Doctrine Of Signs Research Articles

On the institutional (dis)organisation of semiotics as a discipline

Semiotics, as the field dealing with the production of meaning-making mechanisms, was supposed to be a holistic project. Semioticians in the 20th century were concerned about providing semiotics an epistemological identity. For instance, semiotics was aimed at following a meta-role (Greimas, 1976) as ‘a metadiscipline of all academic disciplines’ (Posner, 2003, p. 2366). In fact, Sebeok (1976) deemed semiotics as a ‘doctrine of signs’, refusing to call it a science or a theory. Despite this sophisticated terminology, semiotics remained poorly organised in the national academic systems. This lack of organisation in the academic institutions did not allow semiotics to show this allegedly federative role of general knowledge. Instead, semiotics ended up receiving different designations such as ‘esoteric knowledge’, ‘cabalistic language’, ‘formalistic paranoia’, and so forth. This paper delves into the institutional disorganisation of semiotics by addressing two main aspects. Firstly, the lack of interest by early semioticians to accurately organise their field in the institutions, and secondly, how this treatment, as a meta-field, thwarted its aspirations to be considered as a fully-fledged discipline. Thirdly, I engage in a current discussion (Parra, 2020) in semiotics that questions how semiotics has favoured applied approaches to the production of meaning.

“A familiar logical triplet”: on Peirce’s grammar of representation and its relation to scientific inquiry

This essay focuses on Charles S. Peirce’s grammar of representation and its relevance for a logical conception of scientific inquiry. Closely relying on Peirce’s writings, one of his important trichotomies of signs will be discussed in particular: that distinguishing between substitutive signs, or “semes”, informational signs, or “phemes”, and persuasive signs, or “delomes”. According to Peirce, these three categories of signs result from an extension of the traditional division between “terms”, “propositions”, and “arguments” to all signs (not just symbols), understood as the foundational elements with and on which the scientific mind operates. It is shown that such an extended view of logic, conceived as a “semiotic”, or general doctrine of signs, is consistent with Peirce’s metaphysical views on truth and reality. Logic-as-semiotic, and its three corresponding branches of stecheotic, critic, and methodeutic, is thus conceived as a requisite normative trivium for the practice of scientific inquiry, whose purpose is to represent reality truthfully. In the end, we aim to remind that Peirce’s semiotic epistemology must necessarily be contextualized within the frame of his comprehensive philosophy of the scientific “settlement of opinion”.

Peter Lombard’ın “Sentences”ı Üzerine Bir Değerlendirme

Yüzyıllar boyunca Batı Hıristiyan dünyasında teoloji ders kitabı olarak okutulan “Sentences” adlı eserin yazarı Peter Lombard olarak bilinir. İncil’in yanı sıra teolojik açıdan irdelenen eserler arasında daha fazla yorumun konusu olmuştur. Bu eser her ne kadar eski kaynakların bir derlemesi olarak görülse de asıl önemi, teolojik materyalin organizasyonu, sunum yöntemi ve birçok önemli alanda doktrini ele alma biçiminde yatmaktadır. Bu öneme rağmen eserin yazarının yaşamı ve düşüncesine dair herhangi bir giriş ne yazık ki yoktur. Eser Hıristiyanlık geleneğinin nasıl geliştiğini ortaya koyarak başlar ve sonrasında Lombard’ın yaşamını ve çalışmalarını ortaya koyar. Tanrı, üçleme, yaratılış, angeloloji, insan doğası, etik, ayinlerin doğası ve nitelikleri, Hıristiloji de dahil olmak üzere ana konular eserde yorumlanmaya çalışılır. Orta Çağ’daki en önemli teolojik ders kitabı olarak kabul edilen “Sentences”, kilise babalarının ve sonrasında ortaya çıkan yorumcuların bir dizi teolojik konudaki derlemelerinden meydana gelmiştir. Dört kitap halinde ayrıştırıldığında aşağıdaki gibi ifade edilebilir. Teslis inancının gizemi / Yaratılış üzerine / Enkarnasyon üzerine /İşaretler Doktrini (ayinler ve ayinsel işaretler üzerine).

Peirce, Aristotle, metaphor – and comments to Factor

AbstractCharles Peirce provided a few, but interesting we believe, remarks about metaphor. Aristotle on the other hand developed a theory of metaphor that, to this day has been, and still is, influential (even though his theory, especially within recent years, also has been heavily criticized, e.g., by Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980.Metaphors we live by. Chicago: Chicago University Press). Factor, Lance R. 1996. Peirce’s definition of metaphor and its consequences. In Vincent Colapietro & Thomas Olshewsky (eds.),Peirce’s doctrine of signs: Theory, applications, and connections, 229–235. Berlin/New York: Mouton De Gruyter, as one of very few scholars, makes a comparison between Peirce and Aristotle. Factor claims that Peirce’s definition of metaphor and its consequences undermine and overturn Aristotle’s theory. We do not believe that Factor is right; and this is due to Factor’s misinterpretation of key elements within Aristotle’s theory. We rather believe that Peirce and Aristotle, in fact, have central ideas in common concerning metaphor; perhaps, in particular, when it comes to the function of metaphor. Hence, both see, for example, metaphor as a cognitive mechanism. The article tries to develop this argument.

De-Sign as a Destiny of Negation

Boundaries and borders are undefined and ambiguous paradoxical phenomena, but there is a prevalent repudiation of their ephemerality and transitoriness. Crossing unaccustomed boundaries and traversing untried borders can be achieved by understanding the boundless scope of design and semiotics. Since the idea of design and the doctrine of signs are not restricted by either the humanities or sciences, De-sign (fusion of design and signs) is a boundaryless and transdisciplinary perspective that cannot tolerate cultural enclaves, social dogmas, and an insistence on absolute reality. Engaging in the de-sign process is a journey of negation through which human beings can traverse unfamiliar borders while maintaining their familiar boundaries. In negation, we experience paradoxical thinking and cognitive dissonance, which are associated with all antinomies intrinsic to De-sign. These antinomies can be endured by recognizing the audacity of design and the resilient role of signs. Negation goes beyond the perception of rigid borders and the acceptance of absolute boundaries, which frequently incite ethnocentrism and trigger xenophobia. The destiny of negation depends on a sense of wonder, awareness of epistemological fallibilism, and uncommon sense in order to persevere through contradictions between distinctiveness and sameness. Axiologically, where establishing boundaries can maintain identities, traversing borders can never diminish distinctiveness. Paradoxically, by delving into unfamiliar boundaries and crossing over untried borders, we discover ways to transform our own boundaries and reframe our conception of borders. Boundaries are more than barriers; the distances between them are bridges of invisible relations for thrivability and breakthrough insights.

Confidence through the semiotic process

Abstract Peirce’s semiotics is a formal doctrine of signs. As such, semiotics “would be concerned, in part, to determine the conditions for counting anything as true” (Liszka 1996: 2). Sometimes, semiotics is reduced to its first branch, speculative grammar, which concerns the classification of signs. However, critic and methodeutic are fundamental to guarantee the accuracy of the semiotic process. Critic gives “the conditions which determine the reasoning to be secure” (c.1902, CP 2.1) and methodeutic is the “study of the necessary conditions of the transmission of meaning by signs from mind to mind” (c.1897, CP 1.444). When we observe the system of sixty-six sign classes, we can find a method that provides confidence in the reasoning process. That means we can find classes of signs that represent critic and methodeutic in this system. The set of symbolic signs are the core of this process. In this paper, I will examine the interpretants of symbolic signs in order to describe the production of interpretants that increase the level of confidence in reasoning, contributing to the evolution of thought. The system of sixty-six sign classes provides a more complex set of interpretants, which might show the relation between the three branches of semiotics.

Security as Completeness

Peirce’s anti-psychologism hinges on two main assumptions. First, logic and psychology belong to two separate disciplines – respectively, the normative sciences and the experimental sciences. Second, externalism must be understood as a crucial and inescapable epistemological criterion. The introspectionist illusion, according to which individuals have direct and epistemologically flawless access to their own internal states, should be dismissed. As Colapietro (2003) and Calcaterra (2006) observe, Peirce’s standpoint is far different from the Kantian classical account of anti-psychologism. This original take on anti-psychologism leaves room for a functional distinction between logic and psychology, emerging from a semiotic and communicative continuity. This means that psychology, unlike logic as a formal doctrine of signs, will be epistemologically appropriate for dealing with internal psychological states, on the condition that this inquiry be focused on the communicative processes through which these internal states are expressed and conveyed. Such a Peircean account of anti-psychologism forms the epistemological background of this paper. My goal is to show how Peirce’s approach to communication and semiosis can be applied in order to discuss a specific psychological theory, in this case, attachment theory. Specifically, I propose employing Giovanni Maddalena’s Peircean distinction between complete and incomplete gestures (Maddalena 2015) to account for the distinction between secure, dismissing and preoccupied attachment patterns. To this end, I will be discussing three different measurements of attachment: the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI, George, Kaplan & Main 1985), the Adult Attachment Projection (AAP, George & West 2006), and the Patient Attachment Coding System (PACS, Talia, Miller-Bottome & Daniel 2015). Throughout this discussion, I will examine the connection between the semiotic and phenomenological category of completeness, and the psychological category of security. This connection involves an interesting normative import, which I briefly discuss in the conclusions.

Back on the Right Track

Abstract This article reviews the ‘second’ (although first prepared) volume of Deely’s Poinsot trilogy. It argues that postmodern thinking is, according to Deely, back on the right track; whichever guiding light has been used in the past, it is semiotics that gives light to both cenoscopy and ideoscopy. Science in the modern sense must be able to not only measure and record natural events, but also see the action of signs in all these processes: that is, that there is no understanding of the interrelation of the web of life without cenoscopy and the doctrine of signs

John Poinsot Immer Wieder

Abstract This review addresses the noteworthy enterprise accomplished by John Deely on translating and editing the important work by John Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis. I have underlined that his is not only a historiographical contribution, as important as his work may be from this point of view as well. Rather, Deely’s contribution is of a highly theoretical order, concerned as he is to evidence the line of ideal continuity between Poinsot, Locke, and Sebeok. Such continuity consists mainly in a conception of semiotics 1) as a “doctrine of signs”; and 2) as capable of overcoming the pars pro toto fallacy which, in modernity, presents itself in the form of sémiologie. John Deely has dedicated a large part of his research to John Poinsot, producing not only two new editions of his Tractatus, the first published in 1985 and the second in 2013, but also numerous essays and the important trilogy with which he compares Poinsot to St. Augustine, Descartes, and Peirce. The last part of the present text compares Poinsot’s position with Peter of Spain’s, considering conceptual correspondences in both with Peirce’s semiotics.

Synchronicity and Responsibility in Semiotics

Abstract The synchronic vision is the expression of conscious awareness of the present situation, a totalizing vision capable of gazing at all of life responsibly, at all semiosis over the planet. John Deely’s vision of synchrony’s inevitable seepage into diachrony is connected with the fact that we are members of the societies of human animals who first engendered a “community of inquirers focused on the action of signs”. Deely reconstructs the pathway that from Saussurean semiology leads through Charles Peirce, Charles Morris, and Thomas Sebeok to the new “science of signs” conceived, recovering Locke, as the “doctrine of signs”. Insofar as the human animal is a “semiotic animal” he or she is capable of metasemiosis and therefore of knowledge and control. Consequently, the human animal, a semiotic animal, is also susceptible of responsibility: responsibility that concerns not only the human world and the possibility of the future of anthroposemiosis, but rather all of semiosis, all of terrestrial life, “Gaia”. Insisting on the interdependency, in semiotics, between synchronicity and responsibility, Deely evidences the specific task of semiotics, which is a task that is reserved to the semiotician as such.

Hume's (Berkeleyan) Language of Representation

Although Hume appeals to the representational features of perceptions in many arguments in the Treatise , his theory of representation has traditionally been regarded as a weak link in his epistemology. In particular, it has proven difficult to reconcile Hume's use of representation as causal derivation and resemblance (the Copy Principle) with his use of representation in the context of impressions and abstract ideas. This paper offers a unified interpretation of representation in Hume that draws on the resources of Berkeley's doctrine of signs. On this account, while the Copy Principle still occupies the core of Hume's content the manner in which any perception represents is understood as involving a relation of sign to thing signified. A sign/signified interpretation has the virtue of allowing Hume to remain within the strictures of his empiricism, while underwriting the various senses in which an impression or idea could possess content. Such an interpretation is not only adequate to account for the role that mental representations play in everyday behavior, but also for the purposes of elaborating the foundations of civil society that are Hume's concern in Book 3 of the Treatise .

The Reception of Charles S. Peirce in Denmark

1. Setting the Scene Despite of or maybe because of much activity and numerous Danish scholars working with Peircean ideas, concepts, and methodology, there does not exist one single current concerning the reception of Peirce in Denmark. However, it seems safe to assume that the majority of Danish scholars working with Peirce – in one way or the other – initially came and to some degree still come to Peirce with an interest in his doctrine of signs or semeiotic, and then maybe from there, no...

Exploring the impact of interface signs’ interpretation accuracy, design, and evaluation on web usability

Purpose– The purpose of this empirical study was to address two important concerns of Web usability: how user-intuitive interface signs affect Web usability and how applying semiotics (i.e. the doctrine of signs) in user interface (UI) design and evaluation helps to improve usability.Design/methodology/approach– An empirical research approach is followed here to conduct three user tests. These tests were conducted on a Web application with 17 test participants. Data were gathered through laboratory-based think-aloud usability test, questionnaires and interviews. Following an empirical research approach, statistics and user behavior analysis were used to analyze the data.Findings– This study explores two important concerns of UI design and evaluation. First, users’ interpretation accuracy of interface signs impact on Web usability. The study found that users’ interpretation of signs might be accurate, moderate, conflicting, erroneous or incapable; user-intuitive interface signs led participants to interpret signs’ meaning accurately; and users’ inaccurate interpretation of one or a few task-related interface sign(s) led users to usability problems, resulting in participants performing tasks with lower task-completion performance. Second, considering semiotics perception in UI design and evaluation is important to improve Web usability. This study showed that interface signs, when re-designed considering the semiotics guidelines, have increased the end-users’ interpretation accuracy and the interface signs’ intuitiveness. This study also provides a small set of semiotics guidelines for sign design and evaluation.Originality/value– This study empirically demonstrated that signs’ intuitiveness impact on Web usability and that considering the semiotics perception in sign design and evaluation is important to improve Web usability. These outcomes are valuable in a number of ways to HCI researchers and practitioners: the results provide awareness of the importance of user-intuitive interface signs in UI design; practitioners can easily adopt the concept of interpretation accuracy classification to conduct a sign test to obtain an “overall impression of interface signs’ intuitiveness”; practitioners can easily adopt the methodological approach followed in this study to conduct usability test without additional resources; and the results raised important fundamental questions for future research such as “what does a practitioner need to be aware of when designing or evaluating interface signs?”

Reid's Direct Realism and Visible Figure

In his account of visual perception, Thomas Reid describes visible figure as both ‘real and external’ to the eye and as the ‘immediate object of sight’. These claims appear to conflict with Reid’s direct realism, since if the ‘immediate’ object of vision is also its direct object, then sight would be perceptually indirect due to the role of visible figure as a perceptual intermediary. I argue that this apparent threat to Reid’s direct realism may be resolved by understanding visible figure as the set of geometrical properties that holds between an object’s visible surfaces and some particular perspective or point of view. On this relational interpretation of visible figure, and once an ambiguity over the use of the term ‘object’ is resolved, Reid’s account of vision is both epistemically and perceptually direct, as well as consistent with his account of the other senses and doctrine of signs.

Analytic Philosophy and The Doctrine of Signs

Analytic Philosophy and The Doctrine of Signs

Semiotics Seen Synchronically: The View as of 2010

Abstract Semiotics as a general phenomenon of intellectual culture took root in the 20th century. The earliest figure in that enrooting was Charles Peirce (1839-1914), but the foregrounded figure was rather Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), who plotted a narrower course under the label "semiology". It was Thomas Sebeok (1920-2001) who made unmistakable the " pars pro toto" fallacy of Saussure's standpoint, and who cleared the way for the full development of a "doctrine of signs" under the broader label of "semiotics". Thus, as Susan Petrilli pointed out in her Sebeok Fellow Address of 2008, it is "we today who have lived in both the 20th and 21 st century" who "have witnessed and participated in" the original establishment of semiotics as knowledge thematically developed from the consideration of the action consequent upon the being proper to signs. This essay aims to provide a record of the 20th century founding of semiotics, through the interplay of the work of the key players in the drama that unfolded between the birth of Peirce and the death of Sebeok-such diverse thinkers as Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), Roman Jakobson ( 1896-1982), Charles Morris (1901-1979), Feruccio Rossi-Landi (1921-1985 ), Algirdas Greimas ( 1917-1992), Juri Lotman ( 1922-1993 ) , Jeff Bernard (1943-2010), along with a few survivors of the "founding era" who yet remain on the current scene of "unfolding synchronicity" - the "land of the living"-within semiotics. The essay makes clear that semiosis depends upon the being of signs as irreducibly of a triadic relational structure, as Poinsot (1589-1644) seems earliest to have demonstrated, and Peirce independently established as the "model" required fully to develop the doctrine of signs as a " science" presupposed to "science" in the modem, ideoscopic sense. Perhaps most important of all is the discovery that interdisciplinarity, wherever it occurs and to whatever extent it is possible, is a direct consequence of semiosis, and the reason why semiotics provides the only inherently interdisciplinary perspective antidotal to the specializations required for ideoscopic advances in science. How the universities, shaped by modem scientific specializations, will eventually accommodate this "semiotic singularity" remains to be seen.

On ‘semiotics’ as naming the doctrine of signs

This article traces the comparative fortunes of the terms 'semiology' and 'semiotics,' with the associated expressions 'science of signs' and 'doctrine of signs,' from their original appearance in English dictionaries in the 1800s through their adoption in the 1900s as focal points in discussions of signs that flourished after pioneering writings by Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure. The greater popularity of 'semiology' by mid-century was compromised by Thomas Sebeok's seminal proposal of signs at work among all animals, and Umberto Eco's work marked a 'tipping point' where the understanding associated with 'semiotics' came to prevail over the glottocentrism associated with 'semiology'.

Formal conditions for the significance-effect

The significance-effect is the right effect of meaning caused upon an interpreting mind. The right effect is understood as the right interpretation of an intended meaning caused by a sign communicated by an utterer. In the article, which is inspired by Charles S. Peirce's doctrine of signs, his semeiotics and his theory of communication, we account for the formal conditions that have to be present for the release of the significance-effect.

The literal, the metaphorical, and the price of semiotics: An essay on philosophy of language and the doctrine of signs

This article examines the status of human language as constituting one system of signs among others, with a particular aim to establish the sense in which the classical distinction between ‘literal’ and ‘metaphorical’ ought best to be understood in the context of semiotics today.

Dialogism and biosemiotics

The notions of ‘modeling’ and ‘interrelation’ play a pivotal role in Sebeok’s biosemiotics. In dialogue with Thomas A. Sebeok’s doctrine of signs, we propose to inquire into the action of modeling and interrelation in biosemiosis over the planet Earth, developing the concept of interrelation in terms of ‘dialogism’. Indeed, in the light of Sebeok’s biosemiotics we believe that the concept of dialogism may be extended beyond the sphere of anthroposemiosis and applied to all communication processes, which may be described as being grounded not only in the concept of modeling, but also in that of dialogism. And remembering that the concept of dialogue is fundamental in Charles S. Peirce’s thought system, we also propose that the approach we are formulating be viewed as an attempt at developing the Peircean matrix of biosemiotics.