Deletion or Deployment. Is That any Way to Treat a Sign?

Edmund Husserl's treatment of signs as derivative from the lived presence of human consciousness has evoked quite divergent critical comments. Two can paradigmatically be singled out. Whereas Jaques Derrida in a Heideggerian move shows the metaphysical assumptions hidden in unmediated presence, Ernst Tugendhat exchanges Husserl's emphasis on phenomenological explorations of the human mind for the tools of analytical philosophy of language.\ud \ud Although Derrida and Tugendhat eventually move into very different directions their objections start from similar concerns. Talk about signs is almost incomprehensible unless a certain dualism between something that is employed to indicate, refer to, mean something else is assumed. It can be argued that, consequently, Husserl's attempt to tie such a dichotomy back to the presumably\ud unshrouded clarity of Cartesian consciousness threatens the very idea of signification. According to this consideration semantics cannot be grounded in the noetic realm. ,,Signs are foreign to this self-presence of\ud consciousness'' (SP, 58) since their possibility rests on some systematically antecedent set of differences governing the relations between what is present (the signifier) and what is indicated or expressed by it (the signified). This idea can be expressed not only in the Saussurian terms the early Derrida draws upon, but also by\ud using the distinction between syntax and semantics familiar in analytical philosophy.\u

Meaningfulness, the unsaid and translatability. Instead of an introduction

The present paper opens this topical issue on translation techniques by drawing a theoretical basis for the discussion of translational issues in a linguistic perspective. In order to forward an audience- oriented definition of translation, I will describe different forms of linguistic variability, highlighting how they present different difficulties to translators, with an emphasis on the semantic and communicative complexity that a source text can exhibit. The problem is then further discussed through a comparison between Quine's radically holistic position and the translatability principle supported by such semanticists as Katz. General translatability — at the expense of additional complexity — is eventually proposed as a possible synthesis of this debate. In describing the meaningfulness levels of source texts through Hjelmslevian semiotics, and his semiotic hierarchy in particular, the paper attempts to go beyond denotative semiotic, and reframe some translational issues in a connotative semiotic and metasemiotic perspective

Towards a theory of software engineering

A theory of software engineering (SE) is presented and its application to explaining and analysing SE situations is illustrated. The theory is based on a characterization of SE representations and the fundamental activities that are applied to them. Motivations for developing a theory and means of establishing its validity are also discussed

Wittgenstein and the Life of Signs

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How Do Gestures Influence Thinking and Speaking? The Gesture-for-Conceptualization Hypothesis.

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