Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: (...) reasons for concept use, which tell us which concepts to adopt, adhere to, or abandon, thereby shoring up—or undercutting—the reasons for action and belief that guide our deliberations. Traditionally, reasons for concept use have been sought either in timeless rational foundations or in concepts’ inherent virtues, such as precision and consistency. Against this, the book advances two main claims: that we find reasons for concept use in the conceptual needs we discover when we critically distance ourselves from a concept by viewing it from the autoethnographic stance; and that sometimes, concepts that conflict, or exhibit other vices such as vagueness or superficiality, are just what we need. By considering not what concepts are absolutely best, but what concepts we now need, we can reconcile ourselves to the contingency of our concepts, determine the proper place of efforts to tidy up thought, and adjudicate between competing conceptions of things,—even things as contested as liberty or free will. A needs-based approach separates helpful clarification from hobbling tidy-mindedness, and authoritative definition from conceptual gerrymandering. (shrink)

Brain functions are stochastic processes without intentionality whereas mind emerges from brain functions as a Hegelian “change from quantity”, that is, on the order of 1012 profusely interconnected neurons, “into a new quality”: the collective phenomenon of the brain's self-experience. This self-referential and self-observing quality we have in mind is capable of (recursively) observing its self-observations, i.e., interpreting change that is meaningful in relation to itself. The notion of self-interpretation embodies the idea of a “hermeneutic circle”, that is, (in interpretation (...) theory) the treatment of the whole in relation to its parts. (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)

It is often thought that consciousness has a qualitative dimension that cannot be tracked by science. Recently, however, some philosophers have argued that this worry stems not from an elusive feature of the mind, but from the special nature of the concepts used to describe conscious states. Marc Champagne draws on the neglected branch of philosophy of signs or semiotics to develop a new take on this strategy. The term “semiotics” was introduced by John Locke in the modern period – (...) its etymology is ancient Greek, and its theoretical underpinnings are medieval. Charles Sanders Peirce made major advances in semiotics, so he can act as a pipeline for these forgotten ideas. Most philosophers know Peirce as the founder of American pragmatism, but few know that he also coined the term “qualia,” which is meant to capture the intrinsic feel of an experience. Since pragmatic verification and qualia are now seen as conflicting commitments, Champagne endeavors to understand how Peirce could (or thought he could) have it both ways. The key, he suggests, is to understand how humans can insert distinctions between features that are always bound. Recent attempts to take qualities seriously have resulted in versions of panpsychism, but Champagne outlines a more plausible way to achieve this. So, while semiotics has until now been the least known branch of philosophy ending in –ics, his book shows how a better understanding of that branch can move one of the liveliest debates in philosophy forward. (shrink)

We critically address current theories of figurative language, focusing on the role of literal or compositional meaning in the interpretation of non-literal expressions, including idioms and metaphors. Specifically, we formulate and discuss the processing hypothesis that compositional meaning may either facilitate or impede the recovery or construction of the intended figurative meaning depending on multiple factors, and in particular, on the expression’s decomposability and on the “strength” of semantic relations between the compositional and figurative meanings. As a case study, we (...) consider research on processing and acquisition of figurative expressions in highly verbal individuals with autism spectrum disorder in comparison to neuro-typical individuals, and examine the factors that may account for the observed comprehension deficits in the ASD group. Based on this evidence, we discuss some of the strategies employed by language users in processing non-compositional or non-literal expressions, and we highlight implications for research on natural language comprehension and processing systems in the domain of figurative meaning. (shrink)

This paper starts with an examination of the terms use d to designate the face in different languages, in particular in Italian, comparing these with the definitions provided by some authoritative dictionaries as well as with their etymology. This exploration yields some remarkable results: firstly, it appears that the face is indeed a term that has a material meaning, but at the same time it is a social object; secondly, the importance of the communicative function emerges, which makes the face (...) similar to the mask and in some ways to the arbitrariness of language. All this suggests that the philosophical status of the face is that of ‘transcendence’ which is a condition of that state of freedom that we attribute to ourselves and that can be defined as ‘human exception’. (shrink)

This study reviews research about the recognition of one’s own face and discusses scientific techniques to investigate differences in brain activation when looking at familiar faces compared to unfamiliar ones. Our analysis highlights how people do not possess a perception of their own face that corresponds precisely to reality, and how the awareness of one’s face can also be modulated by means of the enfacement illusion. This illusion allows one to maintain a sense of self at the expense of a (...) precise discrimination of self-face. The internal dynamics of different brain processes, associated with the construction of bodily identity and the sense of self and capable of integrating signals from different sensory channels, particularly visual and tactile, create a mirror-mask effect. According to this effect, the self-face reflected by a mirror becomes a mask for the self, which has the features of the subject’s face, but nonetheless does not correspond perfectly to its characteristics. This poses interesting questions about the nature and construction of one’s self, as self-face reflections allow the mind to mediate between analogue and virtual reality, between past and future events, between memories and plans of action and, most importantly, between beliefs about our identities. (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)

In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco essentially presents an educative vision of some basic semiotic principles that infuse the textual form of a popular fictional genre—the detective story. In effect, it characterizes the postmodernization of the traditional “whodunnit” moving the genre from the realm of “the real” or the plausible into the realm of “the metaphysical” or the unthinkable. The Name of the Rose is a practical application in semiotics. Or, how the aesthetics of textual production as generated (...) through the lexical signs and codes manifest the discursive text of a novel work. The semiotic twists and turns of the detective story facilitate this educational function and the purposeful transformation of the reader into an individual capable of appreciating and grasping the conflicting ideological viewpoints expressed through its dialogical structure. The detective genre enables the Umberto Eco to produce an educational narrative via the intricacies of plot in the detective story while teaching main aspects of semiotic theory. (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)

This contribution to design methodology reflects upon the barriers to effectiveness imposed by our tendency to gravitate towards the over-formal in human affairs. We see a correspondingly cleaned-up description of the process of design, a failure to consider its jagged elements and to take proper account of the non-formal in knowledge (e.g. tacit knowledge) and communication. Discipline in methodology is accordingly wrongly equated with formality. The failure of design to be effective is more likely for innovative design rather than routine (...) design.It is suggested by way of explanation that design methodology especially in the field of information technology is infused with the ghost of positivism, manifest in an unconditional belief in the value of rationality and an implied naive realist conviction about the fixed, singular and transparent nature of the environment for which design is undertaken.We need to be able to work with uncertainty rather than try for its entire elimination. A breadth of approach in carrying out the activity of design is threatened by lack of attention to the variety of forms which knowledge and corresponding forms of discourse can take.We undertake the disciplined reduction from the messy real work to metaphors tidy enough to work with, or models as they are usually misnamed.The notion of “language of struggle” is invoked as a suitable metaphor for the non-formal discourse particularly relevant to innovative design. A complementary exploration is offered of socio-linguistic space which is the common context for design.In view of the concern with social space necessary to effective design, it may be enlightening to consider the designer as applied anthropologist. (shrink)

John Searle identified in Speech Acts the following questions as forming the subject matter of the philosophy of language: “How do words relate to the world? How do words stand for things? What is the difference between a meaningful string of words and a meaningless one? What is it for something to be true? or false?” [...].

Illuminating innovatively the dialectic by which “sign” is induced “to signify” requires an analysis of the inferrer-entailed symbolics constituting “signified,” a process particularly observable during relative, purposeful re-signification, particularly at high-visibility sites. Because Nathaniel Hawthorne focused intently his romantic-dramatic oeuvre on cynosural women, because of his affinity for allegorical signification, and especially for his tangibility to feminist themes and axiologies of virtue transcending even the highly reformist nineteenth century, he is here chosen an interpretation-open “carrier wave” for that research. Climactically (...) and consonant thematically, also instructive is Umberto Eco’s unnamed, eponymous “Rose” for being an antiphrastic sign with a truth of its own signifying at least (like Hawthorne’s Puritan-oblique Hester Prynne) divergence from male/hieratic hermeneutics; at most (like Apuleius’s metaphysical Psyche, Hawthorne’s lodestar) ineffable, philosophical Good. As if to the generating premise, Eco wrote in The Name of the Rose, “Without an eye to read them[,] signs produce no concepts”; socially consequential signification-conditioned transformation, in that eye and toward those signifieds, symptomatic both historical and rhetorical, is here assayed. (shrink)

A metaphor within the framework of semiotics can be embodied in various semiotic systems, which is a prerequisite for a multilateral, in-depth analysis of its generation and interpretation. The purpose of the article is the conceptualisation of metaphor in the framework of semiotics and analysis using methods of analogy and transference. One of the main problems of metaphor theory is to provide means to represent the process of metaphor generation for understanding the nature of the phenomenon. The use of the (...) offered methods in metaphor generation and interpretation opens up a multifaceted understanding of the object under study. (shrink)

In this study, we analyse the notion of “differential heterogenesis” proposed by Deleuze and Guattari on a morphogenetic perspective. We propose a mathematical framework to envisage the emergence of singular forms from the assemblages of heterogeneous operators. In opposition to the kind of differential calculus that is usually adopted in mathematical-physical modelling, which tends to assume a homogeneous differential equation applied to an entire homogeneous region, heterogenesis allows differential constraints of qualitatively different kinds in different points of space and time. (...) These constraints can then change in time, opening the possibility for new kinds of differential dynamics and the emergence of distinct entities and forms. Formally, we show that operators with different phase spaces can be assembled on the basis of a result of Rothschild & Stein (1976. Hypoelliptic differential operators and nilpotent groups. Acta Mathematica 137. 247–320). Furthermore, operators with different dynamics can be assembled by means of a partition of the unit.After stating the concept of differential heterogenesis in terms of contemporary mathematics, we show that this construction sheds light on the constitution of the semiotic function. In fact, both the Merleau-Pontian and the Deleuzian approaches share a common conceptualisation of the semiotic function and its emergence in terms of amorphodynamics of heterogeneous assemblages with a divergent actualisation. This divergent actualisation allows the co-constitution of various expression and content planes. Finally, we show that the divergent actualisation can be interpreted as the directions of principal eigenvectors of the actualized flow. (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)

In this article, we propose that gestures play an important role in the connection between sensorimotor experience and language. Gestures may be the link between bodily experience and verbal expression that advocates of embodied cognition have postulated. In a developmental sequence of communicative action, gestures, which are initially similar to action sequences, substantially shorten and represent actions in metonymic form. In another process, action sequences are based on kinesthetic schemata that themselves find their metaphoric expression in language. Again, gestures enact (...) kinesthetic schemata that are correlated with verbal expressions. Examples from a large database are used to illustrate the various processes by means of which language arises when students conduct school science investigations. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Abduction as a method for sociological explanation is increasingly gaining interest, but questions remain as to what exactly it is and how it differs from other methods of inquiry. This paper compares abduction as conceived in Peircean pragmatism with the critical realist concept of retroduction. I argue that abduction in the Peircean sense and retroduction in the critical realist sense refer to different, but complementary, modes of inference. Abductive conclusions provide the starting point for retroductive inferences; the latter inform (...) the tenability of the former. Together, abduction and retroduction contribute to theoretical explanation. (shrink)

Playing fields are “spaces where the communitas suspends its everyday life and structures” and “The internal logic of sporting games is connected to values from the social context”, Playing fields: Power, practice, and passion in sport, 127–144. Reno: University of Nevada Press). But what about the space in between? What kind of semiotics organisation can be detected in the membrane between player and liminal space where spectators are not allowed yet specific characters needed to carry out an event? We can (...) therefore identify a liminality that can be connected either to the controlled or the wild playing field and depending on which of the two is the case can be analysed according to the degree of regulated system of signs which they produce. This implies different pathways and rituals: as matches are played, a variety of bodily activities may be taking place concurrently. Furthermore, it is inevitable that these activities attract the attention of the audience or alternately lead a player to interact with a non-player. In this article, I will first try to identify certain semiotics features, especially connected to Eco’s Peircian concept of Encyclopedia, that characterize the status of liminal space around the playing field. Then I will focus on liminality in soccer, investigating what kinds of interaction exist outside the playing area. (shrink)

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)

In this paper we review some problems with traditional approaches for acquiring and representing knowledge in the context of developing user interfaces. Methodological implications for knowledge engineering and for human-computer interaction are studied. It turns out that in order to achieve the goal of developing human-oriented (in contrast to technology-oriented) human-computer interfaces developers have to develop sound knowledge of the structure and the representational dynamics of the cognitive system which is interacting with the computer.We show that in a first step (...) it is necessary to study and investigate the different levels and forms of representation that are involved in the interaction processes between computers and human cognitive systems. Only if designers have achieved some understanding about these representational mechanisms, user interfaces enabling individual experiences and skill development can be designed. In this paper we review mechanisms and processes for knowledge representation on a conceptual, epistemological, and methodologieal level, and sketch some ways out of the identified dilemmas for cognitive modeling in the domain of human-computer interaction. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to show the relevance of an ‘effective semiotics’; that is, a field study based upon Peirce's semiotics. The general context of this investigation is educational semiotics rather than semiotics of teaching: I am concerned with a general approach of educational processes, not with skills and curricula. My paper is grounded in a field study that I carried out in a school, L'Ecole de la Neuville, implementing Institutional Pedagogy in France. I first investigate the relevance (...) of Peirce's semiotics in such a context. I then propose several definitions for the word ‘institution’, referring to the core concepts of this particular pedagogy, before describing the concept of ‘institution-sign’, which is considered a useful tool for making effective connections between several aspects of semiotics. I finally assert that an institution constitutes a tool that allows teachers to favour semiosis in educational contexts. (shrink)

This article explores a German philosophy of metaphor, which proposed a close link between the body and the mind as the basis for metaphor, debunked the view that metaphor is just a decorative rhetorical device and questioned the distinction between the literal and the figurative. This philosophy of metaphor developed at the intersection between a reflection on language and thought and a reflection on the nature of beauty in aesthetics. Thinkers such as Giambattista Vico, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul (...) and others laid the foundations for this philosophy and it was successively refined by Gustav Gerber, Alfred Biese and Friedrich Nietzsche. It influenced in its turn in various ways the linguistic study of metaphor and the psychology of metaphor as elaborated, for instance, by a lesser-known American scholar, Gertrude Buck. All these thinkers contributed to a philosophy and psychology of the metaphoric according to which metaphors are not only nice, but necessary for the structure and growth of human thought and language. Obvious parallels between this 19th-century philosophy of metaphor and the 20th-century theory of metaphor developed by Lakoff and his followers are examined throughout. (shrink)

Societies have always used their heritage to remain resilient and to express their cultural identities. Today, all the still-available experiences accrued by human societies over time and across space are, in principle, essential in coping with the twenty-first century grand challenges of humanity. Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms can assist the next generation of historians, heritage stakeholders, and decision-makers in decoding unstructured knowledge and wisdom embedded in selected cultural artefacts and social rituals, encoding data in machine-readable systems, aggregating information (...) according to the user’s needs in real time, and simulating the consequences of either erasing, neglecting, putting in latency, or preserving and sharing specific human experiences. What our global society needs is a multilingual and transcultural approach to decode-encode the treasure of human experience and transmit it to the next generation of world citizens. This approach can be the pathway to work on a new science of heritage, its ethics, and empathy. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to interpret systematically M. M. Bakhtin’s views on genre. Although Aristotle was the first philosopher—and one of the first thinkers in general who focused on the issues of artistic and rhetorical genres, philosophy as such did not treat these issues for a considerably long time. One of the first philosophers who approached the genre issue within the larger context of the philosophy of language was Mikhail M. Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher and a literary scholar. (...) As early as the 1920s he founded philosophical thinking on the so-called small speech genres, which later served as the basis for a remarkable theory of primary and secondary genres. Bakhtin is a world renowned theoretician on the novel, but his genre theory is nevertheless very topical, too, since it relates to issues focused on by philosophers much later. (shrink)

This study was designed to find out what scientists and science students actually do when they are reading familiar and unfamiliar graphs. This study provides rich details of the subtle changes in the ontologies of scientists and science students as they engage in the reading tasks assigned to them. In the course of the readers’ interpretation work, initially unspecified marks on paper are turned into objects with particular topologies that are said to correspond to specific features in the world. We (...) theorize this interpretive work as a transition of graphs from things to signs that come to stand for natural objects. Especially among physicists and theoretical ecologists, graphs enter new relations and become natural objects in their own right. (shrink)

Property is a complex sign in semiotics. It is also the source of tension and conflict in law. This paper examines property in triadic terms consisting of what Charles S. Peirce would identify as the icon (firstness), the index (secondness), and the symbol (thirdness). From this perspective the paper explores the ideas of place, space, and time at the iconic level of the sign of property. Discussion addresses the way in which property serves as a coded system for communicating information (...) about a given community’s values and its cultural-interpretive hierarchy. Much like an aboriginal songline, property functions as a way of imprinting the land with impressions of social ordering related to place, space, and time. In the context of global trade we therefore observe property conflicts which are sometimes not so much about the technical language of property as they are about tensions among the embedded values in competing signs of property. (shrink)

Fuller's program of social epistemology engages a rhetoric of inquiry that can be usefully compared and contrasted with other discursive theories of knowledge, such as that of Richard Rorty. Resisting the model of “conversation,” Fuller strikes an activist posture and lays the groundwork for normative “knowledge policy,” in which persuasion and credibility play key roles. The image of investigation is one that overtly rejects the “storehouse” conception of knowledge and invokes the metaphors of distributive economics. Productive questions arise as to (...) how notions of creation and distribution might guide this rhetoric. (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)

In this paper I attempt to study the notion of “folding of a semiotic continuum” in a direction of a possible application to the biological processes. More specifically, the process of obtaining protein structures is compared in this paper to the folding of a semiotic continuum. Consequently, peptide chain is presented as a continuous line potential to be formed in order to create functional units. The functional units are protein structures having certain function in the cell or organism. Moreover, protein (...) folding is analyzed in terms of tension between syntax and semantics. (shrink)

New discoveries in the life sciences have affirmed that the virtual script as well as its context-dependent reading and interpretation determine the final living creature. An extended understanding of Darwinian Theory is crucial for understanding life as semiosis in terms of Peirce and Eco’s semiotic models. The semiosis of living systems is potentially unlimited. Genes are not static and unchangeable scripts, but can always be reinterpreted by new interpretants that illuminate them from different points of view, depending on which properties (...) are relevant in a particular context. The encyclopedia is a term, in Umberto Eco’s semiotics, which represents the multidimensional space of semiosis that is governed by a self-sustaining production of interpretants. The paper will present the idea of understanding the Extended Synthesis in terms of a biosemiotic enyclopedia. (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)

Is the Dionysian God, or an experience of the Dionysian God, absolutely ineffable? Does the Dionysian corpus assert or perform such ineffability? This paper will argue that the answer to each of these questions is no. The Dionysian God is known hyper-nous as the hyper-ousia cause of all. And the Dionysian corpus unambiguously refers to, asserts of, and metaphorizes about this God just so. In arguing these points, this paper will call upon both the speech act theory of John Searle (...) and the metaphor theory of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. More particularly, it will look to Searle’s rules of reference and predication and conditions of illocutionary acts, as well as Lakoff and Johnson’s schematization of metaphor gestalt and entailment to show how Dionysian expressions of inexpressibility are rule-governed and the Dionysian God is thereby effable. (shrink)

Some forms of argumentation are best performed through words. However, there are also some forms of argumentation that may be best presented visually. Thus, this paper examines the virtues of visual argumentation. What makes visual argumentation distinct from verbal argumentation? What aspects of visual argumentation may be considered especially beneficial?

Money is a symbol. Beginning with this simple notion, we have completed a qualitative study of how money exists in people’s everyday lives and how it is used symbolically. A review of the financial, economic, psychological, and semiotic literature shows that even though money is written and talked about exhaustively, little symbol theory appears in economic writing, and we rarely found money mentioned in semiotic texts. We used a qualitative, phenomenological approach to identify critical thematic elements and underlying structures of (...) participants’ experience. We also incorporated an accepted symbol-structure template in our analysis of the functions, emotions, actions, and reactions in the transactions our participants described. Participants refer to money both as wealth in the abstract and as concrete amounts about to be used. Our analysis of money in the abstract describes a structure of experience involving belonging, privacy and secrecy, unequal distribution, quantitative uncertainty, reflections of life history, and values. Our analysis of money in the concrete reveals a symbolic intention and a variety of “Others” engaged in the symbolic action. (shrink)

In “How Molecules Became Signs”, Prof. Deacon outlines a plausible mechanism whereby biochemical systems could be understood to fulfill the conditions of being “alive” in the context of the two broad families of requirements, namely the energetics of metabolism and the informatics of coding. In so doing, he addresses head-on how to account for the origin and the action of coding in physical systems, and thereby the necessary and sufficient conditions for life. I review some of the relevant issues around (...) the interlocking potential necessary and sufficient conditions whereby these two phenomena are included within systems of interpretation in organisms. (shrink)