General Semiotics Research Articles

Start making sense. Sociosemiotic contributions to the understanding of Generative Artificial Intelligences

The article delves into the symbiotic relationship between sociosemiotics and AI research, specifically focusing on Generative Artificial Intelligences (GenAI). As GenAI gain traction in verbal and iconic creation, in the context of various cultural and communication theories, sociosemiotics emerges as a key framework for understanding these processes. The article addresses questions such as: How have the relationships between AI research and sociosemiotics evolved? How can sociosemiotics contribute to the understanding of GenAI? If Umberto Eco (1986) distinguished between general semiotics and specific (or applied) semiotics, what would be the main characteristics of a semiotics of Generative AI? In this context, the article’s objectives encompass three dimensions: 1) Tracing the intertwined evolution of sociosemiotics and AI research over 75 years, spotlighting the textual and sociosemiotics contributions; 2) Proposing a series of possible sociosemiotic interventions in the realm of GenAI; and 3) Reflecting on the emergence of an applied semiotics of GenAI. Ultimately, the article encapsulates the intricate interplay between sociosemiotics and GenAI, paving the way for novel insights into AI’s semiotic foundations and its multifaceted implications in contemporary digital creation.

Towards a natural semiotics for centralising ‘out of this world’ images in research with children

This article discusses using concepts from various fields across general semiotics, to centralise children's abstract images in research. The aim is to move towards a natural semiotics – which accommodates the primordial, natural and universal dimensions of experience – that children connote through their ‘out of this world’ images. Natural semiotics is a term used to interrogate typical socio-cultural orientations towards meanings generated through signs. It is an approach to the co-interpretation of children's abstract images that appeals to emerging fields in semiotics and philosophical models which suggest the natural world as carrying intrinsic semantic value. Moving towards a natural semiotics carries potentials for co-interpreting children's ‘out of this world’ signs, in relation to situated and universal systems of meaning. When children cannot narrativise their experiences, symbols and other abstract imagery naturally emerge. A natural semiotics approach can be valuable for trying to figure out meanings behind children's creative, and at times, unknowable-yet-known data.

Is social semiotics a unitary research field? An introductory and comparative mapping of Argentinean, Brazilian, French, Italian and English-speaking semiotic approaches to social meaning-making

In the 1980s, researchers from different academic circles around the world started paying attention to the functioning of the social realm with a focus on signification and sense-making. Since then, they have shown particular interest in studying practices, interactions and spatiality, among other objects of study, as activities that convey social meaning and produce sense. This is how the field of social semiotics emerged within general semiotics. However, the emergence of this new research field occurred in a fragmented manner. Nowadays, English-speaking ‘social semiotics’ coexists with at least two French sociosémiotiques, with Argentinean sociosemiótica, with Italian sociosemiotica and with Brazilian sociossemiótica. This article examines these five accounts of social semiotics in a comparative manner with a focus on the theoretical and methodological references they use as their sources. Therefore, the article should function as an introductory roadmap for researchers within the social and human sciences interested in approaching contemporary social semiotics and sociosemiotic research.

Oblique semiotics: the semiotics of the mirror and specular reflections in Lotman and Eco

AbstractNovelty, the creation of new information, has been the hallmark of Juri M. Lotman’s thought. This issue resurfaces in the discussion of his now famous article “On the semiosphere,” in which Lotman, drawing on Vernadsky, identifies the principles of symmetry, asymmetry, and enantiomorphism as pivotal aspects of the semiotic mechanism of the semiosphere. Specular phenomena and mirror reflections have not only found a prominent place in contemporary semiotic theories of different scholarly traditions – from general semiotics (Eco, Volli) to cognitive semiotics (Sonesson) and to the semiotics of culture (Lotman, Levin) – but they also nail down a key element of the inner mechanism of Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere. By using the analogy of thefacereflecting in amirror, Lotman remarks: “It is also like a face, which, wholly reflected in a mirror, is also reflected in any of its fragments, which, in this form, represents the part and yet remains similar to the whole mirror.” By capitalizing on this excerpt, this study unpacks the significance of Lotman’s idea of specular mechanisms as generators of meaning within the semiosphere.

The structural human and semiotic animal: between pride and humiliation

Abstract The main theme of the article, which by genre falls into the area of semiotically influenced philosophy, is a reflection on the relationship between the human and the non-human, using two partial but parallel discourses. The first discourse is the perspective of general semiotics, which is defined in the article on the basis of two distinct forms of rationality that, in different guises, still intervene in debates about the nature of the humanities and social sciences today. The first form of this rationality is semiological, which can be classified under the encyclopaedic rubric of structuralism, and which has its main source of inspiration in general linguistics and its continuation in philosophical anti-humanism. The second perspective has its origins in Peirce’s logicist theory of the sign and his pragmatist metaphysics, and opens up thinking about the sign, the human, and the non-human to a non-language-centric view of the world. Despite their demonstrable theoretical and methodological incompatibility, the present text treats them as incompatible but largely complementary perspectives. It is in their mutual exposition that one can see the moments in which the view of modern human as a semiological and semiotic animal takes shape. The text brings this fundamental and founding theoretical schism into focus by examining two images from post/modern art: Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence” and Jorge Luis Borges’ “Averroës’s Search.”

In the fold of the manifold: a reflection onBloomsbury Semiotics

AbstractThis is a short overview of the newly published four-volume anthology edited by Jamin Pelkey et al. titledBloomsbury Semiotics, with a critical reflection upon the disciplinary status of general semiotics today. The paper proposes methods and principles for future semiotic research and observes the overall trajectory of semiotics during the age of the business model of university life and the marginalization of the humanities. The paper supports the major position ofBloomsbury Semiotics, which is to conceive of semiotics as the most effective platform for revitalizing the humanities in cooperation with hard science, and the reintegration of Peirce and Saussure as the theoretical bedrock of general semiotics.

Dysphoric reactions and conditions

The article analyzes the existing approaches to the interpretation of the concept of dysphoria. The position of dysphoria in the general semiotics of mental disorders is discussed. Obligatory and eventual signs of dysphoric reactions and conditions are considered.

Paul Cobley’s impact on biosemiotics: Thomas Sebeok’s next century

AbstractWe briefly review the impact of Paul Cobley (born 1963) on biosemiotics and list his works on the topic. These have links to communication studies and integrationism. After Thomas Sebeok, John Deely, and several others, Cobley has been a leader of the general semiotics movement, according to which “semiotics’ project is most fully realized on a biosemiotic basis.”

Научные взгляды Р.О. Якобсона в парадигме текстолингвистики

The semiotic concept of R.O. Jacobson has been studied, the ideas of which are associated with structuralism as a method of cognition, semiotics as the science of sign systems and poetics as the general semiotics of the text. We analyzed the main components of the R.O. Jacobson concept, which based on the linguocultural aspect of textual criticism. His complex and dialogical view of semiotics and the unique features of his research paradigm are summarized. When considering the category “complexity”, attention is drawn to the modeling of the “meaning – text” model in the aspect of bringing the science of language closer to the sciences of the anthropocentric cycle. Consideration of the similarity and contiguity of metaphor and metonymy allowed R.O. Jacobson should consider that any metonymy is endowed with a slight metaphorical shadow, and any metaphor has a metonymic coloring, and highlight a formal method of research, which represents the merging and transformation of two different processes of thinking – humanistic and scientific. The scientist considered linguistic consciousness to be in some way derivative of ethnocultural consciousness. since it clearly reflects the ideas of Eastern and Western people about the world within a separate national-cultural tradition, building its own scientific view, defining the features of the organization of discourse. The category of “dialogicity,” which manifests itself in the process of an individual’s speech-mental activity, realizes the dialectical unity of language and thinking, and therefore, bearing in mind the thought processes occurring in the human mind, it is more correct to speak of dialogicity as a text-generating speech-thinking process.

Funktionskreis and the biosemiotic signifieds: Towards the integration of semiotics

The following is a brief synopsis of the 2021 summer Semiosalong event titled “Funktionskreis and the biosemiotic signifieds”, held at the Karl Ernst von Baer House, Tartu, Estonia, with presentations by the authors of this review. The included talks revolve around the idea of a ‘second major turn in biosemiotics’ following the more ‘Peircean inspired biology’ turn of the last few decades of the 20th century, and reconciling its findings with other theoretical foundations of general semiotics, such as structural semiology. The aesthetic and textual concerns of the latter invite commentary from the biosemiotic perspective.

Computational Analysis Problem of Aesthetic Content in Fine-Art Paintings

The article discusses the possibilities of the formal analysis of the fine-art painting composition on the basis of the classical definitions of beauty and computational aesthetics’ approaches of the second half of the 20th century he authors define the problem and consider solutions for the formalization of aesthetic perception in the context of aesthetic text, i.e., as part of the fine arts composition – a formal sequence of signs simply ordered in accordance with the syntactic rules’ system. The methodology of the research is defined by the general semiotics, distinguishing semantics, syntax, and pragmatics of a sign, by the aesthetic analysis’ methods, ranging according to the author’s message aesthetics, receptive aesthetics, and text aesthetics, as well as by the computational analysis methods connected with neural network means of defining the images’ symmetry. The article reveals preconditions for the emergence and also the current state of computational aesthetics as an interdisciplinary branch of knowledge. Analyzing the problem from the perspective of philosophy, aesthetics, semiotics, and technology, the authors draw attention to the need to improve the computational aesthetics methods. Firstly, the existing methods do not always enable to describe the fine-art object adequately. Secondly, there exists the so-called reduction of aesthetic assertion transforming it into the assertion concerning the object’s external characteristics. As a result, the authors assume that the increasing complexity of the current mathematical models and the experts’ subjective assessment support will allow to reach a compromise solution that enables the development of computational aesthetics as a branch of knowledge. Enhancement and development of the mathematical models, taking into account the rules of semiotics and subjectivism of the human perception, is the relevant objective of computational analysis of the aesthetic fine-arts text. The results of the present research supports the classic statement regarding the underivability of semantic and pragmatic propositions from syntax. The research concludes that relevant objectives are to find a correlation between, one the one hand, the axes and points of symmetry, deriving from the neural simulation, and, on the other hand, aesthetic effect, emerging from the perception of fine-art paintings.

Biosemiotic Aesthetics May Unify General Semiotics

Biosemiotic Aesthetics May Unify General Semiotics

Types of novelty in the semiotics of creativity

The purpose of the article is to identify the main types of novelty from the standpoint of the semiotic theory of creativity. The methodological framework of the research is general semiotics, Friedrich Dessauers theory of potential space and the transcendentalist scheme of cognition and activity. Creativity is considered as the transformation of the rules of semiosis at the level of sensory perception, reason or mind in receptive (cognitive) or projective (actually creative) activity. The source and condition for the possibility of creativity is the heterogeneous structure of reality, ontological pluralism, fixed in the concept of three worlds by K.R. Popper and the four kingdoms by Fr. Dessauer. The subject, object and process of activity are singled out as the main environments for the emergence of novelty, in semiotic terminology presented as a shift in pragmatic, semantic and syntactic rules of sensory perception, reason and mind. The identified types of novelty are illustrated with examples from literary science fiction.

Интертеоретические и метатеоретические модели картографической семиотики

The aim of the study is to demonstrate the peculiarities of the cartosemiotic structures manifestation in the sign systems axiomatic intertheory in the view of the metatheoretic approach. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of data and knowledge is based on vector bundle procedures of areal and triangular types on manifolds. Taking into account the principles of General semiotics, the generalization of the research results on cartographic signs and sign systems by the method of vectorization enables defining the universe of sign systems as a unity of fibering (stratification) equivalent forms with the linearly ordered structure

Semiotics as methodology and ontology

The article formulates the categories of general semiotics: sign, meaning, semiosis, layer and vector of semiosis. The purpose of the reasoning is to show the methodology of semiotic research as such, and general semiotics as ontology. The result of the reasoning is to demonstrate the semiotic circle of cognition and activity, which includes objects of perception as signs of sensory perception, objects of mind as signs of language and concepts of reason as complexly organized signs of reflexivity. The receptive and projective vectors of semiosis are introduced as direct cognition and reflexive activity respectively. The transition from cognition to activity - as intuition, organized via the models of aphorism, dialogue or system as philosophical inventions in the sense of I.I. Lapshin. The problem of the new that arises in intuition is considered as a question of the transformation of a specific semantic, syntactic or pragmatic rule in the layer of perception, mind or reason. The ontological thesis supported in the reasoning is that objects, subjects or concepts are not entities, but the rules of semiosis from the standpoint of general semiotics. By virtue of the fact that the conditions for the possibility of sign activity are the rules, by virtue of the rules constitute an objective unsigned meaning extracted by semiotic reflexivity, insofar as they objectively exist in the interaction of the environment and the subject.

Semiótica, poder e intolerância: populismo, direitos humanos e a crise do Estado Democrático de Direito

Este artigo trata dos riscos da derrisão dos valores centrais para o Estado Democrático de Direito, a partir da ascensão dos discursos políticos autoritários, dos discursos de ódio e da multiplicação da intolerância no mundo contemporâneo. Por isso, considera a importância da contribuição analítico-discursiva da Semiótica Geral, da Semiótica do Poder e da Semiótica do Direito. A análise dos discursos permite desvelar a forma pela qual a propaganda populista manipula os indivíduos a partir do apelo aos regimes de estesia e manipulação. Assim, a racionalidade das instituições democráticas, o tempo e o diálogo como pré-condições para o exercício democrático, a garantia da diversidade e do pluralismo vão se erodindo, enquanto crescem as concessões ao poder e as manifestações de intolerâncias. Daí a importância que a Semiótica tem para a promoção do regime de participação, essencial para o Estado Democrático de Direito, uma vez sensivelmente afetado pela crise contemporânea.

The Origins Of Umberto Eco’s Semio-Philosophical Project

Umberto Eco’s semiotics, unlike that of most of his colleagues, has always claimed to be a philosophical research. For Eco, general semiotics, that is, the research on the functioning of signs, was a fundamental part of philosophy, because the knowledge of objects and the formulation of the ideas that characterize them takes place by means of signs. This paper shows how Eco’s semiotic work derives from his philosophical training and how interest in the mass media and political commitment have not changed the nature of his philosophical project. His research itinerary is compared with that of other semiotics scholars to show the originality of his approach.

Ivo Osolsobě on General Semiotics in the Czech Tradition

This paper attempts to reconstruct Ivo Osolsobě’s criticism of the notion that the Prague Linguistic Circle stood for or did, in fact, introduce general semiotics to Czechoslovakia. In the first part, it presents the wider context of the origins of Osolsobě’s critique. In the second part, it discusses the definition and analysis of the main reasons for this criticism (which included a close connection with language and a lack of reflection on basic semiotic concepts in the works of the Prague School) and sketches an alternative for general semiotics in the form of cybernetics and theater semiotics. The final section deals with the position of the most important representatives of general semiotics (Charles Peirce, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Louis Hjelmslev) for the Czech tradition.

Linguistic Problems in Light of General Semiotics

This article is based on several primary postulates. Here is the leading one: A science, called semiotics, which is rapidly developing before our eyes, has not yet developed a standard and acceptable scientific paradigm for most of its followers. It is interpreted in various ways by schools that have arisen in different countries, relying on completely different positions. The school from the Estonian city of Tartu, for example, is guided by the fact that all signs arose in inanimate nature and continued in the life of plants and all living beings, including humans. Thus, any cause leading to the same effect is a sign for this effect. The semiotic school in Gothenburg (Sweden) defends the thesis that images are the basis of all other sign formations. Many semioticians, following de Saussure, are convinced that linguistic signs are the leading and initial ones, and all other sign constructs follow them. The author of this work proceeds from the assumption that the symbolic storehouse contains signs for very different content and of very different origins. From natural signs that came to us from nature (we see smoke, it means something is burning; we hear thunder, it means that it is raining somewhere), to signs in mathematics, which all came from the human mind. Language constructions are included in this system along with signs of other types. None of these types is the leading and decisive one; all of them were born in the course of the development of human civilization, as the human spirit strengthened and developed. And each of them performs its own function – for example, images underlie all arts, and languages are called upon to explain everything and everyone. Therefore, each type of sign is specific, and all together they make up a complete set of tools with which we can understand the events taking place around us and influence them. A complete and deep explanation of the entire sphere of signs and sign systems is available only to general semiotics – it determines the place of each specific sign topic. This article is devoted to the definition of the possibilities of linguistic signs – it seems to be objective enough and it presents linguistic manifestations familiar to us in a new way. What is a word? What is grammar? What is lexicography? etc. But it presents them from a different point of view, from the point of view of semiotics.

Evolution of correlation of terms sign and symbol in general semiotics, linguistics, and cultural studies

The purpose of the article is to analyze the views on the relation between sign and symbol in modern linguistics and cultural studies and to formulate a theoretical conclusion in order to avoid misunderstandings in scientific works. The methodology is based on the application of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the central concepts of semiotics, linguistics, and cultural studies. In addition to general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, a cultural-genetic method was used, as well as such linguistic methods as descriptive, comparative, methods of functional and conceptual-ideographic analysis. The scientific novelty of the study is that it first revealed the cause of differences in the interpretation of the relation between sign and symbol in traditional semiotics, modern linguistic and cultural studies, and formulated recommendations for their definition. Conclusions. It is proved that the opposition of sign and symbol in modern humanities is based on the special symbolism of the symbol, which distinguishes it from the other signs, classified by Ch. Pierce in traditional semiotics. Genetically, a symbol is a sign that has developed particular anthropogenic trait distinctions, contrasting with other signs, which nevertheless does not completely remove its sign properties and functions.