Tegelaskujude/maskottide armsuse semiootiline modelleerimine

Väitekirja elektrooniline versioon ei sisalda publikatsioonePuutume kokku nunnude loomategelastega nii Disney multifilmides, hommikuhelveste pakenditel kui ka tualettpaberil - ja need tegelased ei ole suunatud vaid lastele. Nunnusus, kui esteetiline omadus, võib mõjutada meie otsuseid ja suunata meie tundeid seoses hoolitsemise, huvi ja kiindumusega. Mis see on, mis teeb nunnud tegelased nii armastusväärseks? Uurimistööd teoreetilises bioloogias ja psühholoogias on leidnud, et peamiselt motiveerib nunnusus meid hoolima imikutest ja koduloomadest ning eelistama kindlaid nägusid ja tooteid. Samad uurimused väidavad, et meie huvi nunnude asjade vastu tuleneb bioloogilisest hoolitsemise vajadusest. Samas, hoolitsemise vajadus ei põhjenda isiklikke ja kultuurilisi eelistusi. Samuti ei põhjenda see, miks me leiame, et multifilmid ja erinevad tooted on nunnud. Väitekiri uurib, kuidas biosemiootiline lähenemine aitab meil mõista tajutud nunnususe varjatud tunnuseid. Töö uurib aspekte, mis jäävad meie tajude varju ja kuidas nunnusus mõjutab meie suhtlemisviise loomategelaste ja loomadega. Lõpuks pakub väitekiri praktilisi disaini nõuandeid disaineritele ja multifilmideloojatele loomategelaste loomisel. Uurimustöö tulemustest järeldub, et nunnususe tajumine pole lihtsalt visuaalne, vaid seotud ka meie teiste tajudega. Nunnususe tajumine pole täielikult universaalne nähtus, vaid on mõjutatud kultuurist ja isiklikest eelistustest. Lisaks leiab väitekiri, kuidas nunnude omaduste kasutamine disainis võib teha loomategelased auditooriumile veelgi ahvatlevamaks ja emotsionaalselt mõjusamaks. Nunnud loomategelased võivad mõjutada, kuidas me tajume ja suhestume reaalsete loomadega.From Disney’s hit films to your cereal and toilet paper, we encounter cute animal characters constantly in our daily life, and they’re not just for children. The presence of cuteness as an aesthetic can effect our decision making and lead to feelings of care-giving, attraction, and affection. But what makes these characters so endearing? Research into theoretical biology and psychology has found cuteness to be a major motivator in our caring of infants, adoption of pets, and preference for faces and products. These studies claim our attraction to cute things stems from a biological care-taking response, but this does not explain personal and cultural preferences and why we find cartoons and products cute. This dissertation explores why we find cartoon characters cute and how biosemiotic research help us understand the factors behind our perceptions of cuteness. This dissertation investigates the features that underlie our perceptions, explores how cuteness affects our interactions with both animal characters and biological animals, and offers practical design advice to designers and animators in the creation of animal characters. The results of the research conclude that the perception of cuteness is not just visual but linked with our other senses and that it is not entirely universal but is influenced by culture and personal factors. Additionally, this research identifies how the usage of cute features design and human-like expressions can make animal characters more appealing and emotionally affective for audiences and that these characters can impact how we perceive and interact with real-world animals. As a whole this dissertation advances the field of cuteness studies and offers a practical domain for the application of semiotics.https://www.ester.ee/record=b543738

Earth’s poesy: Romantic poetics, natural philosophy, and biosemiotics

This chapter undertakes an exploration of the pre-history of contemporary biosemiotics in Romantic ecopoetics, beginning with the ways in which Romantic natural philosophies, such as those of Schelling and Goethe, opened the way for a renewed appreciation of the subjective ‘worlds’ or Umwelten, as Jakob von Uexküll later termed them, along with the agency, communicative capacity, and, in some cases, ethical considerability of more-than-human beings. Secondly, I will examine the implications of this philosophical re-animation of materiality for the reconceptualization of human language, especially as deployed to poetic ends. Here, I turn to Friedrich Schlegel’s (1967 [1800]) “Conversation on Poetry,” in which human 'poiesis', the crafting of ideational worlds by means of words, is repositioned as an emergent property of the prior 'autopoiesis' of natural becoming. Finally, I will indicate how this German proto-biosemiotics finds a literary counterpart in the ecosemiotics of English Romantic literature, focusing on John Clare’s birds’ nest poetry

Multiculturalism, biosemiotics, and cross-cultural friendship: An essay review of Olteanu’s multimodal semiotics of culture

Review of Multiculturalism as Multimodal Communication: A Semiotic Perspective [Series Numanities – Arts and Humanities in Progress 9; Dario Martinelli, series ed.] by Alin Olteanu. Cham: Springer, 2019, xviii+140 pp.  &nbsp

How Mangroves Story: On Being a Filter Feeder

The relationship between gravity, the moon and the ocean translates into the regular rhythm of tides, which provide a powerful energy, both productive and destructive, across intertidal zones. Mangroves, like other intertidal ecologies, negotiate the regularities and disturbances of tidal energies through many processes and build up complex worlds. One of these processes is filter feeding, which transforms incoming detritus into many kinds of bodies, while mucus covered faeces are excreted into the bacterial-rich mud, to be transformed again. Filter feeding stories the relationship between the moon and the sea into thick embodied mangrove narratives. This paper demonstrates and explores an account of relationality as narrative within a semiotic material ontology, as told in the storying of the relationship of the moon and the sea within the materiality of mangroves

The Obesity Crisis and Semiotic Corruption

Is there an obesity crisis?  Postmodernists like Michael Gard argue that there is not while epidemiologists argue that there is and it is growing.  In this paper, I argue that such polarized positions are not a sign of healthy dialectic, but a sign of an increasingly fragmented and reductionist obesity research field.  As a further example, I draw on long term seemingly unresolvable disputes within nutrition brought about through reductionist approaches.  I argue that there is an obesity crisis, that it is linked to other major global crises and that to meaningfully address it will require greater unity within the obesity research field.  I therefore put forward the post-reductionist general concept of semiotic corruption developed by process philosopher, Arran Gare and drawn from the emerging post-reductionist field of biosemiotics, as a potential unifying concept for the field.  In doing this I explore the history and nature of biosemiotics and its links to other holistic traditions which all seek to mend the gross philosophical errors committed by those such as Descartes who ruptured the relationship between living and non-living processes.  I then discuss some implications of this holistic approach for better understanding obesity as semiotic corruption, particularly focusing on the concepts of embodied, anticipatory systems and the need for a new ethics of health which understands and augments the real complexity and irreducibility of life

The biosemiotic imagination in the Victorian frames of mind : Newman, Eliot and Welby

This thesis traces the development of thought in the philosophical and other writings of three nineteenth-century thinkers, whose work exemplifies that century’s attempts to think beyond the divisions of culture from nature and to reconcile empirical science with metaphysical truth. Drawing on nineteenth-century debates on the origin of language and evolutionary theory, the thesis argues that the ideas of John Henry Newman, George Eliot and Lady Victoria Welby were cultural precursors to the biosemiotic thought of the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, specifically in the way in which these three thinkers sought to find a ‘common grammar’ between natural and human practices. While only Lady Welby communicated with the scientist, logician and father of modern semiotics, Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), all three contributed to the cultural sensibility that informed subsequent work in biology/ethology (Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944), zoosemiotics (Thomas A. Sebeok (1920-2001), and the development of biosemiotics (Thomas A. Sebeok and Jesper Hoffmeyer (1943-present), Kalevi Kull (1952-present) among others. Each of these nineteenth-century writer’s intellectual development show strong parallels with the interdisciplinary endeavour of biosemiotics. The latter’s observation that biology is semiotics, its postulation of the continuity between the natural and cultural world through semiosis and evolutionary semiotic scaffolding its emphasis on the coordination of organic life processes on all levels, from simple cells to human beings, via semiotic interactions that depend on interpretation, communication and learning, and its consequent refusal of Cartesian divide, all find distinct resonances with these earlier thinkers. The thesis thus argues that Newman, Eliot and Welby all gave articulation to what the thesis identifies as the growth of a ‘biosemiotic imagination.’ It argues that Newman, Eliot and Lady Welby envisaged a unity, or a holistic understanding, of life based on a European developmental tradition of biology, philosophy and language which was familiar to Charles Darwin himself. This evolutionary ontology called forth a new epistemology grounded in a mode of unconscious creative inference (biosemiotic imagination) akin to Charles S. Peirce’s concept of abduction. Abduction is the logical operation which introduces a new idea and, as such, is the only source of adaptive and creative growth. For Peirce, it is closely tied to the growth of knowledge via the evolutionary action of sign relations. The thesis shows how these thinkers conceptualised their own version of what I suggest can be understood as this biosemiotic imagination and the implications this has for understanding creativity in nature and culture. For John Henry Newman, it was a common source of inspiration in religion and science. For George Eliot, it lay at the basis of any creative process, natural and cultural, between which it forged a link. Similarly to Eliot, Lady Victoria Welby saw abduction as a signifying process that subtends creativity both in nature and culture

The treeing-of-tree through affective attunement: biosemiotics and chinese ideograms as an ecosystem

Este trabalho se insere na esteira dos desenvolvimentos recentes de uma “virada ecológica” nas teorias da naturacultura ociental, tendo em vista o paradigma crítico chamado “biossemiótica”. Ele se propõe aventurar-se pela crítica literária interseccionalmente transversal, a ontologia quiasmática, a teoria afetiva, a bioneneurologia, a pesquisa científica e filosófica sobre os estudos faunísticos e florísticos, de modo a descobrir um caminho para uma ecocrítica/ecolinguística chinesa sob a égide das humanidades ambientais. O ensaio parte de um grupo entrelaçado de ideogramas chineses que se apresentam com radicais associados com plantas (mu 木 como elemento “planta/madeira”), e que exibe um amplo espectro de interações planta-ambiente visando a uma empatia afetiva com o agenciamento da vida vegetal. Ele cria, assim, um clima para repensarmos o tema estudo crítico de plantas, estabelecendo uma forma biocêntrica ou fitocêntrica de crítica. Com uma ênfase em mu como um dos elementos da cosmologia wu-xing 五行 da cultura clássica chinesa, esperamos que o esforço amplie o âmbito e a dimensão da biossemiótica como sugerida por Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, Spinoza, Deleuze, Uexküll, Hoffmeyer e Wheeler, mediante uma abordagem entrecruzada não apenas em áreas críticas, mas também entre as culturas do ocidente e do orientee em geral

Narrating Agency and a Reflective Self in Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry

Advancements in modern “post-classical narratology” have undergone unprecedented growth in the last two decades, giving rise to various directions of narratological research within the cognitive and diachronic domains. One such approach is biosemiotics, which appeared at the crossroads of semiotics and cultural biology and combines a set of definitions for meaning-making and agency construction in philosophy, linguistics, culture, and all complex systems. Agency here represents any kind of subject activity (e.g., epistemic, cognitive, etc.) that can be determined by the indices and icons of subjectivity at the level of the storyline development and then compared at the level of the discourse. From the biosemiotic approach, the narrative discourse as a complex system is characterised by the meaning emergence and telic behavior of all its constituent parts striving at closure and a certain goal, i.e., having some agenda. Thus, the agency is supplementary to the acting of the self-reflecting subject in terms of intentionality, self-referentiality, and self-governing activity. Following the above definition of agency, this paper examines the possible ways of applying Peircian triadic sign theory to narrative agency construction in the contemporary novel “Asymmetry” (2018) by Lisa Halliday, operating with the notions of bodily and biosemiotic agency. Seeing subjectivity related to perspective-taking in the narrative discourse, it is important to trace the distribution of the icons and indexes of subjectivity on three levels: semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic