Semiosis and pragmatism: toward a dynamic concept of meaning

Philosophers and social scientists of diverse orientations have suggested that the pragmatics of semiosis is germane to a dynamic account of meaning as process. Semiosis, the central focus of C. S. Peirce's pragmatic philosophy, may hold a key to perennial problems regarding meaning. Indeed, Peirce's thought should be deemed seminal when placed within the cognitive sciences, especially with respect to his concept of the sign. According to Peirce's pragmatic model, semiosis is a triadic, time-bound, context-sensitive, interpreter-dependent, materially extended dynamic process. Semiosis involves inter-relatedness and inter-action between signs, their objects, acts and events in the world, and the semiotic agents who are in the process of making and taking them

C. S. Peirce and Intersemiotic Translation

Intersemiotic translation (IT) was defined by Roman Jakobson (The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, London, p. 114, 2000) as “transmutation of signs”—“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” Despite its theoretical relevance, and in spite of the frequency in which it is practiced, the phenomenon remains virtually unexplored in terms of conceptual modeling, especially from a semiotic perspective. Our approach is based on two premises: (i) IT is fundamentally a semiotic operation process (semiosis) and (ii) IT is a deeply iconic-dependent process. We exemplify our approach by means of literature to dance IT and we explore some implications for the development of a general model of IT

Downward Determination in Semiotic Multi-level Systems

Peirce's pragmatic notion of semiosis can be described in terms of a multi-level system of constraints involving chance, efficient, formal and final causation. According to the model proposed here, law-like regularities, which work as boundary conditions or organizational principles, have a downward effect on the spatiotemporal distribution of lower-level semiotic items. We treat this downward determinative influence as a propensity relation: if some lower-level entities a,b,c,-n are under the influence of a general organizational principle, W, they will show a tendency to behave in certain specific ways, and, thus, to instantiate a set of specific processes. Our goal in this paper is to examine the role of downward determination in semiotic systems, conceived as multi-level hierarchical systems

Constraining the Z' Mass in 331 Models using Direct Dark Matter Detection

We investigate a so-called 331 extension of the Standard Model gauge sector which accommodates neutrino masses and where the lightest of the new neutral fermions in the theory is a viable particle dark matter candidate. In this model, processes mediated by the additional $Z^{\prime}$ gauge boson set both the dark matter relic abundance and the scattering cross section off of nuclei. We calculate with unprecedented accuracy the dark matter relic density, including the important effect of coannihilation across the heavy fermion sector, and show that indeed the candidate particle has the potential of having the observed dark matter density. We find that the recent LUX results put very stringent bounds on the mass of the extra gauge boson, $M_{Z^{\prime}} \gtrsim 2$~TeV, independently of the dark matter mass. We also comment on regime where our bounds on the $Z^{\prime}$ mass may apply to generic 331-like models, and on implications for LHC phenomenology.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for publicatio