Communication and content presents a comprehensive and foundational account of meaning based on new versions of situation theory and game theory. The literal and implied meanings of an utterance are derived from first principles assuming little more than the partial rationality of interacting agents. New analyses of a number of diverse phenomena – a wide notion of ambiguity and content encompassing phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and beyond, vagueness, convention and conventional meaning, indeterminacy, universality, the role of truth in communication, semantic (...) change, translation, Frege’s puzzle of informative identities – are developed. Communication, speaker meaning, and reference are defined. Frege’s context and compositional principles are generalized and reconciled in a fixed-point principle, and a detailed critique of Grice, several aspects of Lewis, and some aspects of the Romantic conception of meaning are offered. Connections with other branches of linguistics, especially psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and natural language processing, are explored. -/- The book will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. It should also interest readers in related fields like literary and cultural theory and the social sciences. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 220 Seiten: 95-121.

Lars von Trier's movies can be seen as a series of iterations in an infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma. After testing the logic of this game, at the core of which is the dilemma of cooperation or conflict, at the middle level at which an individual confronts a community up till Dogville, he has transposed the game to the level of social systems in Manderlay and the level of the minimal social unit, the couple in Anti-Christ. The story is the Oedipus (...) myth reversed and fit into the logic of the prisoner's dilemma which is, one could argue, the mathematical model of a Hobbesian world view. In that sense it could be called Von Trier's Anti-Oedipus. Moreover, this is the first film in which Von Trier fully embraces digital technologies. It is as if he as a filmmaker acts like the male protagonist in Anti-Christ, and assumes the role of the Anti-Christ in order to become a Savior, since digital technologies and special effects are aligned with 'evil' in this movie. (shrink)

In this article, based on a critical metaphor analysis, we identify and describe multimodal metaphors involving the human body and its conceptualizations in five auteur films of the 2010s. Studies on the human body in cinema have documented how it changes according to underlying ideologies. Our research focuses on the role of image schemas and metaphors as they embody meanings and sociocultural paradigms. Metaphors also frame how the body is conceptualized according to dominating ideological practices such as (a) commodification, (b) (...) the integration between artificial and organic, (c) dissatisfaction, (d) dynamics of beautification and idealization, and (e) politicization of the human body. We show how metaphors are creative tools to reframe meanings and representations of the body and how the body is a construct refashioned within the cinematic discourses of these films. (shrink)

This article revisits Jean-Louis Comolli's “Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much” in the spirit of film-philosophy's various efforts to reassess the field's seminal texts, and it recasts Comolli's attentive analyses of film acting in terms of the original interpretations they produce. In short, I look to “A Body Too Much’ for its subtle disclosure of an underappreciated substratum of hermeneutics in so called “1970s film theory.” Comolli's study of the discord between actor and referent, I argue, is surprisingly consistent with (...) Paul Ricoeur's pioneering contemporaneous work on metaphor and interpretation, and it leads him to understand the meaningful deployment of film actors in very particular ways. I provide an extended analysis of Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York to further demonstrate how the distinctive utilization of actors constitutes both a redescription of the historical past and a spur to interpretation. When critically apprehended as a solution to the broadly construed problems of creating historical fictions, the calculated deployment of film actors can reveal a manner of thinking about the historical past – simply put, it can tell us what a film is thinking and how it regards its historical characters and events. In the final analysis, I claim, our attention to – and critical interpretation of – the embodiment of such filmic thinking permits us to grasp the imaginative form of historical knowledge on view in such films. (shrink)

In theories of interpretation, the artwork's “surface” is frequently cast as something to be looked past in our quest for meaning. As such, the “surface” has also understandably been the focus of several polemics against the excesses of interpretive criticism – in film scholarship and beyond. This article explores what role concepts of the “surface” and “surface meaning” might fruitfully play in the interpretation of fiction films by thinking about a particular kind of expression-by-implication available to the medium: irony. An (...) under-theorised phenomenon, filmic irony could seem to require interpretation in order to grasp meanings that reside precisely elsewhere than the “surface”. Yet, can we even distinguish between a “surface meaning” and an “implied” meaning in a non-linguistic medium like film? This article addresses such questions by exploring the possibility of separating the explicit and implicit, as well as interpretation and comprehension, in a medium whose very capacity for ironic expression h... (shrink)

One of the largely untapped potentials of Sausserian semiotics is the ability it provides to examine shifts in the cultural meanings attached to objects and ideasacross time. To explore this potentiality, we trace the intertextual evolution of one of the most enduring mythic figures, the vampire. Our analysis begins with ancient texts and moves forward in time to contemporary cinematic and televised depictions of the vampire. We document the deployment of the vampire as a vehicle carrying oppositional meanings as it (...) moves through various eras. For example, vampires may connote both racism and racial resistance, homophobia and gay acceptance, women’s subjugation and women’s empowerment. By using the vampire to mediate contested, liminal regions of cultural discourse, storytellers have constructed increasingly complex and multivocal portraits of this figure. At present, vampire narratives have come to resemble an alternative universe of human morality and behavior, complete with family structures, emotional depth, and interpersonal conflicts. (shrink)

The raison d’être of the humanities is widely held to reside in its unique ability to generate critical thinking and critical thinkers. But what is “critical thinking?” Is it a generalized mode of...