This book is about the interrelationship between nature, semiosis, metarepresentation and (self-)consciousness, and the role played by metarepresentation in ...

Since 1984, the idea of health equity has proliferated throughout public health discourse with little mainstream critique for its variability and distance from its original articulation signifying social transformation and a commitment to social justice. In the years since health equity’s emergence and proliferation, it has taken on a seemingly endless range of invocations and deployments, but it most often translates into proactive and apolitical discourse and practice. In Margaret Whitehead’s influential characterization, achieving health equity requires determining what is inequitable (...) by examining and judging the causes of inequalities in the context of what is going on in the rest of society. However, it also remains unclear how or if public health actors examine and judge the causes of health inequality. In this article, we take the concept of health equity itself as an object of study and consider the ways in which its widespread deployment has entailed a considerable emptying of its semantic and political content. We point toward equity’s own discursive productivity as well as the quantifying imperative embedded within evidentiary norms that govern knowledge making, and performance management regimes that govern public health practices. Under current conditions of knowledge making and performance evaluation, a range of legitimate action and inaction is produced at the same time that more socially transformative action is legitimately curtailed—not merely by politics, but by the rules of the field in which public health actors work. Ultimately, meaningful progress on a normative ethical idea like health equity will require both substantial philosophical content and an analysis of what is going on in the rest of society. (shrink)

Abstract The artwork of Joseph Beuys was provocative in his time. Although he was very successful on the international art scene and on the art market, the larger The public is still bewildered by his Fat Chair or his installations and his performances. The article shows the evolution of his artwork from classical materials (stone, steel) to soft materials (animals, products of animals) and further to his concept of “social sculpture” and to programmatic diagrams (with words and graphics). A special (...) point of interest is the transition towards language (phonic and conceptual), the philosophy of art exposed in his drawings, and diagrams and the relation between art and science in his artwork. (shrink)

The evolution of human symbolic capacity must have been very rapid even in some intermediate stage (e.g. the proto-symbolic behavior of Homo erectus). Such a rapid process requires a runaway model. The type of very selective and hyperbolically growing self-organization called “hypercyle” by Eigen and Schuster could explain the rapidity and depth of the evolutionary process, whereas traditional runaway models of sexual selection seem to be rather implausible in the case of symbolic evolution. We assume two levels: at the first (...) level the species is adapted to ecological demands and accumulates the effects of this process in the genome. At the second level a kind of social/cultural knowledge is accumulated via a set of symbolic forms, one of which is language. Bühler’s model of three basic functions of signs can also be elaborated so that its cyclic structure becomes apparent. We assume that the hypercyclic process of semiosis and functional differentiation was triggered in 2 my BP (with the Homo erectus) and got more and more speed with the species Homo sapiens and later. The consequences for the evolutionary stratification of human languages will be drawn in the last section of the paper. The basic aim of the paper is to provide a semiotic (and not just a linguistic) explanation of the origin of language which can be linked to relevant models in evolutionary biology and which exploits the possibilities contained in self-organizing systems. (shrink)

This volume unites various contributions reflecting the intellectual interests exhibited by Professor Herman Parret (Institute of Philosophy, Leuven), who has continued to observe, and often critically assess, ongoing developments in pragmatics throughout his career. In fact, Parret's contributions to philosophical and empirical/linguistic pragmatics present substantive proposals in the epistemics of communication, while simultaneously offering meta-comments on the ideological premises of extant pragmatic analyses. In a lengthy introduction, an overview is provided of his achievements in promoting an integrated, "maximalist" pragmatics, as (...) well as of the links between his own work in philosophy of language and in semiotics and aesthetics. The remaining 12 essays address relevant pragmatic themes or look into the relation between pragmatics and neighboring disciplines. They deal with grammatical deixis (Brisard, Ikegami) and mood (van der Auwera & Schalley), performativity (Harnish, Holdcroft), speech-act types and their praxeological dimensions (Roulet, Van Overbeke), Wittgensteinian language games (Marques, Parisi), cultural and intercultural identities (Vandenabeele, Verschueren), and the visual arts (Wildgen). (shrink)