Hotel websites display textual and non-textual strategies with the aim of turning online visitors into customers. This article focuses on two related textual aspects: how consumers are discursively construed and how conditional constructions are used in order to persuade and convince consumers of the adequacy of the hotel. The framework adopted for the analysis combines Stern’s notion of ‘implied consumer’ with a corpus-driven approach. The corpus data comprises 114 British hotel websites and totals half a million words. This is a (...) subcorpus of COMETVAL, a database compiled at the University of València. The results reveal the importance of a number of words that address consumers directly or indirectly. These words intertwine with others to form patterns that help establish a bond between hoteliers and their clients. Further exploration of the corpus confirmed that some conditional sequences such as if you and should you are used by advertisers to speculate about the needs and wishes of consumers that the hotel can fulfil for them. The analysis suggests that conditional structures are a distinctive discursive characteristic strongly associated with the dialogic nature of the discourse hotel websites. (shrink)

Nature & the seasons -- Outdoor pursuits -- The spirit of self-sufficiency -- The joy of fika -- The Nordic kitchen -- Healthy hedonism -- Design & home -- Kinship, conviviality & openness -- How to hygge-at a glance.

Recognition of legal personhood in contemporary international and domestic law is a matter of signs. Those signs identify the existence of the legal person: human animals, corporations and states. They also identify facets of that personhood that situate the signified entities within webs of rights and responsibilities. Entities that are not legal persons lack agency and are thus invisible. They may be acted on but, absent the personhood that is communicated through a range of indicia and shapes both legal and (...) popular understanding of powers and obligations, they lack standing in judicial fora. They are signified as entities that are the subjects of action by legal persons, for example exploitation through rights regarding natural resources or commodification of ‘wild’, companion and other non-human animals. They are also signified as members of a diverse class of non-persons such as ‘nature’ and ‘the environment’. This article explores the consequences of law’s signification of personhood and the natural world before asking whether we both should and could recognise domains such as specific rivers, forests or even Antarctica as a type of legal person. Recognition might acknowledge the salience of nature in the ontologies of colonised First Peoples. It might also underpin a global response to climate change as the existential crisis of the Anthropocene. In understanding law as a matter of signifiers and syntaxes the article cautions that ostensible recognition of some domains as persons has been aspirational rather than substantive, with observers misreading the sign as necessarily transforming power relationships. The article also cautions that personhood for nature or particular domains may be contrary to the self-determination of colonised First Peoples. (shrink)

This is a major work by Ian Maclean exploring the foundations of learning in the Renaissance. Logic, Signs and Nature offers a profoundly learned, compelling and original account of the range of what was thinkable and knowable by learned medics of the period c.1530-1630. This is a study of great significance to the history of medicine, as well as the history of European ideas in general.

This article argues that the Statesman should be read as a historically informed reflection on the nature and possibility of political rule, and that it presents us with a dilemma precisely in this regard. On the one hand, as indicated by the famous myth on the evolution of the cosmos, politics is only possible today, in the age of Zeus, when man no longer is like a sheep, ruled by a caring herdsman, as he used to be in the (...) age of Cronus. Instead, he has become an expert who is capable of some degree of self-rule. On the other hand, however, as a ‘technocratic’ age, the present is marked by its loss of the ‘natural’ model for statesmanship. More specifically, when politics tends to be identified with technical expertise, it becomes difficult to make sense of the very idea of political rule. (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)

Today, data and intervening digital media provide critical lines of communication with our social and business connections. Even those we know personally will typically connect to us via digital means. As a consequence, data and the digital space add a third dimension to the individual: we are now mind, body and digitality. This essay considers how digitality affects outcomes for the individual by exploring the mechanisms of digital influence. By using Peirce’s theory of semiosis to explain the process of digital (...) translation, this essay demonstrates how digitality influences the development of the individual, undermines personal autonomy and changes the nature of legal personhood thereby providing points for future legal intervention. (shrink)

Natural law as fact, theory, and sign of contradiction -- The second tablet project -- The mystery of what? -- The natural, the connatural, and the unnatural -- Accept no imitations: natural law vs. naturalism -- Thou shalt not kill . . . whom? the meaning of the person -- Capital punishment: the case for justice -- Constitution vs. constitutionalism -- Constitutional metaphysics -- The liberal, illiberal religion.

“Black Star” music video was released two days before Bowie’s death. It bears various implications of dying and the notion of mortality is both literal and metaphorical. It is highly autobiographical and serves as a theatrical stage for Bowie to act both as a music performer and as a self-conscious human being. In this paper, we discuss the signs of mortality in Bowie’s “Black Star” music video-clip. We focus on video’s cinematic techniques and codes, on its motivic elements and on (...) its narrative in relation with music, lyrics, characters, and gestures. We also discuss the video’s intertextual references and the broader signification of the black star figure. We adopt a quasi-semiotic approach considering “Black Star” music video-clip as a text which can be investigated through its signs, codes, and conventions of the musical, visual, and cinematic languages as well. Our interdisciplinary tools derive from visual semiotics and audiovisual analysis models, without leaving outside Bowie’s musical-artistic and personal history. As it turns out, Bowie created a video clip that is philosophical in nature and poetic in structure, preserving the role of protagonist. With the visuals creating a psychedelic atmosphere, the lyrics often are heard as a personal confession. They both generate cognitive and emotional responses that influence the way the viewers-listeners may experience, decompose, and interpret Bowie’s artistic endeavor bridging life and death. (shrink)

. This is a brief survey of aspects of the modern scientific view of nature to see if implied therein are signs or traces of the sacred–as early religious apprehension surely supposed. Nature's power and order are discussed as is the strange dialectic of death and life, evident in modern biology as it also is in all early religion.

The suicidal proclivity of our time, writes the acclaimed philosopher J. Budziszewski, is to deny the obvious. Our hearts are riddled with desires that oppose their deepest longings, because we demand to have happiness on terms that make happiness impossible. Why? And what can we do about it? Budziszewski addresses these vital questions in his brilliantly persuasive new book, _The Line Through the Heart_. The answers can be discovered in an exploration of natural law—a venture that, with Budziszewski as our (...) expert guide, takes us through politics, religion, ethics, law, philosophy, and more. Natural law, the author states plainly but provocatively, is a _fact_ about human beings; as surely as we have hands and feet, we have the foundational principles of good and evil woven into the fabric of our minds. From this elemental fact emerges a natural law _theory_ that unfolds as part of a careful study of the human person. Thus, Budziszewski shows, natural law forms a common ground for humanity. But this common ground is slippery. While natural law is truly an observable part of human nature, human beings are hell-bent—quite literally—on ignoring it. The mere mention of the obligations imposed on man by his nature will send him into a rage. In this sense, _The Line Through the Heart _explores natural law as not simply a fact and a theory but also a _sign of contradiction_. While investigating the natural law and its implications, Budziszewski boldly confronts—and offers a newly integrated view of—a wide range of contemporary issues, including abortion, evolution, euthanasia, capital punishment, the courts, and the ersatz state religion being built in the name of religious toleration. Written in Budziszewski’s usual crystalline style, _The Line Through the Heart_ makes clear that natural law is a matter of concern not merely to scholars; it touches how each of us lives, and how all of us live _together_. His profoundly important examination of this subject helps us make sense of why habits that run against our nature have become second nature, and why our world seems to be going mad.__. (shrink)

From Alfred Stieglitz to Trevor Paglen, photographs of the sky have engaged with the relationship between abstraction and representation. This article argues that Stieglitz’s attempt to convert the ‘natural’ abstraction of the sky into the ‘cultural’ abstraction of the modernist image opens a space through which recent photographers have moved to use the sky photograph as a means of interrogating issues of openness and concealment that are at once aesthetic and political. The invisibility of signs of military-industrial power embedded within (...) airspace is, in Richard Misrach’s and Paglen’s photographs, registered but not exactly shown, since the capacity of the photograph to reveal the unseen is challenged by the effectiveness of contemporary modes of concealment. What is shown in these images, however, is the condition of hiddenness itself, which is encountered by Misrach and Paglen not only through the abstraction of the sky photographs but by situating those images within a discursive field – through the use of titles, captions and an explication of working methods – that regrounds the atmospheric as a spectacular function of power’s open secret. (shrink)

Paul Grice distinguishes between natural meaning and non-natural meaning, where the first notion is especially connected to something's being a natural sign and the second to communication. It is argued that some of the arguments against the distinction being exhaustive are based on a misinterpretation of Grice, but also that the distinction cannot be exhaustive if one takes into account both the criterion of factivity and the connection to communication. If one makes a distinction between natural and non-natural communication, (...) then there are different types of natural communication to be distinguished: goal-directed communication, intentional communication and open intentional communication. Given the empirical evidence, the behavior of chimpanzees and of human infants may be described as goal-directed communication, but there are also important differences between the communicative behavior of the two. (shrink)

Starting from the minimal principle of generative anthropology - that human culture originates as 'the deferral of violence through representation' - the author proposes a new understanding of the fundamental concepts of metaphysics and an explanation of the historical problematic that underlies the postmodern 'end of culture.' Part I discusses the nature of paradox and the related notion of irony, as well as the fundamental concepts of being, thinking, and signification, leading to an anthropological interpretation of the origin of (...) philosophy and semiotics in Plato's Ideas. Part II develops the idea that material exchange originates in the sparagmos or violent rendering of the sacrificial victim from which each participant obtains a roughly equal portion. Examining the holocaust, the author demonstrates how postmodern dialogue becomes dominated by the rhetoric of victimage, and the culture of centrality gives way to an aesthetic of the marginal. (shrink)

Semiotic theory, which has restricted its focus largely to human forms of significations, is transformed by Robert S. Corrington into a semiotics of nature itself. Corrington situates the divide between "nature naturing" and "nature natured" within the contest of classical American pragmaticism and postmodern psychoanalysis. At the heart of this new metaphysics is an insistence that all signs participate in larger orders of meaning that are natural and religious. Meanings embodied in nature point beyond nature (...) to the mystery inherent in positioned codes and signs. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to analyse world-view and mythological expressions in Russian and Soviet Constitutional acts that implicitly or explicitly refer to any kind of idea legitimising the shape of the state, its political system or the nature of political power. The object of the argument will be exclusively such provisions of fundamental laws which: having neither a purely regulatory nor a purely programmatic character, model mental representations of the world of the legal text by reference to (...) ‘situationally transcendent’ ideas in Mannheim’s sense ; justify the content of the legal provision by means of such imagery, without being part of the preamble or any different integral part of the Constitution, characterised by a different ontology of the text; justify the content of provisions linked to political power and/or the nature of the state. The materials of the analysis are: Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire of 1906, the Constitutional texts of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of 1924, 1936 and 1977, and the current Constitution of the Russian Federation. Consecutive Constitutions of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic are also referred to. The analysed formulations, legally irrelevant in a conventional reading of a legal text, participate in the semiosis of both the provisions that contain them and the entire texts of the fundamental laws. In this way, the Constitutions incorporate into their complex of meanings either religious expressions, mythologised ideological figures or figures of historical memory associated with collective identity. (shrink)

This review of books by Niemoczynski and Robinson considers how semiotic processes of consciousness posited by Pierce yield insights into experiences usually categorized as religious. For Niemoczynski, consciousness experiences iconic representation and then disruptions of it. Conscious responds to such disruptions by means of abduction, and this is the seed of transcendence. Niemoczynski develops these processes with attention to Schelling, Heidegger, Deleuze, Corrington, and Badiou. Turning to Robinson's book, we find a deep inquiry into trinitarian logic that considers early work (...) of Christian philosophers in relation to Peirce's new list of categories: firstness, secondness, and thirdness. While both books appear to seek new frontiers of naturalism, Robinson's work is notable for its engagement with an emerging field of biosemiotics. (shrink)

Discovering laws of nature was a way to worship a law-giving God, during the Scientific Revolution. So why should we consider it worthwhile now, in our own more secularized science? For historical perspective, I examine two competing early modern theological traditions that related laws of nature to different divine attributes, and their secular legacy in views ranging from Kant and Nietzsche to Humean and ‘governing’ accounts in recent analytic metaphysics. Tracing these branching offshoots of ethically charged God-concepts sheds (...) light on how our ethical ideals and ideas of natural order can still be valuably integrated. Early modern intellectualists valued the law-governed order of nature as a sign of divine Reason. In turn, Reason traditionally ascribed to God has now been partly reclaimed for humans, reframing the value of natural order anthropocentrically, in terms of the value of our own intelligence. Alternatively, Reason may be reclaimed for nature itself, as in an ‘objective’ idealism or metaphysical rationalism. However, beyond divine Reason, an influential voluntarist tradition in theology stressed a connection between laws of nature and God’s Power or free Will. Tracking how divine Power has been reinvested in human beings provides a broader context for instrumentalism and related lineages of empiricism. But secularization can also transfer Power from God to the impersonal natural world. In this light, current scientific interest in lawlike order may also reflect the inherent value of brute necessity or inhuman causal power in nature: this is a deeper way to reject anthropocentrism and to show our respect for the environment. (shrink)

Is there such a thing as natural knowledge of God? C. Stephen Evans presents the case for understanding theistic arguments as expressions of natural signs in order to gain a new perspective both on their strengths and weaknesses. Three classical, much-discussed theistic arguments - cosmological, teleological, and moral - are examined for the natural signs they embody. At the heart of this book lie several relatively simple ideas. One is that if there is a God of the kind accepted by (...) Christians, Jews, and Muslims, then it is likely that a 'natural' knowledge of God is possible. Another is that this knowledge will have two characteristics: it will be both widely available to humans and yet easy to resist. If these principles are right, a new perspective on many of the classical arguments for God's existence becomes possible. We understand why these arguments have for many people a continued appeal but also why they do not constitute conclusive 'proofs' that settle the debate once and for all. Touching on the interplay between these ideas and contemporary scientific theories about the origins of religious belief, particularly the role of natural selection in predisposing humans to form beliefs in God or gods, Evans concludes that these scientific accounts of religious belief are fully consistent, even supportive, of the truth of religious convictions. (shrink)

In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume argues that morality pertains primarily to character, and that actions have moral content only to the extent that they signal good or bad character. I formalize his signalling theory of moral/immoral actions using simple game-theoretic models. Conditions exist under which there is a separating equilibrium in which actions do indeed credibly signal character, but conditions also exist in which there is only a pooling or semi-separating equilibrium. A tradeoff is identified between the (...) signalling value of actions, and the consequentialist goal of incentivizing all character types to choose beneficial actions. (shrink)

When we see or hear a spontaneous emotional expression, we usually immediately, effortlessly, and often correctly interpret it to mean happiness, sadness, or some other emotion as well as what this emotion is about. How do we do that? In this article, I evaluate how useful the concepts of natural meaning and probabilistic meaning are when it comes to explaining how we and other animals interpret emotional signs displayed without communicative intentions. I argue that Grice’s notion of natural meaning, because (...) it is a factive relation, is too restrictive for this purpose. I then present the notion of probabilistic meaning. The latter seems adequate for analyzing our ability to interpret non-communicative emotional signs, but it faces several difficulties when it comes to analyzing how we and other animals interpret emotional _signals_, i.e. signs that have the function to communicate emotional information. I present three of these difficulties. En passant, I suggest that a teleosemantic notion may be better suited for these challenges. (shrink)

Biological evolution is often viewed narrowly as a change of morphology or allele frequency in a sequence of generations. Here I pursue an alternative informational concept of evolution, as preservation, advance, and emergence of functional information in natural agents. Functional information is a network of signs that are used by agents to preserve and regulate their functions. Functional information is preserved in evolution via complex interplay of copying and construction processes: the digital components are copied, whereas interpreting subagents together with (...) scaffolds, tools, and resources, are constructed. Some of these processes are simple and invariant, whereas others are complex and contextual. Advance of functional information includes improvement and modification of already existing functions. Although the genome information may change passively and randomly, the interpretation is active and guided by the logic of agent behavior and embryonic development. Emergence of new functions is based on the reinterpretation of already existing information, when old tools, resources, and control algorithms are adopted for novel functions. Evolution of functional information progressed from protosemiosis, where signs correspond directly to actions, to eusemiosis, where agents associate signs with objects. Language is the most advanced form of eusemiosis, where the knowledge of objects and models is communicated between agents. (shrink)

Metaphors of nature and organism play a central role in the epistemes of the Western culture and arts. The entire project of the 'modern' meant a separation of man from the cosmos and its laws. Signs and symbols are thought to be arbitrary and conventional social constructions. However, there are many returns to iconic imitations of nature and biological principles also in such an esoteric art as music. One of the highest aesthetic categories in Western art music is (...) the so-called 'organic growth' which particularly manifests in symphony. The concepts of 'organic/inorganic' can be used as analytic terms, whereby one might even compare such composers as Jean Sibelius and Gustav Mahler. Music is said to be 'organic' when (I) its theme actors live in their proper Umwelt (or isotopy); (2) all music material stems from the same themes (it is innerly iconic); (3) all musical events follow each other coherently (inner indexicality or the principle of Growth); (4) music strives for some goal (temporality). Moreover the Ueküll idea of a particular lch-Ton of every organism can be turned back to music. Hence we can say that every musical piece is like an 'organism' which has its lch-Ton detennining which signs it accepts and how it acts in the musical environmentof its own and formed by other musical works. (shrink)

A study of the last drama of Aeschylus' trilogy concerned with the fortunes of the house of Laius that ends with the story of Oedipus' sons, the enemy brothers, who self-destruct in mutual fratricide but thereby save the besieged city of Thebes. The book's findings, however, far exceed these limits to explore the relationships between language and kinship, as between family and city, self and society, and Greek ideas about the nature of human development and identity.

Background Genomic research on neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs), particularly involving minors, combines and amplifies existing research ethics issues for biomedical research. We performed a review of the literature on the ethical issues associated with genomic research involving children affected by NDDs as an aid to researchers to better anticipate and address ethical concerns. Results Qualitative thematic analysis of the included articles revealed themes in three main areas: research design and ethics review, inclusion of research participants, and communication of research results. Ethical (...) issues known to be associated with genomic research in general, such as privacy risks and informed consent/assent, seem especially pressing for NDD participants because of their potentially decreased cognitive abilities, increased vulnerability, and stigma associated with mental health problems. Additionally, there are informational risks: learning genetic information about NDD may have psychological and social impact, not only for the research participant but also for family members. However, there are potential benefits associated with research participation, too: by enrolling in research, the participants may access genetic testing and thus increase their chances of receiving a (genetic) diagnosis for their neurodevelopmental symptoms, prognostic or predictive information about disease progression or the risk of concurrent future disorders. Based on the results of our review, we developed an ethics checklist for genomic research involving children affected by NDDs. Conclusions In setting up and designing genomic research efforts in NDD, researchers should partner with communities of persons with NDDs. Particular attention should be paid to preventing disproportional burdens of research participation of children with NDDs and their siblings, parents and other family members. Researchers should carefully tailor the information and informed consent procedures to avoid therapeutic and diagnostic misconception in NDD research. To better anticipate and address ethical issues in specific NDD studies, we suggest researchers to use the ethics checklist for genomic research involving children affected by NDDs presented in this paper. (shrink)

The essay attempts to delineate how Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception can be applied to theories of sign processes, and how it reworks the framework of the phenomenalist conception of communication. His later philosophy involved a reformulation of subjectivity and a resolution of the subject/object dualism. My claim is that this non-reductionist theory of perception reveals a different view of nature as we experience it in an expressive and meaningful interaction. The perspective that another living being has and (...) communicates entails a form of depth, the invisible dimension of the visible or audible. These two aspects of perception and dialogue are intertwined in a dialectic of presence and absence, so that sense arises in the perceptual field rather than in subjectivity. This, I argue, is the most fundamental result of his theory. The origination of meaning in the workings of the chiasm of visible and invisible in perception opens up an objective sense of intersubjective nature. The essay also deals with the role of the phenomenological reduction; a suspension of beliefs and existence claims in experience. The reduction enables us to take a step back and look more closely at our understanding of nature in light of the historical and cultural influence on our thinking. (shrink)

In this article, the aim is to address different forms of relationship between deconstruction, as coined by Jacques Derrida, and research perspectives on music education. Deconstruction represents a radical departure from Western ontology from Plato onward and its essentialistic notions of the metaphysics of presence. Instead, Derrida claims that signs, as well as texts, are decentered, that is, they are continually altering meaning in relation to other signs or texts, being in constant motion. Simultaneously, signs and texts, as well as (...) existence and experience, constitute themselves by binary oppositions, like nature/culture, content/form, original/copy, internal/external, empirical/ theoretical, and so on. Derrida argues that such differences are not inherent, but are instead socially produced and hierarchical mechanisms for providing systematic priority to one aspect of the dualism to the neglect of the other. Consequently, the ethical interest of music education research, from a deconstructive perspective, would be to expose what is marginalized in musical schooling, upbringing, and socialization. In that case, deconstruction might also be able to rectify some of its destructive reputation. (shrink)

This article considers natural signs and their role in the origin of language. Natural signs, sometimes called primary signs, are connected with their signified by causal relationships, concomitance, or likeliness. And their acquisition is directed by both objective reality and past experience (memory). The discovery and use of natural signs is a required prerequisite of existence for any living systems because they are indispensable to movement, the search for food, regulation, communication, and many other information-related activities. It is argued that (...) the birth of conventional signs, sometimes called secondary signs, was determined by a connotative use of natural signs and that, regulated and maintained by them, human language developed. At the same time, the origin and development of human language presupposes a ‘rational turn’ from the given and external reality of natural signs to the rationally constructed reality of artificial signs and rules that are internally maintained by the subjects’ deliberate activities, and actual and inherited social tradition (social memory). In view of this, language is defined as a dynamic system that must both be natural and artificial, empirical and a priori, inductive and deductive. This bilateral origin and regulation of language is the dual-inference of language. (shrink)

Ecosemiotics is the study of sign processes (semioses) in relation to the natural environment in which they occur. The paper examines the cultural, biological, and evolutionary dimensions of ecosemioses on the basis of C. S. Peirce's theory of continuity between matter and mind and investigates the ecosemiotic dimensions of natural signs. Ecosemiotics and the semiotics of nature are distinguished from pansemiotism, and the coevolution of sign processes with their natural enviromnent is discussed as a determining factor of (...) ecosemiosis. (shrink)

The study of natural disaster and its discursive dimensions from a semiotic perspective can provide a theoretical frame for the scientific communication of global catastrophes. In this paper I will suggest two models; one is a semiotic model on the natural catastrophic events and the other is a hexagon model composed of semiotic dimensions of natural disaster discourse. The six main modules include narration, description, explication, visualization, prevention, and recovery action.