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.

Semiotic interpretations of biological mimicry

Abstract: This article presents different semiotic perspectives on biological mimicry, which is considered to be a communicative system consisting of a mimic, a model, and a signal-receiver Proceeding from the writings of Thomas A Sebeok, the activity of the mimic and the relationship between mimicry and iconicity are analyzed From the signal-receiver's perspective, mimicry is described as a probable mistake in recognition and it is characterized by the notion of ambivalent sign Ambivalent sign is a stable sign structure fluctuating between one and two signs On the basis of Jakob von Uexkiill's works, mimicry resemblance is described as taking place in animal Umwelten From this semiotic viewpoint, various examples of abstract resemblance in nature are regarded as 'resemblance with meaning' and an alternative explanation to the concept of abstract mimicry is presented

The Natural History of Intentionality. A Biosemiotic Approach

Abstract: Our lives cannot but implant the knowledge in our souls that the mind is one thing and the world is another. Out of this separation arises the problem of intentionality, that our minds necesarily occupy themselves with things in the world, or that mind processes are always “about” something. In the scholastic tradition from Thomas Aquinas this “aboutness” is still seen as an immaterial or intentional direct union between the knower and the known. To know about things, e.g. a storm or a flower, implies that these things exist in the mind of the knower as intentional beings, and the nature of this kind of being is that of a relation or interface. This understanding is radically different from the cognitive theories that came to dominate in the course of the scientific revolution. According to Descartes the exterior world is grasped through the mechanical work of the senses, which then required some intermediate entity, a concept or an idea, to stand between the outside world (reality) and the mind. Henceforward the mind lost its direct access to the world, and logically enough this line of thought ended up in the conception that we can never understand the world as it is in itself. The idea of intentional being was taken up once again by Franz Brentano in 1874, who claimed that “Mental phenomena … are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves”. To Brentano – and the phenomenological tradition he thus initiated – mind should be seen as real, irreducibly intentional, and inexplicable naturalistically. Philosphers of the analytic tradition rejected this whole notion claiming that whatever is real is nonintentional and explicable naturalistically. Unnoticed by most thinkers a third position was suggested by Charles Peirce, who agreed with Brentano that mind is real and irreducibly intentional but in the same time maintained, contra Brentano, that mind is explicable naturalistically. This chapter takes the semiotic realism of Charles Peirce as a starting point and discusses a biosemiotic approach to the problem of intentionality. Intentionality is seen as implicit to semiosis (sign processes) and semiosis and life is seen as co-existant. The needs of all living beings for expressing a degree of anticipatory capacity is seen as an evolutionary lever for the development of species with increased semiotic freedom. Human intentionlity is not therefore unique in the world but must be understood as a peculiar and highly sophisticated instantiation of a general semiotics of nature. Biosemiotics offers a way to explicate intentionality naturalistically.

Multimodality and translation

Abstract: For a long time, the translation of languages was the only centre of interest in diachronic as well as in synchronic translation studies. Only the linguistic dimension was discussed – irrespective of the text type – so that translation studies could be described as a monomodal discipline. Those texts that existed in combination with other sign systems, such as films, children’s books, operas, comics, were largely neglected, left to other disciplines or analysed by excluding the non-linguistic text constituents. The concentration on one single modality also characterized the theoretical, methodical and analytical equipment of this discipline, the main aim of which was to explore the basic conditions, principles and methods of language transfer. For this purpose, mainly tools from linguistics and literary criticism were used. No reason was found to develop different analysing instruments for other modes.1

A semiotic theory of institutionalization

Abstract: In management theory scholars emphasize that what actors do is often not what they say, but they tend to assume that what actors do is what they mean or that what they mean is what they say. These assumptions are problematic when studying the institutionalization process, where doing, saying, and meaning move from the micro level to the macro level. I argue that the three are distinct correlates of social reality corresponding to the semiotic triangle composed of referent, signifier, and signified, which is key to understanding institutionalization. I combine the semiotic triangle and the chain of signification to conceptualize the process of institutionalization as the coevolution of the three correlates of the sign. Specifically, I identify two kinds of institutionalization: denotational and connotational. Whereas denotational institutionalization entails the coupling of the referent, signifier, and signified, connotational institutionalization involves decoupling among the three. Furthermore, decouplin...

A semiotically oriented cognitive model of knowledge representation

Abstract: This thesis introduces a model for knowledge representation as a sign recognition process, on the basis of an analysis of the properties of cognitive activity. By offering a logical account of this model, the existence of a `naive' logic underlying human information processing is revealed, which in turn opens the way towards a Peircean semiotic characterization of the cognitive model. `Naive' logic is a procedure generating relations between collections of qualia, in the sense of agreement, possibility, and (relative) difference. It is suggested that those relations have common meaning aspects shared with Boolean relations on two variables. The close relationship between the process model of cognitive activity on the one hand, and the Peircean signs on the other enables the cognitive model to be interpreted as a meaningful process, and the Peircean classification of signs as a process, generating meaning aspects or parameters of (meaningful) interpretation. In conformity with the fundamental nature of cognitive activity, it is suggested that the process model of cognitive activity may be uniformly applied for modeling different knowledge domains. This hypothesis is tested for the domain of `naive' logical, syntactic, semantic syntactic, reasoning and mathematical symbols. Each of these models consists in a specification of a recognition process (parser) and a definition of combinatory properties of primary entities (lexicon). An advantage of the proposed theory is that adjustments of the model of a domain, for example, in order to cope with new phenomena, may only require an adjustment of the lexicon, not the parser, which can be invariantly used. An advantage of uniform knowledge representation is that it may reduce the hard problem of merging complex signs obtained in different domains to the more simple task of structural coordination. Such a representation is used in this thesis for the definition of a technique for text summarization.