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Sign (semiotics)

About: Sign (semiotics) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4080 publications have been published within this topic receiving 70333 citations. The topic is also known as: semiotic sign.


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05 Jan 2010
TL;DR: Semiotics is associated with a capacity for listening, which is also the condition for reconnecting to and recovering the ancient vocation of semiotics as that branch of medical science relating to the interpretation of signs or symptoms as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Language is the species-specific human version of the animal system of communication. In contrast to non-human animals, language enables humans to invent a plurality of possible worlds; reflect upon signs; be responsible for our actions; gain conscious awareness of our inevitable mutual involvement in the network of life on this planet; and be responsibly involved in the destiny of the planet. The author looks at semiotics, the study of signs, symbols, and communication as developing sequentially rather than successively, more synchronically than diachronically. She discusses the contemporary phenomenon that people in today's society have witnessed and participated in, as part of the development of semiotics. Although there is a long history preceding semiotics, in a sense the field is, as a phenomenon, more 'of our time' than of any time past. Its leading figures, whom Petrilli examines, belong to the twentieth and twenty-first century. Semiotics is associated with a capacity for listening. This capacity is also the condition for reconnecting to and recovering the ancient vocation of semiotics as that branch of medical science relating to the interpretation of signs or symptoms. The pragmatic aspect of global semiotics studies the impact of language or signs on those who use them, and looks for consequences in actual practice. In this respect, Petrilli theorizes that the task for semiotics in the era of globalization is nothing less than to take responsibility for life in its totality.

26 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, it is shown that organic information and organic meaning are brought into existence by the molecular processes of copying and coding, which implies that, far from being metaphors, they are as real as the processes that produce them.
Abstract: Genes and proteins are molecular artifacts because they are manufactured by molecular machines that physically stick their subunits together in the order provided by external templates. This implies that all biological objects are artifacts, and therefore that 'life is artifact-making.' Natural objects can be completely accounted for by physical quantities, whereas artifacts require additional entities like sequences and codes, or equivalent entities like information and meaning. Here it is shown that organic information and organic meaning are brought into existence by the molecular processes of copying and coding, which implies that, far from being metaphors, they are as real as the processes that produce them. It is also shown that they can be defined by operative procedures that make them as objective and reproducible as physical quantities. The result is that organic information and organic meaning are a new type of fundamental natural entities that here are referred to as nominable entities because they can be specified only by naming their components in their natural order. Any organic code is a correspondence between the objects of two independent worlds (genes and proteins) which is established by molecules that belong to a third world (RNAs). The elementary act of organic coding is therefore a relationship between three objects that can be referred to as 'sign, meaning, and adaptor,' whereas the elementary act of cultural semiosis consists, according to Peirce, of 'sign, meaning, and interpretant.' It is underlined that 'organic semiosis' is implemented by codemakers and consists of objective organic reactions, whereas mental semiosis' is performed by interpreters and is a subjective process. This means that organic semiosis does not require the existence of a mind at the molecular level, and the organic codes are natural processes that are based on objective, reproducible, and fundamental natural entities.

26 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The first attempt to provide a systematic summary of the new concept of cultural technique was made by as mentioned in this paper, who presented an extended checklist aimed at overcoming the textualist bias of traditional cultural theory by highlighting what is elided by this bias.
Abstract: Originally published in 2003, this article presents one of the first attempts to provide a systematic summary of the new concept of cultural technique. It is, in essence, an extended checklist aimed at overcoming the textualist bias of traditional cultural theory by highlighting what is elided by this bias. On the one hand, to speak of cultural techniques redirects our attention to material and physical practices that all too often assume the shape of inconspicuous quotidian practices resistant to accustomed investigations of meaning. On the other hand, cultural techniques also comprise sign systems such as musical notation or arithmetical formulas located outside the domain of the hegemony of alphabetical literacy. The rise of the latter in particular is indebted to the impact of the digital – both as a domain of technology and a source of theoretical reorientation. Together, these aspects require a paradigmatic change that challenges and supersedes the traditional ‘discursivism’ of cultural theory.

26 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors make a distinction between icon/index/symbol and pictorial and structural similarities between objects and signs, and use the term "signi fication" instead of "representation" or "reference".
Abstract: Charles Peirce made a well-known dis tinction between icons, indices and symbols. These are three kinds of signification-spe cifically, three kinds of relationship between a sign and its object. I use the term 'signi fication' instead of terms more familiar in analytic philosophy of language such as 'representation' or 'reference' in an attempt to loosen an apparent near-exclusive hold of the spoken and written word on many phi losophers' thinking about meaning, which is relevant to our topic. The icon/index/symbol distinction has already been much investi gated by Peirce scholars,1 but a brief summary will be helpful. Icons signify objects by resembling them.2 For example, a map of Australia signifies the continent of Australia by being of the same shape (however roughly). One of Peirce's definitions of the icon states that its parts should be related in the same way that the objects represented by those parts are them selves related.3 One might call this form of resemblance "structural resemblance," and the perspicuous representation of relations via structural resemblance is one of the icon's greatest strengths. There are obvious links here to the early Wittgenstein's "Pic ture Theory of Meaning," with the caveat that one may distinguish between structural and properly pictorial resemblance insofar as there are structural mappings which are not good pictures. As Peirce notes, "Many diagrams resemble their objects not at all in looks; it is only in respect to the relations of their parts that their likeness consists."4 The famous London Tube Map does not exactly represent the paths of its train-lines-it has been regularized, and is a more effective icon for that. On the other hand every pictorial resemblance is a structural resemblance, so structural is a generalization of pictorial re semblance. Of course the Tractatus is gnomic enough about meaning to leave it open that structural rather than pictorial resemblance is what Wittgenstein meant too. Is all iconic resemblance structural re semblance? This claim is too strong; there might also be "simple icons." For instance, a particular color might be used to signify a girl who is wearing a dress of that color, or whose personality arguably possesses some shared qualities (for example 'sunniness,' or 'intensity'). Such cases, as well as structural resemblance, are covered by what is arguably Peirce's most general definition of iconicity, which will be used here: "An icon is a sign fit to be used as such because it possesses the quality signified."5

26 citations

Dissertation
30 Mar 2003
TL;DR: Matatu culture is the combined range of activities and symbolic acts, verbal or written, either deployed upon the vehicle or embodied by matatu workers and passengers in their interaction upon the material culture object known as matatu.
Abstract: Matatu 1 Culture: Nairobi's Three Dimensional Space Our every day lives can also be seen as stories, as narratives, in which we act out our lives and construct our identities. (Berger 1995:165) 1.0 Elements of the matatu culture matrix. In this introductory chapter, I seek to map generally the issues that lie at the core of this study, indicate the perspectives from which the study has approached its subject as well as highlight key questions that have been addressed in subsequent chapters. An appropriate beginning point then is to explain the term "matatu culture." 1.1 Definition of terms. Matatu culture is the combined range of activities and symbolic acts, verbal or written, either deployed upon the vehicle or embodied by matatu workers and passengers in their interaction upon the space constituted around the material culture object known as matatu. Its worldview is governed chiefly by the fact that matatu work is a predominantly male youth occupation.2 Music, DVD movies shown in the duration of a trip, stickers, icons of film, music and football stars drawn on the vehicle's exterior surface,3 hip hop fashion, humor, idiom and gestures used by crews and passengers, attitudes towards other road users and disregard for the Highway Code are key ingredients of matatu culture. It is a culture that thrives on the hybridization of semiotic codes as diverse media, languages and attitudes are brought to capture and express experiences and worldviews. After Hebdige, I view culture as any "systems of communication, forms of expression and representation" (1979: 128,161) of which the combined oral, visual, auditory and written items deployed on matatu are examples. Hence, matatu text means crews' quotidian expressive acts and forms manifested through such elements as stickers, dress, language, pictures, gestures and music, variously or in combinatory sets. Even though subcultures generally enact values that differ from those of the mainstream (Bauman 1992: xiv-xvi; Fiske 1992: 25; Dundes 1987:149- 150), as an example of such, matatu culture discourse is ambivalent in the sense that it is also couched within mainstream patriarchal practices and views on crucial issues like gender and (male) control over property. Passenger responses to the culture are part of matatu culture in that they help to circulate its ethos and values within public discourse, with personal experience narratives being a relevant instance of such responses. I use the term sign to refer to any object, action, image or sound that embodies meaning either within itself, outside or in juxtaposition to other objects, images and sounds. As texts, such signs point to other meanings in other texts. An agglomeration of such visual, oral, auditory signs, among others, which might seem disjunctive when taken as a unit because of their disparate media, make up texts just as individual items like sayings, swear words, gestures or designs on the matatu have been treated as texts in themselves. Without doubt, behavior such as pick-pocketing, extorting sexual favors from female passengers whose fare has been stolen on a matatu by a conductor's accomplices or the physical confrontations between crews, passengers or, on the other hand, competing matatu crews lies in the region of criminality. As such, an assessment of matatu work as crime does not lie within the scope of this study; it is only pertinent to the extent that it sheds light on the general transgressive behavior that shapes the subculture's character.

26 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20222
2021178
2020196
2019188
2018186
2017177