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The article discusses some semiotic approaches to the relation between nature and culture. Starting with outlining the structuralistic approach to this issue, especially the ideas of Juri Lotman and Algirdas Julien Greimas, the author finds parallels between different views on the relation between the natural world and human beings. First, the juxtaposition of Eero Tarasti’s existential semiotics with selected concepts of biosemiotics is discussed. The following part of the paper is dedicated to Bruno Latour’s ideas on nature–culture relation, hybrids and mediations. Then the author refers to Lotman’s notion of the semiosphere as the common space for all living and inanimate elements. Closing the paper with a return to biosemiotics, the author comes back to Tarasti’s ideas and compares these with some ideas in biosemiotics, paying special attention to the concepts of unpredictability, choice and dynamics. The comparison shows that some intuitions, assumptions and theses of these different scholars turn out to be surprisingly convergent. The author believes that the outlined parallels between Tarasti’s view, Latour’s and Lotman’s concepts, and biosemiotics may be promising for further research, inviting detailed study.
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The problem of relevance, at individual agent scale – or how we decide what is adequate for our interpretation of the signs we encounter in the world – is a question that keeps reappearing in semiotics and other disciplines concerned with meaning. In this article I propose an approximation on relevance that conceives meaning as a trajectory across a cognitive landscape. Unlike conventional accounts on relevance, which presuppose mental processes built on feature-based representations, my proposal suggests conceiving cognition as a fluid and emergent field of attractors basins that become specified and modified when experiences appear, and conceiving meaning as a trajectory across the cognitive field. Consequently, I suggest that when cognitive landscapes better fit world experience, agents’ categorizations will be more relevant. My proposal is mainly supported by two approaches: the enactivist notion of structural coupling and the theories of dynamic neural populations of Walter Freeman III.
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The article offers the definition of discursive practice as a sign construct of the cognitive-semiotic, discursive-pragmatic and linguacultural levels, realised in the corresponding discursive situations, within which a semiotic configuration of elements of both one discursive practice and their combination occurs. In a cognitive-semiotic perspective, a discursive space is formed by the symbiosis of discursive practices as signs of a person’s communicative consciousness, i.e. a representative of a particular national-cultural community. In this aspect, the discourse is associated with the consciousness, knowledge and perceptions of the language personality, which are formed in the process of socialisation and become the basis of the cultural array, broadcast from generation to generation within a certain ethnic group. Thus, sign constructs of communicative consciousness are formed as concrete semiotic units embodied in discursive practices.
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Fictional names have specific, cognitively relevant features, putting them in a category apart from the category of ordinary names. I argue that we should focus on the name or name form itself and refrain from looking for an assignment procedure and an assigned referent. I also argue that we should reject the idea that sentences containing fictional names express singular propositions. These suggestions have important consequences for the intuition that ‘Sherlock Holmes exists’ is either true or false, and they put our intuitions concerning fictional names into perspective. If Millianism is the view that names only have a referent only as their semantic value, then my proposal on fictional names is not Millian in nature.
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Niniejsza książka ma formułować propozycję metodologicznego otwarcia groznawstwa,silnie akcentując rolę dyskursu i narracji już w dwóch tekstach otwierających:„Dyskursywne gry i dyskursy gier” Geralda Voorheesa oraz „Poza mitem i metaforą.Przypadek narracji w mediach cyfrowych” Marie-Laure Ryan. Podkreślenie roli narracjii dyskursu umożliwiło również umocowanie pozostałych rozdziałów książki w dwuwzajemnie się dopełniających paradygmatach: teorii i filozofii (w części zatytułowanej„Teorie”) oraz praktyce hermeneutycznej (w części zatytułowanej „Praktyki”), dostarczającychwspólnie narzędzi do krytycznej wiwisekcji uobecniających się w grachpostaw dyskursywnych oraz narracji o świecie, kulturze, religii, filozofii, teologii, ekonomii,płciowości, rasie czy polityce. (...) Problem dyskursów gier wideo oraz dyskursóww grach wideo ujawnia zatem nie tyle bałagan, co niesłychaną produktywność ujęćbadawczych, nieograniczonych sztywnymi normami pojęć, kategorii czy narzędzi teoretycznych,które równolegle odnajdują w grach wydarzenia, znaczenia, języki, komunikaty,idee, ideologie, hierarchie i struktury władzy oraz wykluczenia. Sploty problemowew grach jako formach komunikacji, tekstach czy obiektach kulturowych skłoniłynas do zastosowania formuły liczby mnogiej w określeniu „dyskursy gier wideo” –tak, by unaocznić zarówno potrzebę pluralizacji perspektyw badawczych, jak i odpowiadającejjej różnorodności uobecniających się w grach narracji o świecie, zarównotym nas otaczającym, jak i tym przez gry wytwarzanym.
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Theory change is a slow, tortuous process. Problems associated with how we communicate ideas and how these ideas are received by our peers become catalysts for change in how we ourselves perceive and sanction what the discipline is capable of doing. Some parts of semiotics, and particularly biosemiotics, have come under critical scrutiny because of their heavy commitment to Peircean philosophy, but at the same time, the contributions of Peircean philosophy are almost impossible to discount. The ripples of this situation are quite visible in the emergence of code biology as a post-semiotic research programme. Yet there is a general balance between those who do not put that much stock in Peircean concepts and those who cannot conceive semiotics without these. This paper will ask whether a biosemiotics after Peirce is possible at all in the sense of acknowledging Peirce’s contributions to the field while also taking to heart the criticisms raised by those skeptical of the implications of Peircean semiotics. While the answer is most likely positive, it depends on what background our concept of meaning relies on and how it may bleed into the other areas of semiotics that biosemiotics may claim a stake on. Being able to discuss potential theoretical distinctions across semiotics while also allowing communication between the areas caught in this differentiation will be crucial for the health of the discipline as the gap between theories becomes more profound.
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The birth of social semiotics is usually associated with the publication of Michael Halliday’s book Language as Social Semiotic (1978). We try to draw attention to possible new developments in social semiotics, which still remain a potential transdisciplinary project for social sciences. In order to do this, we address the interrelation between sociolinguistics, social semiotics and the semiotics of culture. All of these describe mechanisms of meaning production and translation beyond linguistic structures. The differentiation between these workings is based on a distinction between various aspects of meaning production and communication and functional characteristics of goal setting. The complexity of these processes legitimates the complexity of methodology used to describe them. Interconnection between different domains and aspects may create synthetic methods based on the dynamic approach to meaning production and transmission.
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It is observed that artistic creations have started before the ages of history, whilst refreshing themselves throughout the ages and eras via cultural and societal innovations and not compromising from their core principles at the same. Art, which embraces change and alteration, has made its prevailing presence known through a society’s lifestyle, geography, time and faith at all times. Shaping of art through these concepts has laid the groundwork for acquiring an identity for art which could be used as a common language between different cultures. It is possible that the act greeting, a cultural action, can happen with different rituals in many countries and cultures. The meanings of Greeting and hand-kissing rituals in different cultures has . The focus of this paper is on the meaning of the rituals of greetings and hand-kissing and how they are touted in different cultures in a semiotic aspect. A comparison is showcased between greetings in the French artist, who was raised in a western culture, Gustave Courbet’s “Greeting-Good Moring Mr. Courbet” and the hand-kissing the eastern culture, which is a showcase of respect and love. In this work, the concepts of Kissing, Indicators, Semiotics and Culture’s historical process is emphasized through the greetings ritual in Gustave Courbet’s “Meeting” and the culture of Hand Kissing in Eastern Culture. Certain images are added to emphasize and support this paper. This paper lines up with similar works that has come before it in terms of content, at the same time, it shall be a guide to studies that are going to come after it.
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The article seeks to answer the question what it is about the place which is called home in John McGahern’s novel That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002), i.e. what it is that substantiates it and being in it and a return to it. It argues that the homeplace in the narrative of the novel is defined by two symbolic planes: home is not only a physical and material and social place/ space within a certain geography in the novel, but also is of the ontological structure which is the meeting point of two trajectories that cross over: one of them is the vertical − the sacred, the other is the horizontal − the profane. The sacred puts into communication the three placial / spatial geographies in the narrative − heaven, earth and underworld; the profane marks the historical and the linear. It is within the homeplace in the narrative of the novel that existential being opens up through the tensions between the sacred and the profane. To build the argument, the paper draws on Mircea Eliade’s hermeneutics in The Sacred and the Profane (1959), Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954), and Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism (1961).
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The paper explores the image as a form of psychic reflection of reality in thought encoding, objectivation, and perception processes. The image is an element of the universal object code, the basis of thinking, and the underlying structure of language units. Psycholinguistic experiments prove that the semantics of language units can be reduced to a sensory image. In its actual being, the image correlative of the language sign can be compressed to a minimum, which definitely does not exclude its decompression. Apart from individual images, in the linguistic consciousness of a language community, there exist the so-called stereotypical images, serving as social standards in the cognitive process and as summarizing the empirical knowledge of language users. In the production and perception of texts, social images ensure the predictable impact on a person’s consciousness and emotions.
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The article addresses the topic of great ape–keeper tactile communication. The aim of this paper is to understand whether direct physical contact can be considered a source of enrichment for captive apes and whether it could be used to enhance animal welfare in zoos. We make use of a multispecies perspective provided by umwelt theory in an attempt to determine the role of touch in zoological gardens. By referring to Konrad Lorenz, we describe keeper–animal relationships as a special case of companionship, highlighting the role of keepers in apes’ social behaviour. The paper considers social touch as the primary means used by social animals to create and maintain increasingly complex relationships. Since tactile communication in interspecific contexts has been underestimated previously, our theoretical framework allows for a better understanding of physical contact in zoological gardens without assuming an anthropocentric point of view. Our hypothesis is that physical contact with keepers may provide enriching opportunities for social animals and help strengthen the bond between animals and their keepers. We emphasize that ape–animal interactions in zoos need to involve keeper–animal physical contact as a possible means for enhancing the apes’ welfare.
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