Semiotics inside-out and/or outside-in: How to understand everything and (with luck) influence people (original) (raw)
Related papers
for Semiotic Studies (IASS/AIS) The Phenomenological Road to Cognitive Semiotics
Like M. Jordan, who discovered in his old age that he had always been talking prose, I realized a few years ago that I have been doing cognitive semiotics my whole life. In my 1978 dissertation I argued for an «integral linguistics», meaning both that linguistic theory should be conceived within a wider semiotic framework, and that we should abandon the «autonomy postulate», according to which theoretical models must be independent of empirical findings, which dominated both linguistics and semiotics at the time. When you build theory with the help of a phenomenological method, there is a much shorter distance between theory and experience, because phenomenology is empirical attention to consciousness. Much later I became acquainted with Paul Bouissac's description of semiotics as «meta-analysis», which «consists in reading through a large number of specialised scientific publications/…/ in one or several domains of inquiry, and of relating the partial results within a more encompassing model». Cognitive science is for the most part also a kind of meta-analysis. Nevertheless, semiotics has interest in adopting the practice of cognitive science that consists in submitting its own questions to empirical study. The essential difference between cognitive science and semiotics, however, resides elsewhere, in the point of view taken in the construction of the encompassing model. In semiotics, the point of view that determines the construction of the model is meaning in the widest sense of the term. In cognitive science it is cognition, but in a sense itself redefined by the approach, first, during the reign of the computer metaphor, as everything in the mind which may be simulated on a computer, and then, with the later brain model, as everything which can be detected as occurring in the brain. Semiotics, on the other hand, has generated its own reductionist models from within, most notoriously those of Saussure and Peirce. To avoid reductionism, it will be argued, Husserlean phenomenology, rather than the Peircean brand, is a more suitable method to employ in the study of meaning.
The American Journal of Semiotics 35(1-2), 2019
The recent emergence of cognitive semiotics as an international research nexus, or community of inquiry, spanned the course of two decades, from the mid-1990s through the mid-2010s, becoming well established during the past five to ten years through the launch of an international journal in 2007 (Cognitive Semiotics: with De Gruyter since 2014), the founding of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics (IACS) in 2013, and the association’s launch of a biennial conference series in 2014. The first IACS conference was hosted by the Centre for Cognitive Semiotics at Lund University, Sweden. Since then, the association has held two additional conferences: IACS2-2016 in Lublin, Poland, and IACS3-2018 in Toronto, Canada. In celebration of the association’s first gathering in the Americas, and in solidarity with the movement itself, this thematic double issue of The American Journal of Semiotics is devoted to cognitive semiotics. Before introducing the papers and their relevance further, then, it will be helpful to offer those who happen to be unfamiliar with cognitive semiotics a better orientation to the movement and its purpose. [from the Introduction. Note pdf includes Covers, TOC, and Introduction only]
Semiotica. Vol. 190. Pp. 285-293. , 2012
The third edition of the now classic and basic reference work for semiotic research, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics (published by Mouton de Gruyter), first edited by the world-renowned semiotician, Thomas A. Sebeok in 1986 and revised by him in 1994 has undergone a significant revamping by University of Toronto scholar and Editor-in-Chief of Semiotica, Marcel Danesi. Newly published in 2010, this basic research tool for semiotics remains the quintessential reference work for every scholar in this field. It would be hard to imagine that any researcher would be able to engage in meaningful scholarship without it.
Epistemological discussion on the current status of semiotics in its institutionalization process
DEGRES-REVUE DE SYNTHESE A ORIENTATION SEMIOLOGIQUE, 2024
It is fascinating to observe the evolution of semiotics, which was once considered a passing trend but has now matured into a multifaceted discipline with significant interactions across various fields. The fact that semiotics, focusing on interpreting all types of signs and elucidating their production processes and underlying motivations, has reached this stage is not surprising. Semiotics, which initially interacted with literary studies to develop itself, test its limits, and put forward a systematic and reliable analytical reasoning model, today interacts with various fields of science. Due to this characteristic, semiotics is an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and even a meta-disciplinary domain or an intermediary sphere. However, despite the passage of decades, it is evident that there is still no clear definition of what semiotics is. Therefore, there will be no clear idea about what semiotics is not when it is not known what it is. This quite confusing dialectic has been in existence for a long time. Whether this situation regarding the definition of semiotics is a unique qualitative feature of semiotics or a blurring of ideas caused by different types of views is debatable. This situation of semiotics has the potential to be the subject of discussion in many more studies in different contexts. In the first part of this study, a discussion on the identity of semiotics will be made. The discussion will elucidate whether semiotics is amid an identity crisis and its reasons. In the second part, the interaction of semiotics with other knowledge domains, the role of this interaction in determining its boundaries will be discussed in the context of some descriptive features used for it, and an evaluation will be made on the general situation that emerged in the conclusion.
The Phenomenological Road to Cognitive Semiotics
Like M. Jordan, who discovered in his old age that he had always been talking prose, I realized a few years ago that I have been doing cognitive semiotics my whole life. In my 1978 dissertation I argued for an «integral linguistics», meaning both that linguistic theory should be conceived within a wider semiotic framework, and that we should abandon the «autonomy postulate», according to which theoretical models must be independent of empirical findings, which dominated both linguistics and semiotics at the time. When you build theory with the help of a phenomenological method, there is a much shorter distance between theory and experience, because phenomenology is empirical attention to consciousness. Much later I became acquainted with Paul Bouissac's description of semiotics as «meta-analysis», which «consists in reading through a large number of specialised scientific publications/…/ in one or several domains of inquiry, and of relating the partial results within a more encompassing model». Cognitive science is for the most part also a kind of meta-analysis. Nevertheless, semiotics has interest in adopting the practice of cognitive science that consists in submitting its own questions to empirical study. The essential difference between cognitive science and semiotics, however, resides elsewhere, in the point of view taken in the construction of the encompassing model. In semiotics, the point of view that determines the construction of the model is meaning in the widest sense of the term. In cognitive science it is cognition, but in a sense itself redefined by the approach, first, during the reign of the computer metaphor, as everything in the mind which may be simulated on a computer, and then, with the later brain model, as everything which can be detected as occurring in the brain. Semiotics, on the other hand, has generated its own reductionist models from within, most notoriously those of Saussure and Peirce. To avoid reductionism, it will be argued, Husserlean phenomenology, rather than the Peircean brand, is a more suitable method to employ in the study of meaning.
SEMIOTIC AS COGNITIVE SCIENCE 1
Cruzeiro Semiotico , 1996
This is an early attempt to understand how much cognitive science and semiotics have—or should have—in common. I had heard remarks occasionally (starting in the 80's) about how cognitive science should take semiotics more seriously, and I had even heard Thomas Sebeok reprove cognitive scientists for staking a claim to part of the territory of semiotics and then having the effrontery to call it by a different name. My initial conception of cognitive science was tied closely to my conception of artificial intelligence in the late 70's, and that did not remind me much of semiotics. The main concern of AI, in those days, was the rough internal architecture of artificial intellects—that is, of computer programs theoretically capable of driving instantiating hardware to perform intelligent activity. But I came to regard Sebeok's view as more or less on track and I believe it has become quite clear, as we near the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, that there is much overlap between the research fields of cognitive science and semiotics. This paper, written in 1992, was a preliminary exploration of this overlap.
Cognitive Semiotics: An Overview, pp. 1-20
Mind and Matter - Challenges and Opportunities in Cognitive Semiotics and Aesthetics, 2022
This chapter revises evolving theories on cognition in relation to semiotics, the transdisciplinary study and doctrine of sign systems, and meaning-making. Cognition entails very complex networks of biological processes and actions that encompass perception, attention, manipulation of objects, memory mechanisms, and the formation of knowledge by means of direct experience as well as by learning from others, for which forms of communication and comprehension are also necessary. In view of this complexity, many different disciplines are involved in the study of cognition. These include neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, semiotics, linguistics, and more recently, computational intelligence, information processing, and neural networks used in machine learning, to name but a few. The chapter opens with an introduction to the field of cognitive semiotics and continues with a brief presentation of the interdisciplinary evolution of the 4Es. It also includes an in-depth discussion of Peircean semiotics in relation to the approaches known as wide cognition.