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.

The Self as a Sign, the World, and the Other: Living Semiotics

Abstract: Ostentation of the Subject is a practice that is asserting itself ever more in today's world. Consequently, criticism by philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists has been to little effect, considering that they are not immune to such practices themselves. The question of subjectivity concerns the close and the distant, the self and the other, the other from self and the other of self. It is thus connected to the question of the sign. It calls for a semiotic approach because the self is itself a sign; its very own relation with itself is a relation among signs. This book commits to developing a critique of subjectivity in terms of the "material" that the self is made of, that is, the material of signs. Susan Petrilli highlights the scholarship of Charles Peirce, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Mary Boole, Jacques Derrida, Michael Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, Claude Levi-Strauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Charles Morris, Thomas Sebeok, Thomas Szasz, and Victoria Welby. Included are American and European theories and theorists, evidencing the relationships interconnecting American, Italian, French, and German scholarship. Petrilli covers topics from identity issues that are part of semiotic views, to the corporeal self as well as responsibility, reason, and freedom. Her book should be read by philosophers, semioticians, and other social scientists.

Semiotic Scaffolding: A Biosemiotic Link Between Sema and Soma

Abstract: While organic life is the product of myriads of biochemical processes, it usually escapes notice that the chemistry of life cannot be understood exclusively in terms of chemistry. What must be added is an understanding of the particular organized dynamics, which makes the integration of all these processes into real living creatures possible. This dynamics, however, itself is not a part of chemistry, but is evolutionarily tailored to suit a communicative or semiotic (= sign theoretical) logic (Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics. An examination into the signs of life and the life of signs, 2008a; A legacy for living systems: Gregory Bateson as precursor to biosemiotics, pp. 27–44, 2008b). Reframing our biological thinking in terms of semiotics, i.e., biosemiotics, deeply challenges basic ontological intuitions that for centuries have informed our thinking in philosophy as well as science. It is claimed that the taboo against final causation (in science) and the rejection of the possibility to know the “thing in itself” (in phenomenology) are interconnected errors reflecting a general failure to recognize the fundamentally semiotic nature of life and cognition. While Cartesian dualism has often enough been criticized, such criticism has rarely touched upon one of its core elements: the belief that our understanding of the world around us is based on sensory mechanics, a belief that is still widely held by scientists and thinkers of today. Replacing sensory mechanics with sensory semiotics opens hitherto not fully explored ways of integrating life and cognition. Human interaction is embedded in semiotic activity that easily penetrates to processes deep in the body and brain and back again. One of the main structuring and enabling principles in the semiotic dynamics across levels has been called semiotic scaffolding a concept that relates to psychological catalyses in interesting ways to be further explored.

Language Metaphors of Life

Abstract: We discuss the difference between formal and natural languages, and argue that should the language metaphor have any foundation, it’s analogy with natural languages that should be taken into account. We discuss how such operation like reading, writing, sign, interpretation, etc., can be applied in the realm of the living and what can be gained, by such an approach, in order to understand the phenomenon of life.

On Mediation and Material Agency in the Peircean Semeiotic

Abstract: This chapter seeks to advance our understanding of material agency through an interpretive framework fashioned from the semeiotic ideology of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). In doing so, it attempts to move beyond a rote recital of Peirce’s sign types and their lineaments and toward a larger reading of his philosophical outputs, examining potential points of contact between material agency and Peirce’s thinking on semeiotic functioning. Owing to the contours of a creative mind steeped in mathematics and logic, his is a canon marked by heroic theorising, labyrinthine reasoning and runaway terminology. As such, uncharitable interpretations of Peirce’s writing often evoke words such as ‘impenetrable’ or ‘torturous,’ but it is nevertheless a literature that commands our attention, chiefly because of its non-anthropocentric, anti-Cartesian emphasis on semeiotic mediation. In the Peircean framework, semeiosis is neither bound up in language nor contingent on human consciousness, but rather exists as a relative and relational property tethered to particular experiential settings. Where the human subject is implicated, perception, cognition and belief were understood by Peirce to be engendered by a sensory experience of signs. The phenomenological underpinnings of these themes are explored throughout this chapter and illustrated with reference to a case study involving precontact Aboriginal pottery from southwestern Ontario, Canada.

The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640-1770

Abstract: Introduction: 'spring and motive of our actions', disinterest and self-interest 1. 'Acted by another': agency and action in early modern England 2. 'The belief of the people': Thomas Hobbes and the battle over the heroic 3. 'For want of some heedfull Eye': Mr Spectator and the power of spectacle 4. 'For its own sake': virtue and agency in early eighteenth-century England 5. 'Not perform'd at all': managing Garrick's body in eighteenth-century England 6. 'I wrote my heart': Richardson's Clarissa and the tactics of sentiment Epilogue: 'A sign of so noble a passion': the politics of disinterested selves Bibliography.