Mogućnost Komunikacije u Svijetu Višeznačnosti

Author(s): Mate Penava / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 4/2015

The main focal point of the paper will be the problem of communication. is problem will be addressed from multiple angles, with the theoretical viewpoint typical for philosophy. General questions like the possibility of communication and its sources will be presented through some specific problems like the problem of following a rule, critique of essentialism and an adequate theory of communication or, more specifically, conversation. Authorities in this field, like Frege, Wittgenstein, Searle, Kripke and Grice will be consulted to provide a background for the theses of the paper.

Visual Metaphors in Communication: Intertextual Semiosis and Déjà Vu in Print Advertising

Author(s): Evripides Zantides / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2016

Metaphor, as a concept in which a signified is applied to a signifier that is not literally applicable, does not only refer to speech or verbal language, but also to a wide use of practical applications in visual communication, particularly in advertising design and communication. The metaphorical rhetoric in advertisements is a common practice often used to attract the viewers’ attention, as well as enhance the persuasiveness of messages. From a cognitive perspective, semiosis in the process of visual metaphors in communication, is a complex subject with often a variety of subjective interpretations on behalf of the viewers. Intertextuality, as another form of metaphoric communication that depends on pre-existingtexts (verbal or non-verbal), produces meanings that often deal with parody, sarcasm or irony. Additionally, they are also frequently characterised as anarchistic and provocative, because of the anti-advertising or anti-consumerism/social statements they make.The current study aims to present a literature review on how visual metaphors are defined in printa dvertising, and build on this to examine the notion of intertextuality as a form of déjà vu-metaphor that is popular in advertising and graphic communication.Semiotic analysis as a methodology is used on a purposive sample of print advertisements—including examples of logotypes as well—in order to categorize thematically the major typological references, in respect of intertextual advertising, as well as extract ideological conclusions.The results show that intertextuality in advertising draws its sources of meaning mainly from the Film industry, Art, Monuments and places, Literary texts and Graphic and Advertising itself, whilst, as far as logos is concerned, the source of meaning is purely linguistic. The study also shows that Intertextual visual metaphor semiosis has a variety of popular verbal or non-verbal references and depends on the socio-political context of the sample under investigation.

Pewne problemy z komutatywnością "i" koniunkcyjnego

Author(s): Elżbieta Magner / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2019

Les disciples de King Kong

Author(s): Ciprian Vălcan / Language(s): French Issue: 24/2019

Pour le regard sans illusions de Ciprian Vălcan, le monde posthistorique est une collection de farces et de fanfaronnades grotesques qui ne réussissent pas à masquer le glissement vers le vide. // In Ciprian Vălcan’s unaffected view, the post-historic world is a collection of inconsistent pranks and grotesque blusters that fail to mask the slip towards void.

Towards the semiotics of the future: From anticipation to premediation

Author(s): Katre Pärn / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2021

The paper aims to make a contribution to semiotic research on the future by bringing together various approaches that deal with the relationship humans have with the future. More specifically, the paper concentrates on anticipation viewed as an activity that is based on modelling the (un)desired future as suggested by Nikolai Bernstein. The model-based approach to anticipation allows drawing connections between the psychophysiological and semiotically mediated forms of anticipation on the one hand, and between individual and collective forms of anticipation on the other hand. With these aims in mind, the paper offers a sketch of a semiotic approach to the future that is based on the framework of semiotic modelling systems, i.e. views the future in terms of models of it and the semiotic resources and processes involved in the model-building. As the semiotically mediated models of the future circulating in a culture can become collectively shared means of cognizing and anticipating some futures, it is possible to talk about a collective anticipation, analogous to Juri Lotman’s cultural semiotic notion of collective memory. Accordingly, premediation, a future-oriented media practice outlined by Richard Grusin, is viewed as an example of collective anticipation. In addition to tracing the mechanisms of anticipation from its individual organismic to semiotically mediated collective forms, the paper foregrounds also the two fundamental problems that run across the diverse theoretical perspectives brought together within the approach: the individual and collective agency in future-making and the affective dimension of anticipation.

Towards an integration of two aspects of semiosis – A cognitive semiotic perspective

Author(s): Piotr Konderak / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2021

Meaning-making processes, understood hierarchically, in line with the Semiotic Hierarchy framework, change on various timescales. To account for and predict these changes, one can take a cognitive view on semiosis. I adopt an interdisciplinary approach combining semiotic studies and cognitive studies in an attempt to account for meaning-making activity and to predict the course of semiosis. In this context, I consider meaning-making activity as shaped by both “external” (to a semiotic system) as well as “internal” factors. I also show how both the “external” and “internal” sources of the dynamicity of meaning-making should be framed in terms of studies on cognition. I start with a non-standard, 4e approach to meaning-making. According to this framework, meaning-making processes are constituted by (and not just dependent on) environmental and bodily factors. The dynamicity of semiosis can be accounted for in terms of an experiencing, embodied subject (agent) enacting her/his/its own domain of meaningful phenomena. As I argue, this perspective on meaning-making is the cognitive foundation of the first two levels of the Semiotic Hierarchy. In the following sections I present the Peircean view on signs and semiosis, according to which semiosis is a result of the very nature of a sign and a sign system. In this view, the dynamicity of semiosis has primarily “internal” sources: it stems from the unavoidable fallibility of interpretation and synechism of signs. As I show, this aspect of semiosis can be addressed by means of standard (cognitivist) cognitive science and by means of cognitive modelling. Ultimately, I sketch a proposal of an attempt to develop a uniform cognitive framework allowing for integration of the above-mentioned aspects of semiosis – a framework based on Rowlands’ idea of the Amalgamated Mind.

FICTIONAL CHARACTERS AND THEIR NAMES

Author(s): Hanoch Ben-Yami / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

Fictional characters do not really exist. Names of fictional characters refer to fictional characters. We should divorce the idea of reference from that of existence (the picture of the name as a tag has limited applications; the Predicate Calculus, with its existential quantifier, does not adequately reflect the relevant concepts in natural language; and model theory, with its domains, might also have been misleading). Many puzzle-cases are resolved this way (among other things, there is no problem assigning negative existential statements the appropriate truth values). And fictional characters, although not existing, have real powers through their representations, which are real.

FICTIONAL NAMES, PARAFICTIONAL STATEMENTS AND MOVES ACROSS THE BORDER (DISCUSSION WITH FRANÇOIS RECANATI)

Author(s): Petr Koťátko / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

The paper focuses on fictional discourse, discourse about fiction and dynamic relations between them. The immediate impulse came from François Recanati and his recent analysis of parafictional statements (performed by uttering sentences like “in Conan Doyle’s stories, Sherlock Holmes is a detective who solves mysteries”). Confrontation of basic theoretical assumptions concerning functions of fictionals names, status of fictional characters, the role of pretence, etc. (Sections 1 and 2) results in an alter¬native analysis: unlike Recanati’s version, it does not assume the switch to the mode of pretence as an ineliminable part of parafictional statements (3, 4). The author’s aim is not to replace one analysis by its rival but to show that the same sentence can be used not only to perform various functions, but also to perform the same (here: parafictional) function in various ways—and generally to demonstrate the variety of language games going on in this sphere (5). Special attention is paid to their specific dynamics, including fluctuation between “serious” and fictional mode of speech and re-evaluations of the status of previous utterances, serving to preserve the continuity of conversation or restore it on a new basis (6).

THE IDENTITY OF FICTIONAL CHARACTERS

Author(s): ENRICO GROSSO / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

Fictional characters elicit prima facie conflicting intuitions. On the one hand, a fictional character seems linked to the particular work of fiction (a novel, a poem, a movie, etc.) in which it appears: Ulysses is described in one way in Homer’s epic poems, in another way in Virgil’s Aeneid, and in a still different way in Dante’s Divine Comedy. It is natural to distinguish Homer’s Ulysses from Virgil’s and Dante’s ones, since each of them has specific properties. On the other hand, we have the strong temptation to think that Ulysses is the same fictional character that persists in the passage from one poem to another, despite the change of features. The article tackles this kind of problems by focusing on the cognitive side. By adopting the theory of mental files, I will argue that all issues on the identity of literary characters here presented can be addressed without assuming the existence of fictional objects. Presumption of co-reference between multiple depictions of a given literary character is represented in our mind by means of a network of files, each one indexed to a work of fiction in which the character appears. Indexed files have a meta-representational function, so they do not need acquaintance with real objects. Linked indexed files do not refer, but still a unique reference is presuppose. They would have the same referent, if there was one.

PROPER NAMES AS DEMONSTRATIVES IN FICTION

Author(s): Maciej Tarnowski / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

In this article, I argue for two theses. The first is that, among different existing accounts of proper name semantics, indexicalism—a stance that treats proper names as indexical expressions—is best suited to explaining various phenomena exhibited by the use of proper names in fictional discourse. I will discuss these phenomena and compare the solutions offered by traditional descriptivist and causal-historical theories of proper name reference with those proposed by indexicalists. Subsequently, I will offer a novel account of indexicalism about proper names, which uses the apparatus of so-called hybrid expressions (Ciecierski, 2020; Künne, 1992; Predelli, 2006) as an alternative to traditional Kaplanian semantics for demonstratives. I offer an argument explaining why, among the variety of indexical views, one should favour such a hybrid theory over other available ones (e.g., Pelczar, Rainsbury, 1998; Rami, 2014) based on the analysis of “distributed utterances” (McCullagh, 2020) and statements that employ more than one fictional context.

WHERE NOT TO LOOK FOR FICTIONAL OBJECTS

Author(s): ELISA PAGANINI / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

Philosophers discuss whether we should commit ourselves to fictional objects or not. There is a test—quite widespread among philosophers—to settle the matter: if fictional objects are required to give an adequate semantic/pragmatic analysis of either intra-fictional or extra-fictional sentences, then we are committed to them; if we can account for this analysis without them, we are not so committed. I am going to consider this test and I will claim that on its own it cannot be considered a definitive test.

ARE EMPTY NAMES ALL THE SAME?

Author(s): Mirco Sambrotta / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

The chief purpose of this paper is to advance a defence of the old-fashioned view that empty names are neither proper names nor any other kind of interpretable expressions. A view of this sort usually makes it easy to account for the meaning of first-order sentences in which they occur in subject position: taken literally, they express no fully-fledged particular propositions, are not truth-evaluable, cannot be used to make assertions and so on. Yet, semantic issues arise when those very sentences are embedded in the scope of propositional attitude verbs. Such (intensional) constructions, indeed, turn out to be literally meaningful, truth-evaluable, and eligible for making assertions. The novel solution put forward here is to combine a version of sententialism with the idea that de dicto reports play a distinctive kind of metalinguistic expressive function. Roughly, that of enabling the ascriber to make explicit a mismatch between the way the embedded sentences are used by the ascribee and the way they are ordinarily used ̶ and, in turn, a mismatch between the way the (empty) names occurring in them are used by the ascribee and the way they are ordinarily used. Fictional names are then regarded as a mere subset of empty names. Accordingly, the above strategy is applied to account for the meaning and use of parafictional (and fictional) sentences and fictional vocabulary in general.

THE SPEECH ACT OF NAMING IN FICTIONAL DISCOURSE

Author(s): AMALIA HARO MARCHAL / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

This paper argues that García-Carpintero’s theory of proper names (the Mill-Frege theory) and his theory of fiction-making do not work well together. On the one hand, according to the Mill-Frege theory, proper names have metalinguistic senses which are involved in ancillary presuppositions. These metalinguistic senses and the name-bearing relation depend on acts of naming that create words for referential use. On the other hand, his theory of fiction-making claims that when the creator of a fiction uses sentences, she is not really performing the speech acts that one typically performs with those uses in default contexts; instead, they are merely pretended acts. Specifically, when she uses the sentences that typically perform speech acts of naming in default contexts, she merely pretends to do so. In this situation, these acts do not establish a name-bearing relation and thus these acts do not have a semantic significance. This result entails a flawed conceptualization of the speech act of fiction-making; specifically, one where such speech act is rendered defective.

DESCRIPTIVE NAMES, RIGIDITY, AND DIRECT REFERENCE

Author(s): Filip Kawczyński / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

In the paper, I argue against Dummett’s and Stanley’s objections to the direct reference theory. Dummett and Stanley make use of the notorious descriptive names to formulate the objection against Kaplan’s argument in favour of the direct reference theory. Kaplan argued that difference in modal behaviour of sentences is a reason to regard some singular terms appearing in the sentences as directly referential. Dummett ad Stanley argue, on the other hand, that in the case of descriptive names and the descriptions used to fix the reference of the names, the modal difference between sentences arises merely from the fact that descriptive names are rigid, while descriptions are not. There is no reason then to claim that being directly or indirectly referential has anything to do with the modal differences between sentences. What I attempt to show in the paper is that Dummett and Stanley made wrong assumptions about the modal properties of descriptive names and the descriptions that are used to fix the reference of such names. In Section 1, I characterise descriptive names and discuss some controversies that they create. Section 2 is devoted to the review of Kaplan’s argument for the direct reference theory, while Section 3 presents Dummett’s and Stanley’s arguments against direct reference. In section 4, I raise two preliminary objections against Dummett’s and Stanley’s positions. In Section 5, I discuss in detail “the great mystery” of rigidity of descriptive names which in my opinion lies at the bottom of the whole issue of descriptive names and direct reference. I argue, contrary to Dummett and Stanley, that descriptive names and their mother descriptions have the same modal properties. The last section includes conclusions and presents how the results from the previous parts of the paper affect the arguments of Dummett and Stanley.

NAMES OF INSTITUTIONS

Author(s): Katarzyna Kijania-Placek / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

This paper advances the thesis that the proper names of some institutions, such as the names of universities, heads of state and certain positions or agencies, inherit the linguistic types of the nouns which denote the basic category of the objects that the names refer to, e.g., “university”, “school” or “company”. A reference by those names may select particular aspects of institutions, in the same way that “city” or “book” selects the physical, legal or informational aspects of objects in the extension of the nouns. This view is based on Asher’s and Pustejovsky’s conception of dot-type semantics.

E. E. CONSTANCE JONES ON EXISTENCE IN FICTION AND IMAGINATION

Author(s): BEN CAPLAN / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

E. E. Constance Jones (1848–1922) was one of the first women to study philosophy at the University of Cambridge. On her view, “Dorothea” (from George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch) applies to a fictional character, which has existence in fiction, and “fairy” applies to fairies, which have existence in imagination. She proposes a novel account of negative existentials, on which “fairies are non-existent” is both meaningful and true, given that there are at least two kinds of existence: one that fairies have (so that we can talk about them) and another that they lack (so that we can truly say that they “are non-existent”). Contrary to Russell’s objection in The Principles of Mathematics, accounting for negative existentials does not require distinguishing existence and being, nor does it require rejecting the existential theory of judgment (according to which every sentence is about something that exists).

NORMS OF SPEECH ACTS

Author(s): Grzegorz Gaszczyk / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

This paper offers a systematic classification and characterization of speech acts and their norms. Recently, the normative approach has been applied to various speech acts, most notably to constatives. I start by showing how the work on the norms of assertion has influenced various approaches to the norms of other speech acts. I focus on the fact that various norms of assertion have different extensions, i.e., they denote different clusters of illocutions as belonging to an assertion. I argue that this has consequences for theorising about norms of other speech acts and generates certain arbitrary divisions. In the central part, I analyse two groups of speech acts. Firstly, ordinary speech acts, like predictions or retractions. Secondly, I indicate how the normative view can be extended to so-called ancillary speech acts, like presuppositions or implicatures. I end with a discussion of possible extensions of the normative approach, focusing on the debate on lying.

INSINUATIONS, INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS, AND DENIABILITY

Author(s): ANTONIO MONACO / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

Insinuations are indirect speech acts done for various reasons: a speaker S may insinuate P (i) because an insinuation is more polite, and S can save face by non-explicitly saying P (Brown, Levinson, 1987; Searle, 1975), (ii) because S can deny having insinuated P and avoid the responsibility of explicitly stating P, or (iii) because S perceives herself to be in a competitive rather than cooperative conversation, and she wants to pursue her interests strategically (Asher, Lascarides, 2013; Camp, 2018; Lee, Pinker, 2010; Pinker et al., 2008). These views assume that to insinuate P, S must also intend to use the deniability of P for dealing with a possible non-cooperative hearer. I argue that this requirement is too strong and falls short of accounting for cases in which S intentionally performs a deniable indirect speech act, but S has no intention to use that deniability.

INTENTION AND RESPONSIBILITY IN DEMONSTRATIVE REFERENCE. A VIEW FROM THE SPEECH ACT THEORY

Author(s): Maciej Witek / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

Korta and Perry (2011) argue that the object a speaker refers to with a demonstrative expression combined with a pointing gesture is determined by her directing intention rather than by her demonstration. They acknowledge that our use of the ordinary concept of “what is said” is affected by our judgements about the speaker’s responsibility for the results of her careless pointing; however, they claim that the effects are perlocutionary and have no bearing on determining the referential content of the speaker’s act.I argue that the consequences of careless pointing are illocutionary and play a role in determining demonstrative reference. I also distinguish between two types of referential content which are attributable to the speaker’s utterance and shape its discursive behaviour: what is intended, which is determined by the speaker’s directing intention, and what is public, which depends on what she can legitimately be held responsible for.

ZJAWISKO PRESUPOZYCJI Z PUNKTU WIDZENIA TEORII AKTÓW MOWY

Author(s): Marek Nowak / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2022

The paper is an attempt to express the concept of Strawsonian presupposition in terms of speech act theory. A comparison of existing in pragmatics two concepts of presupposition: Strawsonian propositional presupposition with a presupposition asa preparatory condition ofillocutionary force, leads to the conclusion that both kinds of presuppositions are completely different. Whereas in the light of linguistic intuition, additionally based on Austin (1962), it might seem that only one kind of presuppositionsexists: the preparatory condi-tions. This means that a propositional presupposition presupposed by given sentence is reducible, in a sense, to a preparatory condition of the illocutionary act performed by utterance of the sentence. Such hypothesis is justified here by evokingsome examples of propositional presuppositions presupposed by sen-tences used to perform the elementary illocutionary acts of different types.