The mathematical theory of communication.

The contribution describes the differences between modernism and postmodernism as historical periods of the twentieth century and establishes comparable differences between structuralism and post-structuralism as semiotic approaches. Like modernism, structuralism rejects traditional modes of thought, attempts to reconstruct academic disciplines on the basis of a few fundamental principles and strives to work with reconstructed terminologies and axioms. Like post-modernism, post-structuralism is characterized by the necessity of finding ways to continue research based on the fragmentary results left by structuralist projects. In (...) the beginning of the twentieth century, structuralism itself had responded to materialism, atomism, historicism, and naturalism by introducing its own methodology built around the dichotomies of signified and signifier, paradigm and syntagm, synchrony and diachrony, langue and parole. Rather than rejecting this apparatus, post-structuralism explicated the paradoxes behind these dichotomies and tried to overcome them by under-mining the first concept of each pair. This change of perspective foregrounded the material, processual, and intertextual character of signs as well as the sense-producing function of interpretation. Rejecting rigidly fixed methods as well as general theories, and waiving the distinction between object-signs and meta-signs in favor of their joint reflection, post-structuralist semiotics became an alternative to conventional practices of academic sign analysis and now approaches the status of an art. (shrink)

This volume serves as a reference on the field of cognitive semantics. It offers a systematic and original discussion of the issues at the core of the debate in semiotics and the cognitive sciences. It takes into account the problems of representation, the nature of mind, the structure of perception, beliefs associated with habits, social cognition, autism, intersubjectivity and subjectivity. The chapters in this volume present the foundation of semiotics as a theory of cognition, offer a semiotic model of cognitive (...) integration that combines Enactivism and the Extended Mind Theory, and investigate the role of imagination as the origin of perception. The author develops an account of beliefs that are associated with habits and meaning, grounded in Pragmatism, testing his Narrative Practice Semiotic Hypothesis on persons with autism spectrum disorders. He also integrates his ideas about the formation of the theory of mind with a theory of subjectivity, understood as self-consciousness which derives from semiotic cognitive abilities. This text appeals to students, professors and researchers in the field. (shrink)

This essay presents a phenomenological analysis of the functioning of symbols as elements of the life-world with the purpose of demonstrating the interrelationship of individual and society. On the basis of Alfred Schutz''s theory of the life-world, signs and symbols are viewed as mechanisms by means of which the individual can overcome the transcendences posed by time, space, the world of the Other, and multiple realities which confront him or her. Accordingly, the individual''s life-world divides itself into the dimensions of (...) time, space, the social world and various reality spheres which form the boundaries or transcendences that the I has to understand and integrate. Signs and symbols are described as appresentational modes which stand for experiences originating in the different spheres of the life-world within the world of everyday life, within which they can be communicated, thereby establishing intersubjectivity. Schutz''s theory of the symbol explains how social entities – such as nations, states or religious groups – are symbolically integrated to become components of the individual''s life-world. The following paper reconstructs Schutz''s concept of the symbol as a crucial component of his theory of the life-world, which is seen as an outstanding phenomenological contribution to the theory of the sign and the symbol in general. (shrink)

Practically all theories of iconicity are denunciations of its subject matter. My own theory of iconicity was developed in order to save a particular kind of iconicity, pictoriality, from such criticism. In this interest, I distinguished pure iconicity, iconic ground, and iconic sign, on one hand, and primary and secondary iconic signs, on the other hand. Since then, however, several things have happened. The conceptual tools that I created to explain pictoriality have been shown by others to be relevant to (...) linguistic iconicity. On the other hand, semioticians with points of departure different from mine have identified mimicry as it is commonly found in the animal world as a species of iconicity. In the evolutionary semiotics of Deacon, iconicity is referred to in such a general way that it seems to be emptied of all content, while in the variety invented by Donald the term mimesis is used for a particular phase in the evolution of iconic meaning. The aim of this article is to consider to what extent the extension of iconicity theory to new domains will necessitate the development of new models. (shrink)