nevertheless insist that we can propositionally imagine them, and regularly (...) do, simply by entertaining a text which prompts us to do so. I argue that this narrative does not bear scrutiny for two main reasons. First, because propositional imagining is beside the point, where truth in fiction is concerned; evaluating truth in fiction engages the cognitive architecture in ways that prohibit the mobilization of merely propositional imagination to that end. And second, because it is not obvious, given the strategies usually suggested, that we ever propositionally imagine contradictions in the first place—in fact, it seems we go out of our way to avoid directly imagining them. (shrink)

How does a picture teach a viewer to look at it, understand it, and make meaning?. “Cross-mediality and narrative textual form: A semiotic snalysis of the lexical and visual signs and codes of the picture bnook.” Semiotica, 118 : 1–70 and Peter Pericles Trifonas.. “Texts and images.” In International handbook of semiotics, Vols. 1&2, edited by Peter Pericles Trifonas. The Netherlands: Springer. Pp. 1139–1154.) The suggestion for a pictorial grammar has been derived from the fact that pictures have no unique (...) visual metalanguage and therefore require recourse to language as an instrument for pictorial analysis. The lexical-visual relationship in a text is more complex than is suggested in the question. Proponents for the semiotic autonomy of pictures have objected that the commentaries of crossmedial contexts have not asserted the semiotic priority of the lexical over the visual message. ‘Is an autonomous semiotics of visual perception possible, or does the semiotic analysis of pictorial text always require recourse to the model of language?’. (shrink)

How can providing less textual information about a fictional character make his or her mind more transparent and accessible to the reader? This is the question that emerges from an empirical study of reader response conducted by Kotovych et al. Taking my cue from this study, I discuss the role of implied information in readers’ interactions with characters in prose fiction. This is the textual strategy I call ‘character-centered implicature.’ I argue that the inferential work cued by implicature creates an (...) intersubjective dynamic analogous to what philosophers Zahavi and Rochat discuss under the heading of ‘experiential sharing.’ Effectively, readers complement the textual evocation of mind by drawing on their own past experiences, which leads to a distinctive first-person plural perspective—a sharing of cognitive resources that is responsible for the perceived transparency of the character’s mind. While this experiential sharing may result in empathetic perspective-taking, not all instances of empathy for fictional characters involve sharing. (shrink)

A corpus made by online Canadian newspaper articles, coming from the archives of CBC News, Vice Canada and Huffington Post Canada, and related multimedia contents such us audio interviews, videos and especially links to images and comments shared on Twitter, allows us to reconstruct the debate on the seal hunt that involved Canadian media in 2014. In specific, we propose an interpretation of the pro-sealing discourse by Canadian Inuit and Newfoundlanders as an ironic and incisive answer to the serious United (...) States animal rights activists discourse, explaining how these two different points of view on animals come from a different experience of the environment and a different conception of nature. The image of the seal became the friction point between Western naturalism against Inuit animism: a multinaturalist clash in the North America post-colonial situation. A clash solved by people as Tanya Tagaq and other Inuit artists that belong to these two different semiospheres and thanks to their border placement can allow a dialog between Inuit and North American cultures traducing aesthetic forms, values and meanings. To study the structures of meaning at the base of this clash and iconoclash Iconoclash. Beyond the image-wars in science, religion and art, pp 14–37, ZKM and MIT Press, Boston, 2002) on the artic seal between opposite cultures, it has been necessary to use the socio-semiotic approach with the help of semiotics of culture tools (Lotman in Universe of the mind. A semiotic theory of culture. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990, Culture and explosion. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2009]. (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)

Situated semantics can be regarded as an attempt at placing situational context (context of situation) at the center of all discussions of meaning. Situation theory is a theory of information content that takes context very seriously. Individuals, properties, relations, and spatiotemporal locations are basic constructs of situation theory. Individuals are conceived as invariants; having properties and standing in relations, they tend to persist in time and space. An anchoring function binds the location parameters to appropriate objects present in the grounding (...) situation. Anchoring plays a major role in the working of constraints that include nomic constraints, conventional constraints and conditional constraints. Situation semantics develops a theory of meaning that is based on relations between situations. Situation semantics provides a fundamental framework for realistic semantics. The ideas emerging from research into situation semantics have been combined with linguistic work and have led to numerous useful proposals. (shrink)

A theory of consciousness is proposed which integrates much of what we know about the evolution and functioning of the human brammmd. The organism constructs its world of experience as an adaptation to the problem of moving in the world. The relationship between the observed and unobserved world is discussed. A cartography of state-bound meaning is described in which the continuum of arousal states is linked to different states of consciousness. The inevitable ambiguity of perception is addressed and the evolutionary (...) and developmental importance of self-awareness is emphasized. All of this is related to poststructuralist formulations. (shrink)

This article focuses on a number of cases in international law in which US domestic courts have produced judgments that conflict with those given by the International Court of Justice. The nature of these courts’ judgments has been extremely closely tied to the interpretation given by the US national Executive to a certain international norm. This situation raises a number of questions, which can be broadly categorized into two spheres: the legal (regarding the overall legality of the courts’ decisions) and (...) the semiotic (regarding the manner in which a ‘meaning’ for the norm has been claimed by the courts). In this article we aim to provide answers to a number of these questions, both from the standpoint of international law and from that of a reader-response model of semiosis. We also analyse the level of interdependency that exists between the two spheres. (shrink)

We discuss the difference between formal and natural languages, and argue that should the language metaphor have any foundation, it’s analogy with natural languages that should be taken into account. We discuss how such operation like reading, writing, sign, interpretation, etc., can be applied in the realm of the living and what can be gained, by such an approach, in order to understand the phenomenon of life.

After establishing its roots in basic forms of sensorimotor coupling between an organism and its environment, the new wave in cognitive science known as “enactivism” has turned to higher-level cognition, in an attempt to prove that even socioculturally mediated meaning-making processes can be accounted for in enactivist terms. My article tries to bolster this case by focusing on how the production and interpretation of stories can shape the value landscape of those who engage with them. First, it builds on the (...) idea that narrative plays a key role in expressing the values held by a society, in order to argue that the interpretation of stories cannot be understood in abstraction from the background of storytelling in which we are always already involved. Second, it presents interpretation as an example of what Di Paolo et al. ( 2010 ) have called in their recent enactivist manifesto a “joint process of sensemaking”: just like in face-to-face interaction, the recipient of the story collaborates with the authorial point of view, generating meaning. Third, it traces the meaning brought into the world by interpretation to the activation and, potentially, the restructuring of the background of the recipients of the story. (shrink)

The development of the conception of U. Eco’s literary art is considered on examples of ‘Notes in the margins of the novel ’The Name of the Rose‘’, ‘The Role of the Reader‘, ‘From Internet to Gutenberg‘, and ‘Confessions of a young novelist‘. In the article, the non-classical character of literary creativity and theory of Eco is discussed that is realized through the transformation of some ideas and conclusions of semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, and postmodernism. In ‘Confessions‘ Eco talks about the relationship (...) between himself as an author, his creations as texts, and the audience as readers. He distinguishes two types of readers: Empirical reader and Model reader. The article indicates the basic components of Eco’s literary theory of Interpretation. Eco considers that author will be interpreted not according to his intentions, but according to a complex strategy of interactions and intertextual meanings, based on fictional realms of novels. The article pays attention to Eco’s way from writing on non-fiction to fiction and otherwise, by exploring the boundary between fiction and nonfiction. However, in the practice Eco constitutes the relationship between fictional and nonfictional parts of literary art. As a result, Eco creates a kind of hypertext - the network of ideas, meanings, senses, codes, signs, interpretations, and so on. All of this gives the opportunity to make up the conclusion that Eco created the modern type of model writer - ‘Umberto Eco - M-author‘ that helps to appear the new kind of reader, the ‘Model reader‘. (shrink)

Strawson proposed in the early seventies an attractive threefold distinction regarding how context bears on the meaning of 'what is said' when a sentence is uttered. The proposed scheme is somewhat crude and, being aware of this aspect, Strawson himself raised various points to make it more adequate. In this paper, we review the scheme of Strawson, note his concerns, and add some of our own. However, our main point is to defend the essence of Strawson's approach and to recommend (...) it as a starting point for research into intended meaning and context. (shrink)

Here, S is a sentence—or possibly a smaller or larger unit of meaningful expression for a language—that's written by an author and c is the circumstance in which S is used. R is defined as the language conventions holding between an author and a reader (or better yet, his readership). P, probably the most important part of the equation, is the content of S or, the intended meaning of the author. We assume that the communication between an author and a (...) reader is limited only to written text. Consequently, it is not possible to ask the author about his intention for writing S; that will have to be discovered by a reader. (shrink)

In Strawson’s Entity and Identity, there are two essays (Chapters 11 and 12), which study the notion of context. In these essays, Strawson advances a threefold distinction regarding how context bears on the meaning of 'what is said' when a sentence is uttered. -/- In this paper, we'll (i) review the original scheme of Strawson and summarize his improvements to his own scheme, and (ii) add our own improvements to make it even more thoroughgoing. We'll also show that unless it (...) is elaborated with several considerations (mostly based on our work regarding context as a social construct and contextualizing as a form of social action) it cannot function as a realistic initiative towards building common sense models of how intended meaning is achieved. (shrink)

The following paper draws upon a formerly published paper of mine (Krátky, 2021) where text perception was analysed from the perspective of the recipient. As its logical continuation and completion, this paper deals with the author’s viewpoint in the process. Various related aspects are identified, observed and studied, such as the ‘author’s strategy’, the evaluation of the recipient, the intended goals, as well as other important factors that influence the final text. Special attention is paid to all such aspects of (...) communication pragmatism that are reflected by the author’s (more or less controlled) deviations from the norm, aptly made to achieve communication goals. Within this framework, the study strives to show the different roles that the factor termed ‘expectation violation’ takes on when strategically applied by the author in the process of text creation. To support this description, numerous observations by authors such as Grice, Burgoon, Gombrich, Iser etc. are employed. By tackling the author’s viewpoint on text creation, a claim is advanced concerning the plausibility of certain conclusions, theories and, possibly, laws, by virtue of the identification and observation of selected multi-domain principles, phenomena and tendencies. (shrink)

In this article, I attempt to set out and discuss the main trajectories of Umberto Eco’s thinking on the media and mass communication, based on a review of the author’s writings on these subjects. What emerges from the study is Eco’s attention to the public and to forms of reception; his attention to the relationship between media communication and reality, which involves investigating the concept of “truth” in an area such as that of mass communication; his cross-media view of information, (...) seen from a pluralistic and polyphonic viewpoint; the ethical tension that is always present in Eco’s work; his unfailing propensity for teaching. What emerges above all is the way in which the theoretical and practical tools used by Eco were developed in the context of reflections on the media and mass communication: an indication that alongside its “philosophical vocation,” Eco’s semiotics was always characterized also by an essential “empirical vocation.”. (shrink)

In the multidisciplinary field of memory studies, remembering and forgetting have mainly been analyzed following two ideal-typical models: memory-as-containment (exemplified by the notions of framework and site of memory) and memory-as-flow (epitomized by the notions of afterlife and mnemohistory). These two models are often presented as mutually exclusive and counterposed. Yet, in linking past with present, and when connecting different spaces and generations, memory is always the result of circulation (flow) as well as of local semiotic conditions of production and (...) use (containment). By investigating memory-making and oblivion-making in processes of interpretation, the semiotic perspective elaborated by Umberto Eco allows us to envision memory-as-containment and memory-as-flow in a combined analysis, where the twofold conception of memory – either as movement or as form – merges. The aim of this article is, then, to provide an interpretative theory of memory, and to identify and describe the methodological tools capable of implementing such an approach. The memory of the former Italian concentration camp of Fossoli will serve as an exemplary and illustrative case study. (shrink)

A number of recently published studies by reformist-minded Muslim scholars have both questioned the normative nature of and emphasized the need to rethink some of the fundamental assumptions and interpretational models governing traditional Islamic legal theories and ethics. As part of this process they have emphasized the need to develop novel Islamic hermeneutics. One major element in this emergence of novel Islamic hermeneutics is the production of an increased number of what I term ‘gender equality affirmative scholarship on Islam’. What (...) is particularly interesting, if not intriguing, from the perspective of the author of this article is that the scholarship on gender equality affirmative interpretations of Islam is theorized by reformist-minded Muslim male scholars at historically unprecedented levels which is what this study seeks to highlight. This article examines the arguments employed by three prominent contemporary Muslim male reformist scholars, both Shī’ī and Sunnī, in developing gender equality affirmative interpretations of Islam – Nasr Abu Zayd, Mohsen Kadivar, and Khaled Abou El Fadl. The focus on male scholars in this article is intentional and seeks to highlight the most fundamental point and indeed the raison d’être behind it, namely to underscore the historically unprecedented support Muslim male scholars are providing to the development of feminist interpretations of Islam. (shrink)

Orwell, as he himself remarked, came from a lower, professional-service fraction of the English and imperial ruling class that was ‘simultaneously dominator and dominated’ (Raymond Williams), so that a combination of state and monopoly power became his abiding nightmare. His horizon was, as of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, a revolutionary socialism committed to freedom and equality, opposed both to Labourite social democracy and to Stalinist pseudo-communism. In this article, I concentrate on Nineteen Eighty-Four, drawing on narratology (its agential (...) system, spacetime descriptions, and composition – ‘the Winston story’, the ‘Goldstein excerpts’, and the Appendix on Newspeak) and history. I conclude that Nineteen Eighty-Four has an interesting, but limited, ‘Tory anarchist’ stance and horizon: in revolt against the rulers, but not believing that the revolt can succeed (in direct polemic with the Communist Manifesto). In Orwell’s view there are ‘three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle and the Low’, but the mindless and passive Low reduce this to the Middle against the High, or intellect and impotence versus cynical power. ‘No economics’ entails here ‘no class struggle’, and a fair amount of misogyny. Orwell’s textural skill was penetrating, but his thematics very limited. Still, he was one of the first to notice the long-duration slide of politics toward fascism, even if he drew a mistaken consequence from it, as evident in his early conflation of Stalinism and Nazism into an untenable ‘totalitarianism’. Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a concerned, appealing, and in some ways useful text, albeit one that ultimately lacks wisdom. (shrink)

Semiotics provides the tools for studying the process of decoding law, one of the most important tasks in the daily work of courts. The semiotic review of juridical interpretation and gap filling concludes that in juridical and semiotic methodology the same question—how a norm is interpreted—is answered from different perspectives. According to the semiotic model proposed in the current paper, juridical interpretation can be structured into three levels: intra-, inter- and supranormative sign-process. For legal theory semiotics can highlight the similarities (...) in the interpretation of norms and gaps. In gap filling the iconic, indexical and symbolic relations compensate for the missing of intranormative semiosis. The applicability of the proposed model is tested on an example of case law. Semiotic investigation of the judgements of Supreme Court of Estonia and European Court of Human Rights shows that semiotics gives a well structured picture of the juridical interpretation process. (shrink)

This article examines J. G. Farrell’s depictions of colonial medicine as a means of analysing the historical reception of the further past and argues that the end-of-Empire context of the 1970s in which Farrell was writing informed his reappraisal of Imperial authority with particular regard to the limits of medical knowledge and treatment. The article illustrates how in The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), Farrell repeatedly sought to challenge the authority of medical and colonial history by making direct use of period (...) material in the construction of his fictional narrative; by using these sources with deliberate critical intent, Farrell directly engages with the received historical narrative of colonial India, that the British presence brought progress and development, particularly in matters relating to medicine and health. To support these assertions the paper examines how Farrell employed primary sources and period medical practices such as the nineteenth-century debate between miasma and waterborne Cholera transmission and the popularity of phrenology within his novels in order to cast doubt over and interrogate the British right to rule. Overall the paper will argue that Farrell’s critique of colonial medical practices, apparently based on science and reason, was shaped by the political context of the 1970s and used to question the wider moral position of Empire throughout his fiction. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson proposed in the early seventies a threefold distinction regarding how context bears on the meaning of "what is said" when a sentence is uttered. The proposal was somewhat tentative and, being aware of this aspect, Strawson himself raised various questions to make it more adequate. In this paper, we review Strawson's scheme, note his concerns, and add some of our own. We also defend its essence and recommend it as an insightful entry point re the interplay of intended (...) meaning and context. (shrink)

This article aims to analyse one specific type of memorial site that furnishes an indexical link to past traumatic events which took place in precisely these places. Such memorials will be defined here as trauma sites. It will be shown how the semiotic trait of indexicality produces unique meaning effects, forcing a reframing of the issue of representation, with all its aesthetic and ethical dimensions. In contrast to other forms of memorial site, trauma sites exist factually as material testimonies of (...) the violence and horror that took place there. The fact they still exist, more or less as they were, implies a precise choice on the part of post-conflict societies regarding which traces of the past ought to be preserved and in which ways. In other words, a decision is made about what politics of memory to adopt in each case. Trauma sites thus become unique, privileged observatories that allow us to understand better the emergence of post-conflict societies. The various forms of conservation, transformation, memorialization of places where slaughter, torture and horror have been carried out are key clues to better understandings of the relationship between memory and history in each post-conflict society studied. This article presents a close reading of three very different trauma sites: the Tuol Sleng Museum of the Crimes of Genocide in Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, Chile; and a third, more recent, museum: The Ustica Memorial Museum (Museo per la Memoria di Ustica) in Bologna, Italy. These memorials represent instances of three very different traumatic memory politics: in Tuol Sleng, visitors are relocated in the trauma space, in a sort of ‘frozen past’; in Villa Grimaldi, a process of attenuation is at work, the traces of the past are less evident, and their emotional effects weaker. The Ustica Museum represents yet another option, a movement towards an artistic and creative reinterpretation of the traumatic event itself. (shrink)

The object of this paper is to study the analogy, drawn both positively and negatively, between mathematics and fiction. The analogy is more subtle and interesting than fictionalism, which was discussed in part I. Because analogy is not common coin among philosophers, this particular analogy has been discussed or mentioned for the most part just in terms of specific similarities that writers have noticed and thought worth mentioning without much attention's being paid to the larger picture. I intend with this (...) analogy (looking at others' comparisons) to shed a little light on what is going on in mathematics, how one can understand it a bit other than experientially. This intention is philosophical and the way that I am attempting to accomplish it is also philosophical. I shall conclude my attempt to explain how it is possible and even natural for mathematics and fiction to have the analogy they have, taking it for granted, as argued in part I, that they are not to be identified. To this end I shall discuss philosophers' comparisons, mainly those of Hodes, Resnik, Tharp, and Wagner, who are the writers that seem to me to have written most thoughtfully and sufficiently extensively about fiction in making the comparison and of Körner, whose comparison is different. Whether either of these comparisons or the more general analogy is of permanent philosophical interest will have to be decided by philosophers now that they have had a fuller examination. I shall mention some other writers' reference to fiction, but not all; indeed, I am sure that I have not even found all the comparisons that there are. (shrink)

The three commentaries of Van Orden, Spivey and Anderson, and Dietrich (with Markman’s as a backdrop) form a tableau that reminds me of a fable by Ivan Andreevich Krylov (1769 - 1844), in which a swan, a pike, and a crawfish undertake jointly to move a cart laden with goods. What transpires then is not unexpected: the swan strives skyward, the pike pulls toward the river, and the crawfish scrambles backward. The call for papers for the present ecumenically minded special (...) issue of JETAI was designed to minimize this kind of discord, by charging the authors to examine the possibility of epistemological pluralism in cognitive science — a field whose very diversity makes fundamental disagreement more likely than in other sciences. No doubt, the road mapped out by the editor had been conceived with good intentions in mind, but where did it lead us? It has been said that no good intention must go unpunished. To celebrate this venerable academic tradition (and also because I have a reputation to maintain), the following remarks will therefore be mostly other than conciliatory; caveat lector. (shrink)

Topical Themes in Argumentation Theory brings together twenty exploratory studies on important subjects of research in contemporary argumentation theory. The essays are based on papers that were presented at the 7th Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation in Amsterdam in June 2010. They give an impression of the nature and the variety of the kind of research that has recently been carried out in the study of argumentation. The volume starts with three essays that provide stimulating (...) theoretical perspectives on argumentation. Subsequently, some views are explained on the intriguing topics of ‘dissensus’ and ‘deep disagreement’. After a discussion of three different approaches to the treatment of types of argumentation some classical themes from antique argumentation theory are revisited. The new research area of visual argumentation is explored in the next part. The volume concludes with three reports of experimental studies concerning argumentative discourse. The volume starts with three essays that provide stimulating theoretical perspectives on argumentation. Subsequently, some views are explained on the intriguing topics of ‘dissensus’ and ‘deep disagreement’. After a discussion of three different approaches to the treatment of types of argumentation some classical themes from antique argumentation theory are revisited. The new research area of visual argumentation is explored in the next part. The volume concludes with three reports of experimental studies concerning argumentative discourse. The volume starts with three essays that provide stimulating theoretical perspectives on argumentation. Subsequently, some views are explained on the intriguing topics of ‘dissensus’ and ‘deep disagreement’. After a discussion of three different approaches to the treatment of types of argumentation some classical themes from antique argumentation theory are revisited. The new research area of visual argumentation is explored in the next part. The volume concludes with three reports of experimental studies concerning argumentative discourse. (shrink)

Many edusemiotic writers have begun to closely align edusemitoics to biosemiotics; the basic logic being that, if the life process can be defined through the criterion of semiotic engagement, so can the learning process :373–387, 2006). Thus, the ecological concept of umwelt has come to be a central area of investigation for edusemiotics; allowing theorists to address learning and living concurrently, from the perspective of meaning and significance. To address the conceptual and experiential foundations of the edusemiotic perspective, this paper (...) will focus its attention on the basic semiosic processes that sustain the learner’s primary modelling system or umwelt—the world of meaning and sensory engagement that the organism is immersed in. This focus enables us to identify and explore four basic principles that an ecologically concerned edusemiotic perspective can be said to rest upon; the Iconicity Hypothesis, the Principle of Suprasubjective Relation, the Natural Learning Flow Principle, and the Continuity Principle. The identification and elaboration of these basic philosophical orientations will help establish the importance and relevance of the edusemiotic perspective for educational philosophy and theory in general. This task requires the methodological framework of Sebeok and Danesi’s Modelling Systems Theory, which; provides a biosemiotically grounded approach to understanding the diversity of modelling phenomena across all species, and; contextualizes the specific focus of this study within the broader forms of learning and knowing encompassed by a semiotic theory of learning. Hopefully such attention to the foundational doctrina of this new perspective will encourage more educational research to take what Semetsky has called the edusemiotic turn. (shrink)

People tell stories. In stories, the narrator and the receiver can perceive meanings. These meanings can be analyzed again through larger interpretative framings. In this article, different ethical uses of the golem story are analyzed by making use of some of Jörn Rüsen’s ideas concerning historical thinking and narration and with a focus on the uses of the golem myth in studies and discussions on new and emerging science and technology.

Despite the proliferation of specialised agencies designed to reduce the prevalence of refugees worldwide, the number of individuals fleeing persecution is increasing year on year as endemic violence in countries such as Iraq, Somalia and the Syrian Arab Republic continues. As a result, media broadcasts and political dialogues are saturated with discussions about these “persons of concern”. Fundamental questions nonetheless remain unanswered about what meaning these actors attribute to the label ‘refugee’ and what intent, other than paucity of knowledge, might (...) be driving the term’s use or manipulation. Though this is evidently important in the public arena, where incorrect conflations fuel mistrust and misunderstandings, the ramifications of these divergent understandings at the level of multi-lateral politics have yet to be critically explored. This article applies Barthes’ theory of the multiple orders of the sign to address this. Using the case study of the negotiations preceding the invocation of the Cessation Clause for Rwandan refugees, it illustrates how the word refugee is susceptible to numerous, simultaneous understandings, and discusses the implications of these manifold interpretations for how durable solutions are envisaged and negotiated in the refugee regime. In the case of Rwandan refugees in Uganda, this has meant that over a decade of stalemated discussions between the Governments of Uganda and Rwanda and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees over their future have been broken by a series of bilateral concessions that, whilst diminishing the political significance attached to this protracted caseload, have failed to address the continuing precarity of their situation. By conceptualising the word refugee as a sign according to the Saussurean model of semiotics, this paper therefore argues that despite the term’s established legal-normative definition, its inherent malleability makes it susceptible to processes of political instrumentalisation. This elevates the refugee as a rhetorical figure above the refugee as a physical-legal body entitled to certain forms of assistance. (shrink)

’Death’ and ’Furniture’ are emblems for two very common (predictable, even) objections to relativism. When relativists talk about the social construction of reality, truth, cognition, scientific knowledge, technical capacity, social structure and so on, their realist opponents sooner or later start hitting the furniture, invoking the Holocaust, talking about rocks, guns, killings, human misery, tables and chairs. The force of these objections is to introduce a bottom line, a bedrock of reality that places limits on what may be treated as (...) epistemologically constructed or deconstructible. There are two related kinds of moves: Furniture (tables, rocks, stones, etc. - the reality that cannot be denied) and Death (misery, genocide, poverty, power - the reality that should not be denied). Our aim is to show how these ’but surely not this’ gestures and arguments work, how they trade off each other, and how unconvincing they are, on examination, as refutations of relativism. (shrink)

Two approaches to the study of diagnostic thinking are compared, one mainly propositional, namely that of Patel and Groen (1986), the other mainly semantic, that of Lemieux and Bordage (1986). Patel and Groen analyzed the linear dimension of cardiologists' discourses while solving a case of acute bacterial endocarditis, that is, the before and after propositional rules. A secondary analysis of two of their pothophysiological protocols is done using structural semantic techniques from Lemieux and Bordage where the vertical dimension of the (...) discourses is analyzed, that is, the levels of meaning or semantic axes. Contrary to Patel and Groen's position, making an accurate diagnosis is not explained in terms of pure forward reasoning through networks of causal rules, but by means of networks of semantic qualities abstracted from the symptoms and signs. The semantic qualities operate in the clinician's mind in terms of binary oppositions (e.g., sudden-gradual, unilateral-bilateral) whereby each pair of properties constitutes a semantic axis (e.g., sudden-gradual). The successful diagnosticians are those who use the most diversified and pertinent set of semantic axes and, therefore, have a deeper representation of the problem. (shrink)

The following paper is based on a broad understanding of communication that considers as text basically anything that has been created within the framework of a cultural interaction by an author and that is perceived by a recipient. The first part of the paper introduces, explains and follows mostly cases in which the author’s violations of the recipient’s expectations have a communication value, i.e. provoke, in the recipient, a communication effect that matches the author’s intentions. In such cases, this effect (...) results as a consequence of an violation of the communication „cooperative“ principles. This, at the recipient’s end, translates into an event of expectancy violation. Each of such violations provokes an arousal in the recipient, which further motivates him/her to search for its cause. Finding this cause, and being “confronted” with the related violation pertaining to it with the norm equals, for the recipient, getting to the meaning of the text, or identifying its communication value etc. As part of the conclusion, a commented scheme is presented which offers a spectrum of possible communication outcomes “positioned” between the predictability of each textual element and the stochasticity of choice. The effort to illustrate all the explained facts results, in the paper, in a rich set of examples stemming from miscellaneous spheres of human activity – from “high styles” to rather day-to-day activities, to pop-culture. The objective is to show that the described principles, if not valid in general, permeate at least all forms of interaction. (shrink)