Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 251-277.

Having identified previously the Peircean Category Firstness as the semiotic basis for Australian Aboriginal culture, this paper examines the “lens” of Firstness as it is manifest in a variety of aboriginal cultures worldwide. By studying the semiotic contours of religion, language, social organization, and art, we find systemic prioritization of Firstness in its various manifestations, across a wide range of aboriginal cultures from Australia to the Indian Subcontinent to aboriginal Siberia and the New World. Shamanic culture, despite its ethnic and (...) geographic variety, may therefore be represented as a semiotic type – and, in addition, one that, in its pristine form, is nearly extinct. (shrink)

Having shown previously how a culture type can be given a unitary description in terms of a semiotic “lens” constrained by one of the Peircean Categories (“Shamanic” culture, by Firstness), we apply this methodology to a more “fine-grained” level of analysis, by comparing the Tamil and Sinhalese cultures under the assumption that one of them (Sinhalese) is in fact a “hybrid” culture-sign. Having shown in previous work that the greater South Asian microculture may be characterized as a Firstness of Thirdness (...) (13), in this paper we provide evidence from a variety of semiotic contexts, including language, art, and religion, that the novel or “intrusive” sign in Sinhalese culture is Firstness of Secondness (12), resulting in a hybrid culture sign that may be described as 12 × 13. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2014 Heft: 202 Seiten: 589-607.

The ontological implications of the Peircean Categories, as set forth most clearly in Peirce’s summative architectonic statement, “New Elements,” and referenced elsewhere in Peirce’s body of writings, are examined with reference to the existent or physical universe. The Peircean universal ontological Categories Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness are shown to give rise to a cosmos that is triadic and representational in essence. This immanently representational cosmos, denominated the “Book Universe,” is shown to be evidenced by the representational contours of both the (...) mathematical and of the conceptual framing of the three broad domains of theoretical physics, the quantum, classical, and relativistic domains. This triadic “Book Universe” model is both characterized and also contrasted with the “Block Universe” model, and is seen to incorporate both time and space as emergent representational characteristics, and to be manifest, qua triadic Representamen, in terms of a “foliated eternalism” that requires both antecedent and parallel cosmoi. (shrink)