73,594 research outputs found
A view on the iconic turn from a semiotic perspective
Media are not only a means of communication. From a cognitive perspective, they may be viewed as components of an external, auxiliary memory system (Schönpflug 1997), and contemporary cognitive science âconstrues cognition as a complex system in which cognitive processes are âembodied, situatedâ in environments, and âdistributedâ across people and artifactsâ (Nersessian 2007: 2). In man-machine communication, man-man-communication via digital machinery and especially in the World Wide Web (Heintz 2006, Steels 2006) the âexternalâ components of this system have taken on more and more of the characteristics of our individual, âinternalâ, living and active memory with its richness of sensual and symbolic formats. The intellectual challenge in the drafts of the âmastermindsâ of hypertext (Eisenstein) and multimedia (Lintsbakh) was the detection of temporal/spatial, mathematical and linguistic correspondences between such different sensual and symbolic representations (Bulgakova 2007, Tsivian 2007). The so called âiconicâ or âpictorial turnâ was pulled along by the digital turn, and it may in turn have stimulated and accelerated the digital turn
The Biosemiotic Approach in Biology : Theoretical Bases and Applied Models
Biosemiotics is a growing fi eld that investigates semiotic processes in the living realm in an attempt to combine the fi ndings of the biological sciences and semiotics. Semiotic processes are more or less what biologists have typically referred to as â signals, â â codes, âand â information processing âin biosystems, but these processes are here understood under the more general notion of semiosis, that is, the production, action, and interpretation of signs. Thus, biosemiotics can be seen as biology interpreted as a study of living sign systems â which also means that semiosis or sign process can be seen as the very nature of life itself. In other words, biosemiotics is a field of research investigating semiotic processes (meaning, signification, communication, and habit formation in living systems) and the physicochemical preconditions for sign action and interpretation.
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A semiotic analysis of the genetic information
Terms loaded with informational connotations are often employed to refer to genes and their dynamics. Indeed, genes are usually perceived by biologists as basically âthe carriers of hereditary information.â Nevertheless, a number of researchers consider such talk as inadequate and âjust metaphorical,â thus expressing a skepticism about the use of the term âinformationâ and its derivatives in biology as a natural science. First, because the meaning of that term in biology is not as precise as it is, for instance, in the mathematical theory of communication. Second, because it seems to refer to a purported semantic property of genes without theoretically clarifying if any genuinely intrinsic semantics is involved. Biosemiotics, a field that attempts to analyze biological systems as semiotic systems, makes it possible to advance in the understanding of the concept of information in biology. From the perspective of Peircean biosemiotics, we develop here an account of genes as signs, including a detailed analysis of two fundamental processes in the genetic information system (transcription and protein synthesis) that have not been made so far in this field of research. Furthermore, we propose here an account of information based on Peircean semiotics and apply it to our analysis of transcription and protein synthesis
An Outlaw Ethics for the Study of Religions: Maternality and the Dialogic Subject in Julia Kristevaâs 'Stabat Mater'
In this essay I examine Julia Kristevaâs transgressive body of work as a strategic embodiment of, and argument for, an ethical orientation towards otherness predicated on the image of divided subjectivity identified by Jacques Lacan but powerfully re-theorised as dialogic by Kristeva. I focus on what is, for Kristeva, a stylistically unique essay â 'Stabat Mater' â which examines a number of institutional discourses about motherhood from the western philosophical, religious, and psychoanalytical traditions, and simultaneously subverts them with a parallel discourse (and enactment) ostensibly by an actual mother. The text itself, I argue, can be read as a performance of dialogic subjectivity and of Kristevaâs conception of maternality, which implies a radical ethical imperative â termed 'herethics' â towards alterity. I propose that this herethical model might heuristically inform current debates regarding the ethical orientations of the study of religions as an academic field
Mind, Cognition, Semiosis: Ways to Cognitive Semiotics
What is meaning-making? How do new domains of meanings emerge in the course of childâs development? What is the role of consciousness in this process? What is the difference between making sense of pointing, pantomime and language utterances? Are great apes capable of meaning-making? What about dogs? Parrots? Can we, in any way, relate their functioning and behavior to a childâs? Are artificial systems capable of meaning-making?
The above questions motivated the emergence of cognitive semiotics as a discipline devoted to theoretical and empirical studies of meaning-making processes. As a transdisciplinary approach to meaning and meaning-making, cognitive semiotics necessarily draws on a different disciplines: starting with philosophy of mind, via semiotics and linguistics, cognitive science(s), neuroanthropology, developmental and evolutionary psychology, comparative studies, and ending with robotics.
The book presents extensively this discipline. It is a very eclectic story: highly abstract problems of philosophy of mind are discussed and, simultaneously, results of very specific experiments on picture recognition are presented. On the one hand, intentional acts involved in semiotic activity are elaborated; on the other, a computational system capable of a limited interpretation of excerpts from Carrollâs Through the Looking-Glass is described. Specifically, the two roads to cognitive semiotics are explored in the book: phenomenological-enactive path developed by the so-called Lund school and authorâs own proposal: a functional-cognitivist path
Is the semiosphere post-modernist?
This paper provides arguments for and against M.Lotmanâs (2002) contention that Y.Lotmanâs
seminal concept of semiosphere is of post-modernist (post-structuralist; Posner 2011)
orientation. A comparative reading of the definitional components of the semiosphere, their
hierarchical relationship and their interactions is undertaken against the two principal axes of
space and subjectivity in the light of Kantian transcendental idealism, as inaugural and
authoritative figure of modernity, the Foucauldian discursive turn and the Deleuzian (post)
radical empiricism (sic), as representative authors of the highly versatile post-modernvernacular.
This comparative reading aims at highlighting not only similarities and differences between the
Lotmanian conceptualization of the semiosphere and the concerned modernist and postmodernist
authors, but the constructâs operational relevance in a post-metanarratives cultural
predicament that has been coupled with the so-called spatial turn in cultural studies (Hess-
Luttich 2012)
Before the consummation what? On the role of the semiotic economy of seduction
The cultural practice of flirtation has been multifariously scrutinized in
various disciplines including sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis and
literary studies. This paper frames the field of flirtation in Bourdieuian terms,
while focusing narrowly on the semiotic economy that is defining of this
cultural field. Moreover, seduction, as a uniquely varied form of discourse
that is responsible for producing the cultural field of flirtation, is posited as
the missing link for understanding why flirtation may be a peculiar case of
non-habitus, contrary to the received notion of cultural field as set of goaloriented
practices and actionable habituses. This argument is pursued by
highlighting the endemic traits of ambivalence and constant reversibility of
signs or multimodal semiotic constellations in the discourse of seduction,
while seeking to demonstrate that seduction, and by implication the cultural
field of flirtation, does not necessarily partake of a teleological framework
that is geared towards the consummation of sexual desire. This thesis is
illustrated by recourse to a scene from the blockbuster âHitchâ
Emergence of Self-Organized Symbol-Based Communication \ud in Artificial Creatures
In this paper, we describe a digital scenario where we simulated the emergence of self-organized symbol-based communication among artificial creatures inhabiting a \ud
virtual world of unpredictable predatory events. In our experiment, creatures are autonomous agents that learn symbolic relations in an unsupervised manner, with no explicit feedback, and are able to engage in dynamical and autonomous communicative interactions with other creatures, even simultaneously. In order to synthesize a behavioral ecology and infer the minimum organizational constraints for the design of our creatures, \ud
we examined the well-studied case of communication in vervet monkeys. Our results show that the creatures, assuming the role of sign users and learners, behave collectively as a complex adaptive system, where self-organized communicative interactions play a \ud
major role in the emergence of symbol-based communication. We also strive in this paper for a careful use of the theoretical concepts involved, including the concepts of symbol and emergence, and we make use of a multi-level model for explaining the emergence of symbols in semiotic systems as a basis for the interpretation of inter-level relationships in the semiotic processes we are studying
Multilevel poetry translation as a problem-solving task
Poems are treated by translators as hierarchical multilevel systems. Here we propose the notion of âmultilevel poetry translationâ to characterize such cases of poetry translation in terms of selection and rebuilding of a multilevel system of constraints across languages. Different levels of a poem correspond to different sets of components that asymmetrically constrain each other (e.âg., grammar, lexicon, syntactic construction, prosody, rhythm, typography, etc.). This perspective allows a poem to be approached as a thinking-tool: an âexperimental labâ which submits language to unusual conditions and provides a scenario to observe the emergence of new patterns of semiotic behaviour as a result. We describe this operation as a problem-solving task, and exemplify with Augusto de Camposâ Portuguese translation of John Donneâs poem âThe Expiration.
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