Semiotic Network Research Articles

Ideology, Affect, Semiotics: Towards a Non-personal Theory of Personality

Personality theories, as Giordano (2014) argues, often treat Western versions of the self as having universal import. Eastern notions of self, however, offer a dramatically different basis for thinking about what personality might be. This paper, nonetheless, seeks to offer a general framework for theorizing about the epiphenomenon of personality in any culture, asserting that it is an effect of specific histories of ideological practices, semiotic networks and systems, and affect, which engage each other in dialogic and dialectical ways. The interactions of these factors, guided by ideology, regularize behavior and affective dynamics, largely in non-personal ways. Subjects are produced and reproduced from these complex interactions, which are situationally specific and simultaneously transpersonal. The subjects formed through these interactions are the basis for the folk psychology of personality, which treats the transient, varying effects of these interactions as more or less reified qualities that form a basis for the construction of selfhood, however conceived.

Down the Rabbit Hole

Research Article| July 01 2012 Down the Rabbit Hole Matthew Sutherlin Matthew Sutherlin Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Visual Arts Research (2012) 38 (1): 11–33. https://doi.org/10.5406/visuartsrese.38.1.0011 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Matthew Sutherlin; Down the Rabbit Hole. Visual Arts Research 1 January 2012; 38 (1): 11–33. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/visuartsrese.38.1.0011 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressVisual Arts Research Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Counting, demonstrating, formalizing

Calculation and mathematical formalisation constitute an important part of knowledge. Their ethnographic study raises classic questions about the validity of data, equations and models. It accounts for their construction and the social and semiotic networks that make it possible demonstrations in their classical or modern forms. The published articles also underline the collective nature of mathematical activity and its use of material devices and multiple supports.

Semiotic Dynamics Solves the Symbol Grounding Problem

AbstractLanguage requires the capacity to link symbols (words, sentences) through the intermediary of internal representations to the physical world, a process known as symbol grounding. One of the biggest debates in the cognitive sciences concerns the question how human brains are able to do this. Do we need a material explanation or a system explanation? John Searle’s well known Chinese Room thought experiment, which continues to generate a vast polemic literature of arguments and counter-arguments, has argued that autonomously establishing internal representations of the world (called ’intentionality’ in philosophical parlance) is based on special properties of human neural tissue and that consequently an artificial system, such as an autonomous physical robot, can never achieve this. Here we study the Grounded Naming Game as a particular example of symbolic interaction and investigate a dynamical system that autonomously builds up and uses the semiotic networks necessary for performance in the game. We demonstrate in real experiments with physical robots that such a dynamical system indeed leads to a successful emergent communication system and hence that symbol grounding and intentionality can be explained in terms of a particular kind of system dynamics. The human brain has obviously the right mechanisms to participate in this kind of dynamics but the same dynamics can also be embodied in other types of physical systems.

Biosemiotics and ecological monitoring

During the recent decades, a global culrural-institutional network has gradually grown lip to project, implement, and use an enormous technological web that is supposed to observe, monitor, communicate, inventory, and assess our environment and its biodiversity in order to implement sustainable management models. The majority of "knowledge tools" that have been incorporated in the mainstream of this "techno-web" are amply based on a combination of mechanistic biology, genetic reductionism, economical determinism and neo-Darwinian cultural and biological perspectives. These approaches leave aside many of the qualitative and relational aspects that can only be grasped by considering the semiotic networks operative in complex ecological and cultural systems. In this paper, it is suggested that a biosemiotic approach to ecology may prove useful for the modelling process which in turn will allow the construction of meaningful monitoring systems. It is aJso advanced that it may as well serve to better integrate our understanding and monitoring of ecosystems into the cultural process of searching for (human) sustainability.

BINÔMIOS SAUDE-DOENCA E CUIDADO-EDUCAÇAO EM AMBIENTES COLETIVOS DE EDUCAÇÃO DA CRIANÇA PEQUENA

O crescente ingresso de crianças pequenas em instituições de educação coletiva tem recebido sérias críticas, principalmente do setor saúde, por nao serem consideradas ambientesadequados, especialmente às crianças em seus dois primeiros anos de vida. Verifica-se, assim, a necessidade de se debater sobre e lidar com os complexos processos de saúdeidoença e cuidado/ educação em tais ambientes. Discutiremos aqui doenças infecciosas em creches, a partir da perspectiva teórico-metodológica da Rede de dignificações. Esta perspectiva entende saúde/ doença como um processo dinâmico, caracterizado pela dialética relação entre vários fatoresque se esh aturam em uma rede semioticamente constituída, a qual canaliza dignificações e processo. Essa perspectiva lança novos olhares à situação e possibilita a reelaboração de propostas de ação nesses contextos e, mesmo, de constituição dos mesmos em ambientes de qualidade e promotores de saúde.

Uma perspectiva teórico-metodológica para análise do desenvolvimento humano e do processo de investigação

We present a theoretical-methodological approach which proposies a semiotic network of meanings to analyse human development. This network structures the milieu/moyen which, at each moment and situation, captures and frames each person's behavioral flow, rendering it meaningful in that context. Thus, it acts as a mediator of development in the interactive situation. Persons and network of meanings are mutually and continuously transformed. Those changes are canalised by the context's physical and social characteristics in a dynamic segmentation and combination of fragments of discursive and ideological formations, past and present experiences, and future expectations. With that perspective, we tried to apprehend the co-construction and mutual transformations of individuals in specific situations, encompassing interactions, contexts, roles attributed or assumed by the participants, and cultural meanings which guide the development of persons and situations. Although it was initially designed to study the adaptation of babies to day-care, this approach is proposed for the analysis of various situations.

A semiotic approach to music

The purpose of this paper is to sketch a semiotic approach to music that avoids relying on linguistic models. Peirce's triadic description of the sign is drawn into a landscape in which any sign is viewed as a node in a latent network of potential intersemic relationships. Whenever a sign is uttered, in speech or in musical performance, it activates an area of the emitter's and the receiver's semiotic network; the felicity of the exchange depends on the level of similitude between the networks. Basic musical techniques such as repetition, variation or development are the means of structuring the listener's network. The musical discourse tentatively controls the listener's meandering through the semiotic network, and the score is a notation of the discursive strategy.

A reply to Courtial's comments

One should distinguish carefully between information and meaning;1 or in the language of semiotics between signals and codes. 2 When Courtial describes "information content as a combination of novelty and network effects," he tends to confuse the two. Courtial comments on the relations between signals and codes, while my paper is on the relations between signals and noise as generated by the LEXIMAPPE system. Indeed, words and co-words are both signals, and meaning can be attributed to them with reference to a system. 3 In the "sociology of translation" the system of reference is the so-called "semiotic" or "actor-"network, in which the words figure as "actants. "4 Consequently, the words which indicate the dusters should no longer be considered as semantically meaningful, but merely as indicators of the development of the semiotic network, i.e., as unique labels for the (sometimes emerging) clusters in the dynamics of the representation. 5 This theoretical frame of reference has to be kept in mind to understand the argument. For example, when Courtial states above that LEXIMAPPE "detects emergent clusters within the network which are in a position to structure it," one may wonder how it is possible to infer from the results of a relational algorithm conclusions with respect to positions. Indeed, such inference is impossible without reference to the "sociology of translation. "6 The relational algorithm informs us only about how the system reconstructs the information in the data; it tells us nothing about what this change means within the network. Thus, the algorithm signals changes in the data, on the basis of which a sociological theory can then predict that this will have certain effects. However, the scientometrician is interested not in change, but in the significance of change; not in prediction per se, but in the quality of a prediction. The specific sociological theory fails us in answering these questions, since it only specifies that the information is coded, but it specifies neither how and why, nor to which extent and in which respects

The Fashion Show in Ulysses

Over the past decade, the transvestism in the Circe section of Ulysses has come under increased critical scrutiny.' Given the current emphasis on gender studies this is not surprising, but the specific focus has led to a disregard for the larger phenomenon at work, which is the artifice of costume and fashion in general. In Circe, Joyce provides over ninety elaborately described costumes, mostly male attire on men and female attire on women, many in quick-change on the same characters. Given the assortment of side attractions in Circe, what is one to make-what should one make-of this fashion show that parades through the chapter? No one answer will suffice. If the writing of Ulysses corresponds to any psychoanalytic mode, it is the Freudian concept of overdetermination: for any given phenomenon, there are multiple causes. In ascending order of complexity, the discernible motives are dramatic, oneiric, epic, and sartorial. This last mode, that of fashion itself, encompasses an entire semiotic network; a psychosexual sensibility; and a model for the writer, the text, and the reader that mimics the whole of Ulysses.