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(M)any Questions? A Comparison of the Use of Questions in Wittgenstein’s first 37 paragraphs of Philosophical Investigations with Austin’s essay “The Meaning of a Word”

Author(s): Blahoslav Fajmon / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2014

Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy is closely related not only to the content but also to the form of his investigations. The following paper presents the uniqueness of Wittgenstein’s writing style, namely his use of questions, by comparing part of his work with Austin’s essay. For this purpose a typology of questions with regard to their function in the text is established and applied. The difference between Wittgenstein’s and Austin’s writing style is then documented by the frequency of certain types of questions, and omission of others, and related to some of Wittgenstein’s remarks about his approach to philosophical inquiry. The difference is then summarized tentatively as one between “pedagogical” and “academic” writing style, which poses questions concerning the translation of Wittgenstein’s investigations into academic prose.

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(Nie)chronologie choroby. Punktowa obecność obrazu-bólu w Miłości Michaela Hanekego

Author(s): Sebastian Porzuczek / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 1/2018

Focusing on Michael Haneke’s Amour, Porzuczek examines the mechanisms of visual (non-linguistic) representations of pain and illness in the realm of the film medium. In the Austrian film director’s work the problem of suffering is inscribed in the order of emotional tensions in family relationships. It is against this backdrop that the question of social (cultural) exclusion emerges. Porzuczek draws on notions such as Roland Barthes’s punctum and Gilles Deleuze’s time-image. Relevant issues are: a) the process of the materialization of time (through slowness) in the representation of daily struggles with illness and b) the specificity of the violent, punctual appearance of a paroxysm – analysed in terms of Porzuczek’s concept of the pain-image, which initiates an ethical (affective) encounter with the image experienced by the viewer.

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A Heritage for the Future: Hawthornesque Unfettering of the „Iron Men“

Author(s): Tihomir Živic / Language(s): English / Issue: 1-2/2014

With his Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne really wanted to unfetter the New English Puritan scions, or at least make them think what has morally degraded the “Iron Men” and destroyed a steadfast faith of the primogenitors. Hawthorne’s answer is that they have forgotten to express emotions. The Scarlet Letter thus responds to the hypothetical questions raised by the Puritan Community of the seventeenth-century New England; however, the novel is not directed against the positive traits of the Puritan New Englandism, e.g., discipline, home life, education, etc. Moreover, Hawthorne’s opus has a universal philosophical and moral sense, although its tone is usually mildened by his humanity and subtle humor. All of that enabled Hawthorne’s voice to be keenly heard in the twenty-first century as well.

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A Letter for Chuck Goodwin

Author(s): Adam Kendon / Language(s): English / Issue: 19/2018

Dear Chuck, I think the first time I ever became aware of your work was in the spring of 1973. It must have been at UCLA which I visited as a result of an invitation that Michael Moerman had arranged. On this occasion, as I recall, I also visited Irvine, and met Harvey Sacks, even stayed with him for a night in his Geodesic Dome house. Either at UCLA or perhaps during my visit to Irvine (I cannot now recall precisely) I joined a “data session” with Moerman, Schegloff , Sacks, Gail Jeff erson and perhaps one or two others, where we went over a video called “Auto Discussion”.

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A Peirce for the 21st century

Author(s): Frederik Stjernfelt / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/2018

Review of: Frederik Stjernfelt - Review of Peirce’s Speculative Grammar: Logic as Semiotics by Francesco Bellucci. New York, London: Routledge, 2017, 388 pages

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A philosophical investigation in machine understanding. The case of implicit meaning

Author(s): Maria Wilkowska / Language(s): English / Issue: 12/2013

The question of machine thinking and understanding, once initiated by Alan Turing, has puzzled scholars from various disciplines. This paper aims at investigating some of the facets involved in the topic of machine language understanding with particular interest devoted to indirect meaning comprehension (more specifically, the implicature). So far as the subject under examination – the chatbot – manages to understand directly conveyed information, still much is to be done with respect to implicit data in which everyday messages (formulated in ordinary language) abound. This situation generates a number of not only hard-science questions but also, more importantly, given the viewpoint of this paper, it gives rise to a considerable amount of philosophically- oriented and frequently neglected issues and dilemmas too. This study is a brief investigation of exactly those phenomena.

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A post-structuralist revised Weil–Lévi-Strauss transformation formula for conceptual value-fields

Author(s): James B. Harrod / Language(s): English / Issue: 2-3/2018

The structuralist André-Weil–Claude-Lévi-Strauss transformation formula (CF), initially applied to kinship systems, mythology, ritual, artistic design and architecture, was rightfully criticized for its rationalism and tendency to reduce complex transformations to analogical structures. I present a revised non-mathematical revision of the CF, a general transformation formula (rCF) applicable to networks of complementary semantic binaries in conceptual value-fields of culture, including comparative religion and mythology, ritual, art, literature and philosophy. The CF is a rule-guided formula for combinatorial conceptualizing in non-representational, presentational mythopoetics and other cultural symbolizations.

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A Revisionary View of Texts, Textual Meaning, and Fictional Characters

Author(s): Anders Pettersson / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2017

Using ideas from John Searle, Roy Harris, Michael Reddy, and Nelson Goodman, I argue that texts, such as they are commonly conceived, lack brute existence. The common idea of texts is a conceptual construction which is useful in practical everyday contexts but not in serious theorizing, where it creates illusions and contradictions. One of these illusions is the idea of an objective textual meaning, a meaning which is “in the text”: what we actually have in the way of textual meaning are the ideas of various persons – authors, readers, and commentators -- about the meaning of the text. When applied to fictional characters, this way of viewing things explains why it makes sense to regard fictional characters as being created and as lacking brute existence.

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A SEMIOTIC-AESTHETIC APPROACH TO THE ANALYSIS OF THE PRACTICE OF VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE IN HUNGARY

Author(s): Imre Gráfik / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2014

The spatial frame of the investigation is the Carpathian Basin and especially its Great Plain areas inhabited by Hungarian-speaking people; and the period it covers, which can be documented with buildings, is the 150–200 years from the second half of the 18th century to the first half of the 20th century. Examining all the elements of form which played a role in shaping the architectural image of the market town, it can be found that some of them are only barely, while others are very definitely expressions of the semiosis of market town architecture. The criteria of form are suitable for the simultaneous realisation of the following triadic relations: 1) the architectural functions archived through the technical-technological and structural solutions of building practice; 2) meanings related to the communicative nature of architecture; 3) representation of the architectural solutions of aesthetic content accepted by the taste of the community, artistic aesthetics (of architecture). As a final conclusion it can thus be said that a relative and absolute horizontal and vertical dynamics – realised with architectural signs and visually codable – operate in shaping the architectural image of the market town.

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A Structural Study on the Image of the Turk in the British Caricatures

Author(s): Evrim Ulusan Öztürkmen / Language(s): English / Issue: 91/2017

The main tool of the caricature is the “line”. The line on its own, the characteristics of the line such as being horizontal, vertical, or diagonal and its figural characteristics such as being circular, curved, diagonal, or zig-zag create different associations and semantic fields in the mind. While the line in the caricature is processed with such tools as color, texture, shadow and perspective, it creates a discourse consisting of verbal and visual patterns. In this research, the following questions were sought to be answered by examining six cartoons published in England in the magazine Punch during World War I: What kind of image of the Turk do the lines in the England caricatures create? What kind of relationship is there between the visual content and the verbal content of the caricature? What are the concepts that make up the positive and negative contents of the images of the Turk?

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A study by Umberto Eco and his colleagues on the history of early zoosemiotics: Commentary and bibliography

Author(s): Kalevi Kull / Language(s): English / Issue: 2-3/2018

The article provides a commentary on Umberto Eco’s text “Animal language before Sebeok”, and an annotated bibliography of various versions of the article on ‘latratus canis’ that Eco published together with Roberto Lambertini, Costantino Marmo, and Andrea Tabarroni.

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Accountability from a semiotic perspective

Author(s): Jonathan Grant Griffin / Language(s): English / Issue: 16/2016

Accountability in the common usage often implies something like ‘responsibility’ or a kind of judicial accounting imposed from the outside. Here our semiotic approach focuses more on the -ability part. This is more in accordance with the etymological building blocks of the term. We consider the aspect of semiosis that makes it able to be accounted for – if the full conditions for such are present. That is, what is proper to not only semiosis but to the sign relation (proper to and fundamental for semiosis) is not temporal but logical in a sense that does not depend upon the arrow of time. So if one can fix the interpretant at the appropriate angles, one can find out the “semiotic truth of the matter” in the present or in retrospect. And the only thing keeping one from being able to establish this truthful relation would be access to the interpretant in whatever domain needed. That is, we may not have current access to some domain (like someone’s internal thought life), but what keeps us from establishing the truth of the sign relation is not on the semiotic side. If we can find a way to access the relevant domain, the sign relation will “give itself up” to view. It has no agenda to collude with us in our purposes to obscure the reality of our past (or present) semiosis.

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Adaptation, learning, Bildung: Discussion with edu- and biosemiotics

Author(s): Eetu Pikkarainen / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/2018

Learning and adaptation are central problems to both edusemiotics, or semiotics of education, and biosemiotics. Bildung, as an especially human way or form of learning, and evolution as the main form of adaptation for many biologists after Darwin are often regarded as mutually exclusive concepts even though human beings are undeniably one biological species among others. In this article I will try to build a bridge between the biosemiotical, edusemiotical and Bildung-theoretical stances. Central to this discussion is biosemiotician Kalevi Kull and some of his recent publications where he considers adaptation, evolution and learning. The primary theoretical resource that I utilize here, in addition to the general Greimassian, edusemiotical and Bildungtheoretical starting points, is perceptual control theory (PCT) to which I compare the Uexküllian conception of functional circle.

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Against the Frame

Author(s): Wojciech Kalaga / Language(s): English / Issue: 1-2/2016

The paper explores theoretical foundations of the frame from two semiotic perspectives: that of the Saussurean dyadic sign dominant in the European tradition and that of the triadic sign of the Peircean/American descent. If – within the post- Saussurean agenda – meaning can be fairly easily “framed” and closed in the field of the signified, Peirce’s concepts of interpretant and infinite semiosis implement a mechanism which inherently obliterates the frame. Given this duality of approaches, the contention “No meaning without a frame” is thus true and paradoxical at the same time, and that paradox goes far beyond the Derridean concept of the parergon, which only belongs to both the inside and the outside. The frame, as construed in this paper, is not merely a material or imaginary, inactive partition, but is itself an operational agent which isolates and delineates a text ontologically as the other of the context, and simultaneously subverts that otherness by necessitating further semiosis and its own partial self-erasure. Regarding the interrelations amongst texts and between text and context, the frame is thus envisaged, and investigated in the paper, not so much as a factor of resistance or separation, but as an osmotic boundary facilitating rather than preventing a bi-directional flow of meanings. Putting this in epistemological terms, one may say that interpretation – paradoxically again –requires an enframing of its object, but at the same time it dissolves the stipulated frame and reaches beyond it.

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Aksjologiczno-pragmatyczny obraz sumienia we współczesnej polszczyźnie

Author(s): Monika Kaczor / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 2 (9)/2013

Conscience is an element of the linguistic portrayal of the human person. The manner in which conscience is conceptualized in a language certifies that it is an intellectual judgment, moral imperative, moral reflection, a force to do good and a force restraining from evil. Specific linguistic connections certify what is meant by conscience in contemporary Polish. The contexts of occurrence of conscience allow for distinguishing two orientations, which are not only characteristic of Christian thought. They are: axiological orientation and pragmatic orientation. The first can be found in texts of a legislative nature, the second – points to the sociological and psychological motivations for using the concept in a specific context. This allows for a reconstruction of the image of conscience on the basis of specific mental operations that affect the formation of specific language constructs.

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Altın Beşik Efsanesinin Yüce Ana Ekseninde Göstergebilimsel İncelenmesi

Author(s): Aynur Koçak,Serdar Gürçay / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: 3/2017

This study involves the semiotic interpretation of the high mother variant of the legend of the Golden Cradle which is a Crimean–Tatar tale. The peninsula located at the Northern Black Sea is called Crimea. Turks living there are called Tatars. Semiotics is uncovering the visible and unseen meanings within an expression or work and analyzing them through various methods. One of those models is Greimas’s Square of Opposition and it is used in this work. The word mother is a significant concept that can be seen in mythology, art, sociology and psychology at the same time. The source of its significance is the symbolic meanings it possesses which are existence (origination from the birth) also feeding and protecting. On the other hand, the Golden Cradle is the existential legend that the Crimean people projected on their future generations. This legend has various variants; the one related to high mother has its sentimental value improved as it feeds from the concept of mother. The first part of the work involves the simplified version of the story. The second part contains the interpretation of key events occurred in the course of tale also this part covers the key concepts. The third part is about the mother archetype. Mother Umay is covered in the fourth part. The importance of wolf symbolism in Turkish culture is presented in the fifth section. In the six and the last section the Greimas Square is given.

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Animal cognition, speciesism, humanism: Reflections on the notion of “semiotic animal”

Author(s): Dario Martinelli / Language(s): English / Issue: 11/2016

The goal of this article is to assess the epistemological “suitability” of humanities to discuss the question of “humanity” and “human identity”, and their reiterated dialectic opposition to “animality”. The case study shall be the notion of “semiotic animal” (Deely 2005) within the framework of similar anthropocentric definitions aimed to establish a qualitative and dualistic distinction between the human being and the other animals. The motivations behind this differentiation – it is here maintained – appear to be more ideological than methodological, as illustrated by the long history of definitions of “humanity”, as instruments for qualitative distinction from the rest of the animals. On the contrary, the article defends the thesis of the (ethical, but not only) necessity to produce certain statements on a solid empirical (or at least scientifically-informed) basis. By analyzing notions like “semiotic animal”, the article seeks to expose some of their many scientific inaccuracies and to challenge their speculative construction.

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Animal language before Sebeok

Author(s): Umberto Eco / Language(s): English / Issue: 2-3/2018

Publication of the text of Umberto Eco’s talk given at a symposium held in honour of Thomas A. Sebeok (1920–2001) in San Marino in 2002.

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Anticipation

Author(s): Andres Kurismaa / Language(s): English / Issue: 16/2016

This paper provides a short overview of anticipation as a field of enquiry that is closely related to semiotic biology. Anticipation can be seen as addressing both empirically and conceptually certain key features of (bio)semiotic processes, including their open-ended and non-deterministic structure, (self-)referential and relational features, contingency and constructiveness. Outlines are given of some main theoretical frameworks and sources informing current anticipation research. The parallel (and complementarity) between independently developed foundational traditions is highlighted, and seen as a relevant fi eld of future analysis.

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Ar Galima Semiotiką Pradėti Nuo Aristotelio? Ženklo Aiškinimas, Grįstas Hilomorfine Esaties Teorija

Author(s): Algirdas Budrevicius / Language(s): Lithuanian / Issue: 74/2013

Sign—the basic idea of semiotics—has been explored by great many philosophers since antiquity; nevertheless, as of now we do not have its ultimate and systematic theory. Peirce proposed an original and philosophically (ontologically) grounded conception of the sign. Could there be a different ontologically based conception of the sign? Could there be developed a different and ontologically based semiotics? The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the fundamentals of semiotics can be developed starting from the ideas of Aristotle. The idea of sign might be grounded on Aristotle’s account of Being and cognition considered in terms of form and matter. Various signs can be treated in terms of form and matter. Pictures, letters are signs of form. A wedding-ring is a material sign-symbol. Many signs can be treated in terms of similarity to the objects they signify: photographs, pictures, sculptures, diagrams, graphical charts, land maps, etc. It is quite natural to treat signs in terms of form and matter. The paper shows how the sign can be defined in terms of form and matter. A concrete model of sign as similarity of form (homomorphism) to the signified object is described. The structurally treated Cartesian system of coordinates is involved for articulation of the modes of Being. Intentionality as directedness of consciousness of the sign perceiver toward the signified object is used in the account of sign.

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