Tom Sebeok lives in recent memory partly because of his phenomenal networking, administration, editing and promotion of individuals in semiotics as well as the disciplinary field in general. Yet this must not be allowed to obscure a body of published writings that is as original as it is eloquent. One of Sebeok’s most penetrating insights arises from his consideration of a fundamental paradox in modern intellectual life, one that traverses the bridge between the ‘hard’ and ‘human’ sciences. Sebeok’s 1979 (...) review of investigations into animals’ aesthetic behaviour, originally cast as an early chapter of a much larger book, contains the key observation which drives contemporary, twenty-first-century semiotics. Sebeok’s abduction of the riddle posits that “aesthetic sensibility plays the part of a delicate sieve” among animals. In so doing, it not only clarifies the modelling process as a whole, across verbal and averbal modes, but also provides an agenda for re-thinking tertiary modelling, the humanities and global arts policy. (shrink)

This address begins with a few historical considerations regarding the foundation of the Semiotic Society of America and how the founders came to define the purpose of the Society as that of advancing the study of signs. The question of what it means to ask “Why semiotics?” is then taken up, introduced, and framed within a strictly Peircean framework. How would Peirce have answered it, he the paramount logician of signs? Taking inspiration from his 1902 essay “Why Study Logic?”, (...) of Peirce’s answer to that seminal question I extend important elements to semiotics understood as logic in a much broader sense than Peirce’s 1902 conception of logic. Then I make it clear that Peirce’s approach to our main question would have been as demanding and rigorous as the spirit in which he expected semiotics to be studied: in a genuine scientific spirit of fundamental inquiry. I expand about Peirce’s conception of fundamentality, and then show how it entails properties that are common to a particular class of fundamental concepts Peirce called “continuous predicates”. Taking advantage of a recent publication by Francesco Bellucci on the subject, I illustrate what makes continuous predicates so special, and how it is that Peirce’s general definition of a sign relation conforms exactly to the inherent form of continuous predicates. This has a direct consequence on the definition of semiotics itself, and thus on the expression of its most fundamental purpose, which is then spelled out. The address concludes with considerations about what it would take to accomplish such a fundamental purpose. (shrink)

The essay seeks to harness the diverse and innovative work to date of legal semiotics. It seeks to bring together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a preclusion to identifying fertile avenues for research.

The aim of the 2008 Roundtable was to focus on the progress to date in the many facets—methodological, epistemological and conceptual—of the field of legal semiotics, specifically the contribution of different schools and forms of semiotics as well as emerging and emergent semiotics approaches which can be used in researching and interpreting law and legal phenomena. The participants sought primarily to engage with the epistemological and methodological challenges which the field currently faces and to discuss the implications (...) of these. (shrink)

The present paper examines three parts of ancient school rhetoric: the issues, the topics, and the questions of style from the perspective of legal semiotics. It aims (1) to demonstrate the roles these have played and can play in the interpretation of legal discourses; and (2) to summarise what insights have been and can be gained from this classical tradition by contemporary legal research. It is argued that the promise of legal semiotics for rhetorical investigations is that it (...) may help to make sense of the functioning of the system of ancient rhetoric, and contribute to our understanding of how rhetorical tradition works, while the research of ancient rhetoric can explore a range of semiotic devices essential for lawyerly thinking, resulting in the knowledge of a richer framework of interpretation. (shrink)

The marginal status of semiotics in society and the academic world is a paradox. Semiotics is not only relevant to every field of inquiry, but is a universal aspect of everyday experiences. Yet even among those that advocate the study of signs, the notion of calling semiotics an academic discipline is controversial. Like any academic area, the language and concepts of semiotics exclude the uninitiated. Ironically, just as the study of semiotics predicts, opinions and beliefs (...) vary and disagreements commonly occur because of a tendency to interpret the world according to cultural habits rather than through critical logic supported by systematic and verifiable evidence. Especially in an age of global media, semiotics provides an effective way to examine messages representing ideas, and communicating values, beliefs, ideologies, and agendas. (shrink)

This article provides a review of A Buddhist Theory of Semiotics by Fabio Rambelli while also broadening the scope of its evaluation to the review author’s own considerations “around” semiotics and Buddhism. After summarizing the general structure of the book, this review provides a qualitative evaluation of the book’s treatment of these two major themes: Buddhism and semiotics. It then approaches the question of interdisciplinarity, both in general and in relation to the book in particular. It discusses (...) the two great anthropological perspectives: the emic and the etic. Finally, this review identifies three major ways of conceiving semiotics and the semiotic in relation to three spheres or levels. (shrink)

The present paper is divided into two parts. Part one is an attempt to reconstruct the semiotic models of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, in which conceptsfrom De Saussure, C. S. Peirce, Jakobson, Lotman, Eco are drawn for mutual illumination and synthesis. Psychoanalytic semiotics is considered a particular areaand discipline in semiotics, aiming at the unconscious dimension of the subject. Lacan could be considered a post-structuralist revision and extension of Freud. Part two is an application of psychoanalytic semiotics to the (...) interpretation of dream painting, focusing on the Dali example. Essential issues in psychoanalytic semiotics of dream painting are explored in the Dali example, such as dream indexes, dream mechanisms, self-portraits as imago and icon, and psychoanalytic Nirvana as a recovery and memory of a non-alienated subject. My reading of Dali demonstrates the possibility of a convergence of semiotics, psychoanalysis, and art criticism. (shrink)

This paper shows how Peirce's semeiotic could be turned into a powerful science. The New Science of Semiotics provides not only a new paradigm and an empirical justification for all these applications, but also a rational and systematic procedure for carrying them out as well. Thus the New Science of Semiotics transforms the philosophy of law into the science of legal scholarship, the discipline that I call jurisology.

This ethnographic research features Shugendō , Japan’s centuries-old, mystical tradition. I and approximately fifty other lay participants took part in a three-day Shugendō program for the secular. The program is physically demanding and takes secular trainees to three holy mountains in Yamagata, Japan, where they take part in the water purification and holy fire rituals in the mountain asceticism tradition. Using the theoretical framework of semiotics, I explicate the visual signifiers of this esoteric mysticism in the context of Shugendō (...) teachings represented in twenty photographs taken during the training. The purpose of this article is to promote semiotics as an analytical standpoint alternative to other approaches to studying culture, in this case, a Japanese religion sourced in my fieldwork. I argue that, living in today’s global age and visual culture, college students can and should benefit from learning about semiotics and developing visual literacy for their future career opportunities. (shrink)

The International Court of Justice advisory opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons in 1996 was a landmark case because, for the first time in history, the legal aspect of nuclear weapons was addressed. The decision has evoked controversies regarding the Court’s conclusion, the legal status of international humanitarian law in relation to nuclear weapons, and a newly introduced concept of state survival. While much legal scholarship discusses and criticizes the legal significance of the opinion, (...) there has not been enough scholarship examining the Court’s specific choice of words and concepts that sustain its wider ideological and political position in the opinion. The paper argues that the Court’s vague and controversial logic is attributed to its confrontation with two international orders/codes: the legal order and the political order. The paper engages in legal semiotics as methodology to decode legal text and discover a deep structure that sustains networks of codes, according to which text is interpreted. Through the semiotic examination of three sets of key concepts “permitted” and “prohibited,” “threat of use” and “possession of the weapon,” and “state survival,” the paper shows the ICJ’s confrontation with two orders/codes and eventual prioritization of the political order over the international legal order. The analysis of the opinion based on legal semiotics indicates an intimate and inseparable relationship between state practice and international law, which must be disentangled for the sake of the rule of law. (shrink)

Bakhtin’s social semiotics, Lotman’s structural literary semiotics, and Uspenskij’s linguistic cultural semiotics are the three important theoretical cornerstones of the mansion of semiotics in the former Soviet Union, whose influences have long gone beyond the territory of the former Soviet Union, and have attracted widespread attention of the literary and semiotic circle from China and the rest of the world as well. However, researches so far have been mainly separate studies of their distinct theories, while a (...) comparative study of the characteristics of Bakhtin, Lotman, and Uspenskij’s theories and methodologies has not been initiated. This paper attempts to compare the Russian troika’s conceptions and research methodologies of semiotics, and explores how they reach the same goal of the study of social-cultural system from different approaches — linguistics and trans-linguistics. This paper further reveals how they break the thinking mode of dualism and construct a pluralistic critical mode, and finally points out the contribution they have made to semiotics and the overall studies of humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

How does fiction work? How can mere words create realities that exist only in the mind of the writer and the reader, yet seem so tangible in their realness? How can the first sentence of a novel transport one into a very real, yet purely objective, world — literally word-by-word? How do the subjective worlds of the writer and reader interact with the words on the page to create similar, yet always highly individualized, objective worlds? How can semiotics function (...) as a means to analyzing a written text in order to answer these questions about how the processes of writing and reading work? These, amongst others, are the questions explored in this paper, “Mrs. Dalloway and the Semiotics of a First Sentence”. In it I analyze Virginia Woolf ’s classic novel from a semiotic stance. Through exploring the semiotics of the novel’s first sentence, I attempt to show how we can read even the first nine words of a book and find ourselves transported to a whole, new, highly detailed world — the world of fiction. (shrink)

The notion that we live, or should live, in a “post-metaphysical” age is prevalent, with semiotics displacing metaphysics in many quarters; in other words, the study of meaning has supplanted the study of being. Charles Peirce, a founder of contemporary semiotics, seems to agree with this view on occasion; claiming, for example, “The demonstrations of the metaphysicians are all moonshine.” (Peirce c.1897: 1.7) On the other hand, Peirce consistently reserved a place for metaphysics within his classification of the (...) sciences, serving in part as a bridge between philosophy and the special sciences. Thus, while Peirce consistently argues that metaphysics must rest upon logic/semiotic – citing the exemplars of Aristotle and Kant – a properly Peircean metaphysics is irreducible to, and irreplaceable by, semiotics (cp. Peirce c.1902: 2.121). This paper will explore Peirce’s understanding of metaphysics in relation to his semiotics, focusing on the following issues. First, I will analyze some of Peirce’s claims concerning the relationship between semiotics and metaphysics within his classification(s) of the sciences. Second, I will address Peirce’s claim that metaphysics is unavoidable, for “[f]ind a scientific man who proposes to get along without any metaphysics…and you have found one whose doctrines are thoroughly vitiated by the crude and uncriticized metaphysics with which they are packed.” (Peirce 1905-1906: 1.129) Third, I will explore briefly the relationship between metaphysics and the special sciences. Answering these questions, and stimulating new ones, should help us begin to understand why such a thoroughly semiotic thinker as Peirce maintains the need for metaphysics. (shrink)

The history and effects of British imperialism in Fiji created a model for analyzing the semiotics of cultural identity. Following the acquisition of land in Fiji, the British recruited impoverished people from India and relocated them as indentured servants to do work on sugar cane plantations that natives refused to do. When Fiji became independent nearly 100 years later, the island nation had nearly equal populations of native Fijians and people of Indian decent. Fiji experienced three military coupes between (...) 1987 and 2000 while the two ethnic and culturally distinct groups competed for jobs and political power. As a small, island nation, identity-based communication in Fiji represents a microcosm of other more complex multicultural societies. This study examines the semiotics of cultural identity among the people of Fiji. (shrink)

Peirce defines the legal expression proximale cause and effect as an “obscure term like most of the terms of Aristotelianism.” He says that students of law and logic should be shocked by thc practicc of justifying the payment of damages in law by reference to a “term in Aristotelian logic or metaphysics.” That such practice does occur underscores and “illustrates the value of PRAGMATISM.” Peirce reminds usthat in English law the term “witness” does not mean a person who testifies to (...) his own experience, “but to facts which he knows by the immediate testimony of others” .Practical law, Peirce suggests, results from persons whose knowledge of the facts of experience are formed in dialogue with others whose experience confirms their own. The dialogue is immediate; the knowledge is mediated through signs. From the viewpoint of Peirce’s pragmatism which he sees as an integral part of his semiotic Methodology or Speculative Rhetoric this paper will assurne that there are distinct types of legal cultures and that each may be regarded as a method of inquiry for the purpose of realizing social values. The relation between Laws and Societies-systems of legalities and legitimacies-will be regarded as culture-specific modes of dialectic. I propose here that Peirce’s Methodology-his method of methods-may account for the way that “patterns of conceptual change retlect the presuppositional structures of conceptual systems” . Within the framework of a semiotics of law I will be looking at various ways the idea of the Legal System has been interpreted. (shrink)

In East Asia, there has been a long tradition of using graphs and diagrams to express abstract ideas. This paper is to give an account of the East Asian methodsfor representing body, mind and the universe. The fundamental ideas of East Asian graphic interpretation mostly originated from the Yijing , and were later developed by Confucian and Daoist thinkers to describe the universe, the mind, and the body as an organic totality. By comparing different approaches to portraying the universe, this (...) paper offers a critical analysis of East Asian semiotics. (shrink)

Peirce defines the legal expression proximale cause and effect as an “obscure term like most of the terms of Aristotelianism.” He says that students of law and logic should be shocked by thc practicc of justifying the payment of damages in law by reference to a “term in Aristotelian logic or metaphysics.” That such practice does occur underscores and “illustrates the value of PRAGMATISM.” Peirce reminds usthat in English law the term “witness” does not mean a person who testifies to (...) his own experience, “but to facts which he knows by the immediate testimony of others” .Practical law, Peirce suggests, results from persons whose knowledge of the facts of experience are formed in dialogue with others whose experience confirms their own. The dialogue is immediate; the knowledge is mediated through signs. From the viewpoint of Peirce’s pragmatism which he sees as an integral part of his semiotic Methodology or Speculative Rhetoric this paper will assurne that there are distinct types of legal cultures and that each may be regarded as a method of inquiry for the purpose of realizing social values. The relation between Laws and Societies-systems of legalities and legitimacies-will be regarded as culture-specific modes of dialectic. I propose here that Peirce’s Methodology-his method of methods-may account for the way that “patterns of conceptual change retlect the presuppositional structures of conceptual systems” . Within the framework of a semiotics of law I will be looking at various ways the idea of the Legal System has been interpreted. (shrink)

The European Union is one of the ‘big ideas’ of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and has been built on the idea of the European Community, which it supersedes. Seen in this light the emergent law of the European Union is becoming omnipresent in so many ways and yet it does not appear to have been the subject of as much semiotic study as it deserves. This paper takes a multilingual stance and explores emerging EC and EU law from a (...) perspective of a lawyer-linguist practitioner in the field. The purpose is to describe a range of practitioner ‘realities’ and to explore how semiotics provides a tool for analysis and insights for a better understanding and awareness of EU law, with particular emphasis on the legislative, or law-making aspects. (shrink)

Originally written in 1990, this reviews largely late 20th century debates on the study of law as Logic, Discourse, or Experience; the Unity of the Legal System and the Problem of Reference; Semiotic Presuppositions of Traditional Jurisprudence (Austin, Hart, Kelsen, Dworkin, Legal Realisms); then turns to legal philosophies explicitly Employing Forms of Semiotics (Kalinowski, the Italian Analytical School, Rhetorical and Pragmatic Approaches, Sociological and Socio-Linguistic Approaches, Peircian Legal Semiotics, Greimasian Legal Semiotics and Aesthetic/Symbolic Approaches). A major section (...) then offers (from a largely Greimasian point of view) some hypotheses for legal semiotics on the Problem of Reference, Semantic and Pragmatic Levels, Semiotic Groups and “The Legal Culture”, Normativity and Justification, and finally considers the implications for particular legal phenomena: the “Legal System”, Legal Institutions, Legal Codes, Legal Rules, Rights, Courtroom Behaviour: Witness and Counsel, The Judge: Justification of Decisions on Law, and the Criminal Justice Process. A conclusion addresses the status of legal semiotics. (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.

In this article, I attempt to describe how certain theoretical constructions of semiotics could be applied in educational theoretical work. First I introduce meaning as a basic concept of semiotics, thus also touching on concepts such as action, competence and causality. I am then able to define learning as a change of competences, and also refer to the pedagogical concept of learning i.e. Bildung, which can be roughly defined as valuable human learning. I then take up the problem (...) of education as pedagogical direction and communication. Finally, I conclude with some considerations on the famous Greimassian semiotic square. (shrink)

Later reprinted by Deborah Charles Publications (and not available from Amazon), this book expounds and comments on the application of Greimasian semiotics to a legal text, as found in the article by Greimas and Landowski in Greimas, Sémiotique et Sciences Sociales (1976), compares this with the semiotic presuppositions of Hart, Dworkin, MacCormick and Kelsen, and offers my own analysis of the implications of such semiotic analysis for legal theory, including some more recent radical non-positivist accounts.

How can philosophy or science claim to discover objective truth when their arguments originate from subjective beings? In _Intentionality and Semiotics_, John Deely offers a controversial solution to the problem of subjectivity in inquiry. He creates an interface between semiotics and the concept of intentionality, as it appears in Aquinas’s work, to demonstrate that every sign is irrevocably linked to the reality of relations. In the process, Deely builds a bridge between classical thinkers such as Aristotle and modernists such (...) as Heidegger and Peirce in this innovative volume. (shrink)

The author suggests that educational philosophy should benefit from addressing questions traditionally asked within discourse in the philosophy of mind, namely: the relation between the mind and world and the problems of intentionality , meaning, and representation. Peirce's semiotics and his category of creative abduction provide a novel conceptual framework for exploring these questions. A model of reasoning and learning, based on Peirce's triadic logic of relations, is analysed. This model, it is argued, is fruitful for overcoming the paradox (...) of new knowledge that was first debated by Socrates in his dialogue with Meno. (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 examines the meaning of interactive comportment as identified by Richard Lanigan and the role fundamental analysis of this facticity can play in improving social life. The role of communicology as exposed by this non-naïve sense of responsibility is examined. The contribution of Ernst Cassirer’s work on symbology generally, and the primitive more specifically, is explored as a case that supports Lanigan’s assertion that fundamental examination of comportment can expand our understanding of ourselves and others, facilitate tolerance, foster creativity, (...) and enrich our lives. Rigorous examination and appreciation of comportment, including the relationship between identity and difference, has implications for, and reverberates throughout, the lifeworld. A non-naïve understanding that social studies take place within a social environment and have consequences for that environment prompts us to self-consciously interrogate the implications of such work for life. Cassirer’s work demonstrates the potential for communicology to facilitate change. (shrink)

Semiotics, the body of knowledge developed by study of the action of signs, like every living discipline, depends upon a community of inquirers united through the recognition and adoption of basic principles which establish the ground-concepts and guide-concepts for their ongoing research. These principles, in turn, come to be recognized in the first place through the work of pioneers in the field, workers commonly unrecognized or not fully recognized in their own day, but whose work later becomes foundational as (...) the community of inquirers matures and ‘lays claim to its own’. As semiotics has matured, the work of Jakob von Uexküll in establishing the concept of Umwelt has proven to be just such a pioneering accomplishment for the doctrine of signs, and in this paper I trace out some of the lines of development according to which Uexküll’s concept came to occupy its central place in semiotics today. (shrink)

The right to a fair trial as a fundamental human right has been widely established in the international community. While the notion of a fair trial is typically associated with procedural safeguards, fairness can be reflected in spatial dimensions. Courtroom design, apart from achieving its main functional objectives, reflects the institutional ideology of how justice can be staged in public. In alignment with the perspective that courtroom as theatre consists of a sign system, this paper adopts a semiotic approach to (...) the courtroom setting of Chinese criminal trials. With a thick description of space, mobility and attire, it attempts to probe into how judicial ideology is symbolically framed in the field. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork of three courts, this paper discusses how courtroom space is constructed semiotically as a performative stage on which legal dramas unfold. Ultimately this paper argues that a semiotic investigation of Chinese courtrooms will shed light on an understanding of its judicial value, ideology of justice and dynamics of power relationship. (shrink)

The central focus of this paper is the disjunction between the findings of climate science in revealing the threat of global warming and the failure to act appropriately to these warnings. The development of climate science can be illuminated through the perspective provided by Peircian semiotics, but efforts to account for its success as a science and its failure to convince people to act accordingly indicate the need to supplement Peirce’s ideas. The more significant gaps, it is argued, call (...) for the integration of major new ideas. It will be argued that Peirce should be viewed as a Schellingian philosopher, and it will then be shown how this facilitates integration into his philosophy of concepts developed by other philosophers and theorists within this tradition. In particular, Bourdieu’s concepts of the ‘habitus’ and ‘field’ will be integrated with Peirce’s semiotics and used to analyse the achievements and failures of climate science. It will be suggested that the resulting synthesis can augment Peirce’s evolutionary cosmology and so provide a better basis for comprehending and responding to the situation within which we find ourselves. (shrink)

[Note: Picture of Peirce available] Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Signs Essays in Comparative Semiotics Gérard Deledalle Peirce’s semiotics and metaphysics compared to the thought of other leading philosophers. "This is essential reading for anyone who wants to find common ground between the best of American semiotics and better-known European theories. Deledalle has done more than anyone else to introduce Peirce to European audiences, and now he sends Peirce home with some new flare."—Nathan Houser, Director, Peirce Edition (...) Project Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Signs examines Peirce’s philosophy and semiotic thought from a European perspective, comparing the American’s unique views with a wide variety of work by thinkers from the ancients to moderns. Parts I and II deal with the philosophical paradigms which are at the root of Peirce’s new theory of signs, pragmatic and social. The main concepts analyzed are those of "sign" and "semiosis" and their respective trichotomies; formally in the case of "sign," in time in the case of semiosis. Part III is devoted to comparing Peirce’s theory of semiotics as a form of logic to the work of other philosophers, including Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, Frege, Philodemus, Lady Welby, Saussure, Morris, Jakobson, and Marshall McLuhan. Part IV compares Peirce’s "scientific metaphysics" with European metaphysics. Gérard Deledalle holds the Doctorate in Philosophy from the Sorbonne. A research scholar at Columbia University and Attaché at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, he has also been Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Philosophy Department of the universities of Tunis, Perpignan, and Libreville. In 1990 he received the Herbert W. Schneider Award "for distinguished contributions to the understanding and development of American philosophy. In 2001, he was appointed vice-president of the Charles S. Peirce Society. Contents Introduction—Peirce Compared: Directions for Use Part I—Semeiotic as Philosophy Peirce’s New Philosophical Paradigms Peirce’s Philosophy of Semeiotic Peirce’s First Pragmatic Papers The Postscriptum of 1893 Part II—Semeiotic as Semiotics Sign: Semiosis and Representamen—Semiosis and Time Sign: The Concept and Its Use—Reading as Translation Part III—Comparative Semiotics Semiotics and Logic: A Reply to Jerzy Pelc Semeiotic and Greek Logic: Peirce and Philodemus Semeiotic and Significs: Peirce and Lady Welby Semeiotic and Semiology: Peirce and Saussure Semeiotic and Semiotics: Peirce and Morris Semeiotic and Linguistics: Peirce and Jakobson Semeiotic and Communication: Peirce and McLuhan Semeiotic and Epistemology: Peirce, Frege, and Wittgenstein Part IV—Comparative Metaphysics Gnoseology—Perceiving and Knowing: Peirce, Wittgenstein, and Gestalttheorie Ontology—Transcendentals "of" or "without" Being: Peirce versus Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas Cosmology—Chaos and Chance within Order and Continuity: Peirce between Plato and Darwin Theology—The Reality of God: Peirce’s Triune God and the Church’s Trinity Conclusion—Peirce: A Lateral View. (shrink)

Existential semiotics involves an a priori state of signs and their fixation into objective entities. These essays define this new philosophical field.

The essay seeks to single out, describe, and analyze the main semiotic features that compose the fundamentalist understanding of authoriality. Given a definition of authoriality as the series of semiotic dynamics that induce a reader to posit a genetic relation between an author and a text, the fundamentalist authoriality is characterized as displaying six main traits. First, centrality of the written text: in order to postulate a perfect coincidence between a transcendent intentio auctoris (intention of the author) and an immanent (...) intentio lectoris (intention of the reader), fundamentalist exegetical and juridical hermeneutics must be anchored to a stable message, canonized into a written verbal text or into a corpus of written verbal texts. Second, fundamentalist authoriality rests on the assumption of the immutability and mono-centrism of the religious semiosphere that irradiates from the written text. Third, literalism, infallibility, and non-contradiction are attributed to the relation between the written text, its exegetical hermeneutics, and the pragmatic normative orders to which it gives rise. Fourth, fundamentalist authoriality rules out any potential duplicity of the operations that ‘extract’ meaning from religious texts. Fifth, the assumption of the immutability of the religious text leads to exclusion of any operation that might alter the form of both its expression and content, hence to stigmatization of translation. The sixth feature of fundamentalist authoriality encompasses all the previous ones: in fundamentalism, a religious text is not actually a text anymore, but a mirror, whose passive reflection of the exegete’s mind undermines the semiotic nature of the relation between the reader and the text. (shrink)

Since 1984 when J. Lotman’s article “On semiosphere” was published, this concept has been moving from one terminological field to another. In the disciplinary terminological field of the Tartu–Moscow School semiotics of culture, ‘semiosphere’ is connected with terms ‘language — secondary modelling system — text — culture’. From interdisciplinary terminological fields, the associations either with biosphere and noosphere, or with logosphere, are more important. As a metadisciplinary concept, semiosphere belongs to the methodology of culture studies and is associated with (...) the concepts of holism and the part and the whole. In this context, semiosphere marks the complementarity of disciplines studying culture, the movement towards the creation of general culture studies and “understanding methodology”. On the background of the contemporary trends of science it has to be remembered that semiosphere is simultaneously an object- and a metaconcept. The dynamism of culture as a research object forces science to search for new description languages but the new description languages in turn influence the cultural dynamics as they offer new possibilities for self-description. Often, however, from a historical perspective, a new description language is nothing but a methodological translation. Thus also the term semiosphere joins together several concepts that are related to semiotics of culture and that have gained new relevance on the background of the culture’s developmental dynamics. The concept of semiosphere brings semiotics of culture again into contact with its history, as it also brings applicational cultural analysis into contact with the history of culture and with the newest phenomena in culture. These contacts determine the place of the semiotics of culture among the sciences studying culture. (shrink)

A response to Touchie’s further response in this journal, at 10 (1998) 193-203, on the philosophy of the linguistics of the normative syllogism.

The present article gives an overview of different approaches on semiotics as science, its objects of investigation, methods and genesis (where, how and when does semiotics begin?). The author does not aim at establishing one prescriptive approach. Quite the opposite, by leaving the question open, the author aspiresto encourage further discussion about the criteria for scientificity, establishing the borders of scientific disciplines, and the productivity of the dialogic (or, rather,polylogic) scientific meta-discourse in science in general and in (...) class='Hi'>semiotics in particular. (shrink)

The interpretation of cultural history in the context of cultural semiotics, especially interpretation of semiotics of cultural history as a semiotics of culture, and semiotics of culture as a semiotics of cultural history, gives us, first, a deeper understanding of the analysability of cultural history and, at the same time, of the importance of history and different aspects of temporality for the semiotics of culture. Second, the history of the semiotics of culture, especially (...) the semiotics of culture of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics, is an organic part of cultural history, while the self-presentation of the school via establishing explicit and implicit contacts with the heritage of Russian theory was already a semiotic activity and an object of the semiotics of cultural history. Third, the main research object of semiotics of culture is the hierarchy of the sign systems of culture and the existent as well as historical correlations between these sign systems. Such conceptualization of the research object of semiotics of culture turns the latter into a semiotics of cultural history. Emphasizing the semiotic aspect of cultural history can support the development of semiotics of culture in two ways. First, semiotics of culture has the potential of conducting more in-depth research of texts as mediators between the audience and the cultural tradition. Second, semiotics of culture as a semiotics of cultural history can be methodologically used for establishing a new theory of culture.Толкование истории культуры в контексте семиотики культуры, а особенно толкование семиотики истории культуры в качестве семиотики культуры и семиотики культуры в качестве семиотики истории культуры приближает нас прежде всего к возможности более глубокого понимания анализируемости истории культуры и в то же время и значения разных аспектов темпоральности для семиотики культуры. Во-вторых, семиотика культуры и особенно семиотика культуры Тартуско-московской школы, составляет естественную часть истории культуры, а самоопределение данной школы через явные и скрытые связи с цензурованной русской теорией является по природе семиотической деятельностью и тем самым объектом исследования семиотики истории культуры. В-третьих, объектом исследования семиотики культуры является иерархия знаковых систем культуры и как актуальная, так и историческая корреляция между данными знаковыми системами. Подобная концептуализация объекта исследования превращает семиотику культуры одновременно в семиотику истории культуры. Актуализация семиотического аспекта истории культуры поддерживает развитие семиотики культуры в двух направлениях. С одной стороны, поддерживаются предпосылки семиотики культуры для более глубокого анализа текстов как посредников между аудиторией и культурной традицией. С другой стороны, семиотика культуры как семиотика истории культуры содействует методологически созданию новой теории культуры.Kultuuriloo tolgendamine kultuurisemiootika kontekstis, eriti kultuuriloo semiootika tolgendamine kultuurisemiootikana ja kultuurisemiootika tolgendamine kultuuriloo semiootikana, annab meile koigepealt voimaluse sugavamalt moista kultuuriloo analuusitavust ja uhtlasi ajaloo ja temporaalsuse eri aspektide tahtsust kultuurisemiootikale. Teiseks moodustab kultuurisemiootika ja eriti Tartu-Moskva koolkonna kultuurisemiootika kultuuriloo orgaanilise osa ning selle koolkonna enesemaaratlus nahtavate ja peidetud seoste kaudu tsenseeritud Vene teooriaga on loomuldasa semiootiline tegevus ja kultuuriloo semiootika uurimisobjekt. Kolmandaks, kultuurisemiootika uurimisobjektiks on kultuuriliste margisusteemide hierarhia ning tanapaevane ja ajalooline korrelatsioon nende margisusteemide vahel. Selline uurimisobjekti kontseptualiseerimise viis kultuurisemiootikas teeb sellest uhtlasi kultuuriloo semiootika. Kultuuriloo semiootilise aspekti esiletoomine toetab kultuurisemiootika kaht arengusuunda. Koigepealt saab paremini avalduda kultuurisemiootika eeldus tekstide kui auditooriumi ja kultuuritraditsiooni vahendajate sugavamaks analuusiks. Teiseks saab kultuurisemiootika kui kultuuriloo semiootika metodoloogiliselt kaasa aidata uue kultuuriteooria loomisele. (shrink)

The two interviews with Boris Uspenskij on history and the contemporary state of linguistics and semiotics discuss the necessity to elaborate a common terminology in semiotics, at the same time speaking about perspectives for interdisciplinary research, various research models, and the possibilities to produce proof in the humanities. Commenting upon some of his own works, in particular on Ego loquens, Boris Uspenskij reflects upon the crucial events of his academic life and on contacts with his colleagues, emphasizing the (...) importance of friendship with Roman Jakobson and Juri Lotman.Высказывая свое мнение об истории и современном состоянии лингвистики и семиотики, в двух интервью Борис Успенский рассуждает о необходимости разработки общей рабочей терминологии для специалистов по семиотике, в то же время говоря о перспективах междисциплинарных исследований, о существовании разных исследовательских моделей и о принципиальных возможностях доказательств теорий в гуманитарных науках. Возвращаясь к уже написанным своим работам – в частности, к книге Ego loquens, – Борис Успенский комментирует ряд важных событий своей акаде мической биографии и делится воспоминаниями о встречах и контактах с коллегами, особенно подчеркивая значимость дружбы с Романом Якобсоном и Юрием Лотманом.Labi kahe intervjuu esitab Boriss Uspenski oma vaateid semiootika ja lingvistika ajaloole ja praegusele seisule. Ta rohutab vajadust uhtse semiootikaterminoloogia jarele ning koneleb interdistsiplinaarsete uuringute perspektiividest, erinevatest mudelitest ja toestamisvoimalustest humanitaarteadustes. Kommenteerides oma toid, pohjalikumalt eelkoige raamatut Ego loquens, kirjeldab ta uhtlasi olulisi sundmusi oma teadlaselus ning raagib kontaktidest Louis Hjelmslev’, Roman Jakobsoni ja Juri Lotmaniga. (shrink)

This special issue on the semiotics of perception originates from two workshops arranged in Tartu, Estonia, in February 2009. We are located at the junction of nature and culture, and of semiotics and phenomenology. Can they be reconciled? More particularly, can subfields such as biosemiotics and ecophenomenology be mutually enriching? The authors of the current special issue believe that they can. Semiotic study of life and the living can emerge as properly informed only if it is capable of (...) incorporating observations made in natural science, philosophy and cultural studies. The semiotic study of nature entails an experiential turn in the study of life processes. Perception is—or should be—at the heart of the life sciences. (shrink)

The metaphor of parasites or parasitism has dominated literary critical discourse since the 1970s, prominent examples being Michel Serres in France and J. Hillis Miller in America. In their writings the relationship between text and paratext, literature and criticism, is often likened to that between host and parasite, and can be therefore deconstructed. Their writings, along with those by Derrida, Barthes, and Thom, seem to be suggesting the possibility of a semiotics of parasitism. Unfortunately, none of these writers has (...) drawn enough on the biological foundation of parasitism. Curiously, even in biology, parasitism is already a metaphor through which the signified of an ecological phenomenon involving two organisms is expressed by the signifier of “[eating] food at another’s [side] table”. This paper will make some preliminary remarks on semiotics of parasitism, based on the notions of Umwelt (Jakob von Uexküll) and structural coupling (Maturana and Varela). It will look into the phenomenon of co-evolutionary process in community ecology. With reference to empirical history, the project will briefly surveythe literary and medical praxis of the 17th century England where large number of creative writings referred to the phenomenon of parasitism, which was deeply embedded in religious practice (e.g., the Eucharist) and political life (e.g., the courtier ecology in monarchy) of the times. Finally, it will touch upon the possible ‘parasitic’ relationship between language and biology. (shrink)

This paper argues that garbage is no longer the site of contempt and fear and has become an object of profound theoretical investigation. The paper reviews some of the salient points in the growing body of theory about garbage and shows that if one thing has come out of this scholarship, it is that waste is both productive and dangerous, spent but agential, rejected but inescapable, and the intensity of disruptions of order potential in waste are immense. I show that (...) two very different poems – one entitled “Above the Water, Under the Water” by South Korean poet Choi Sung-ho, the other entitled “Garbage” by American poet A.R. Ammons –reveal in very different ways both the agentic capacity of garbage and the ascension of garbage to a semiotics of the sublime in the twentieth century, East and West. (shrink)

The paper is devoted on the foundations of semiotics. It examines the specific features of Peircean and Saussurean traditions and demonstrates that the basis of all the differences is the different conception of the nature of sign: Peirce proceeds from the substitutive concept, Saussure from the bilateral one. The substitutive construction is atomistic by its nature: it is based on a (single) sign which replaces a (single) object, while bilateral is holistic: it is based on the sign system which (...) is divided into (single) signs. The differences of semiosis in atomistic and holistic approach will be pointed out. (shrink)

The article explores the reception of Boris Uspenskij’s writings and ideas outside of the Soviet Union, primarily in Western European and North American academic contexts. The present brief overview of Uspenskij’s academic reception covers the translations of his best-known scholarly works [first and foremost “Historia sub specie semioticae” and “Istoriya i semiotika ”] into English, French, Spanish, German and other European languages, as well as various references to Uspenskij’s ideas on what nowadays would be categorized as ‘semiotics of history’, (...) or thoughts at least in some way related to the ‘cultural-semiotic approach to history’ of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics.В статье рассматривается рецепция научных идей Бориса Андреевича Успенского за пределами Советского Союза, главным образом в западноевропейском и северо-американском академических кругах. Данный обзор академических рецепций работ Успенского охватывает переводы его наиболее известных историко-теоретических трудов [в первую очередь «Historia sub specie semioticae» и «История и семиотика »] на английский, французский, испанский, немецкий и другие европейские языки. Обзор также включает рассмотрение различных «западных» ссылок и отзывов на идеи Б.А. Успенского, относящиеся к «семиотике истории» и рассуждения связанные с «культурно-семиотическим подходом к истории» практикуемым Тартуско-московской школой семиотики.Artiklis vaadeldakse Boris Uspenski kirjutiste ja ideede retseptsiooni valjaspool Noukogude Liitu, eelkoige Laane-Euroopa ja Pohja-Ameerika akadeemilises kontekstis. Kaesolev luhike ulevaade Uspenski sellisest akadeemilisest retseptsioonist katab tuntuimate teadustoode [eelkoige “Historia sub specie semioticae” ning “Ajalugu ja semiootika ”] tolkeid inglise, prantsuse, hispaania, saksa ja teistesse Euroopa keeltesse ning mitmesuguseid viitamisi Uspenski ideedele valdkonnas, mida tanapaeval kategoriseeritakse ‘ajaloosemiootikaks’, voi motetele, mis on vahemalt mingil moel seotud Tartu-Moskva semiootikakoolkonna “kultuurisemiootilise lahenemisega” ajaloole. (shrink)

The introductory article proposes to offer a general frame for the special issue, discussing the emergence of semiotics of history as a new discipline or approach in the humanities. It presents an overview on the attempts of joining the history and semiotics in the Western world since the early 1980s, with a special focus on the United States, and examines the contribution of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics to the semiotic study of history, paying the main attention (...) to the work of Juri Lotman and Boris Uspenskij. Finally, a survey of the articles that make up the special issue dedicated to the 80th anniversary of Boris Uspenskij is presented.Вступительная статья определяет ключевые темы всего спецвыпуска: в ней обсуждается появление семиотики истории как новой дисциплины или подхода в гуманитарных науках. В статье предлагается обзор попыток объединения истории и семиотики, предпринимавшихся западными учеными с начала 1980-х годов. Далее рассматривается вклад представителей Тартуско-московской школы в исследование истории sub specie semioticae. В заключении представлены аннотации статей, составивших настоящий том, посвященный 80-летию Б. А. Успенского.Sissejuhatav artikkel pakub erinumbrile uldise raami, arutledes ajaloosemiootika kui uue distsipliini voi lahenemise esiletousu ule humanitaarteadustes. Artikkel teeb ulevaate ajaloo ja semiootika uhendamiskatsetest laanemaailmas 1980. aastate algusest alates, fookusega Ameerika Uhendriikidel. Seejarel kasitletakse Tartu-Moskva semiootikakoolkona panust ajaloo semiootilisse uurimise, poorates pohitahelepanu Juri Lotmani ja Boriss Uspenski toodele. Lopetuseks on esitatud kokkuvote artiklitest, mis moodustavad selle Boriss Uspenski 80. sunniaastapaevale puhendatud erinumbri. (shrink)

Ethical problems connected with biological and medical discoveries in genetic engineering, neurobiology and pharmaceutical research, reach a unified and critical point of view in bioethics as a specific discipline. But even before reaching this stage, ethical problems already belong to two totalities: the semiobiosphere. and the current social form of global communication. Coherently with its philosophical orientation, bioethics must necessarily keep accountof this double contextualisation. The semiobiosphere is the object of study of global semiotics or the semiotics of (...) life. Global semiotics is of particular interest to bioethics not only because of the broad context it provides for the problems treated by bioethics, but also because it provides bioethics with an adequate contextualisation both in terms of extension, of quantity, as well as of quality. From this point of view, "contextualisation" also means critical reformulation. We are now alluding to the need of viewing bioethical problems in the light of today's socio-economic context, that is, in the context of global communication-production. These contextualisations are closely related from the viewpoint of ethics. Semiotics as global semiotics or semiotics of life must accept the responsibility of denouncing incongruencies in the global system, any threats to life over the entire planet inherent in this system. (shrink)

The article views the development of the Tartu–Moscow semiotic school from the analysis of texts to the study of spatial entities (semiosphere being most well known of them). It comes to light that ‘culture’ and ‘space’ have been such notions in Tartu–Moscow School to which, for instance, the ‘semiosphere’ does not add much. There are studied possibilities to join Uexküll’s and Lotman’s basic concepts (as certain grounds of Estonian semiotics) with Tartu–Moscow School’s treatment of culture and space through the (...) notion of ‘semiotic subject’. Such an approach allows to see transdisciplinarity, which has come to issue only during the last decade, already in the first conceptions of Tartu–Moscow School where transdisciplinarity revealed itself in the symbiotic use of ‘culture’ and ‘space’. (shrink)