I develop a theory of learning grounded in Charles Peirce’s semiotics. This endeavour comes in th... more I develop a theory of learning grounded in Charles Peirce’s semiotics. This endeavour comes in the context of the iconic (phenomenological) turn in semiotics, which resulted in a Peircean renaissance, and of the growing semiotic trend in education. Peirce’s semiotics offers insights into the phenomenon of learning and contains an implicit philosophy of education. The application of Peirce’s phenomenological categories to education reveals the semiosic character of education. Learning, education, and research constitute a triad, having the structure of a sign (phenomenon of signification). As such, they are correspondingly governed by Peirce’s three criteria of evolution: chance, necessity, and love. Therefore, Peirce’s theory of education can only be understood in the context of his theory of evolution. I develop three central arguments: (1) that according to Peirce’s taxonomy of signs, learning is the evolution of signification from the Icon sign type to the Argument sign type, (2) that learning is the Universe’s way of discovering itself through life forms, thus being both an evolutionary factor and an explanation for the emergence of life and (3) that learning can only be fulfilled in self-denying love for the other. Using Peirce’s taxonomy of signs I analyse the student/teacher relation, explaining how the passage from Icon to Argument proceeds and how learning is fulfilled in self-denying love.
This study develops a biosemiotic framework for a descriptive phenomenology. We incorporate the s... more This study develops a biosemiotic framework for a descriptive phenomenology. We incorporate the set utterance-genre-lifeworld in biosemiotic theory by paralleling it with the Peircean-Uexküllean notions of sign, habit, and Umwelt (respectively). This framework for empirical semiotic studies aims to complement the concepts of affordance and scaffold, as applied in studies on learning. The paper also contributes to bridging Bakhtinian-Hallidayian-Habermasian views on utterance, genre, and lifeworld with biosemiotics. We exploit the possibility that biosemiotics offers to bring together hermeneutic and phenomenological analysis. We relate these views to integrated levels in a systemic framework for communication. Signs are seen as interdependent construction elements in utterances. Repeated use of utterances in shifting contexts generates shared recognizable kinds of communication, or genres. 'Life-genre' is used in a zoo-communication context, to avoid anthropocentrism. Life-genre serves animals' life-functions. Genres make up a systemic network of communicational resources, along with the related concepts of event, affordance, and scaffold. Utterance, genre, and lifeworld have five aspects, constituting an integrative approach to communication: form, content, act, time, and space. Semiosis and positioning are processes that connect aspects and levels. Levels, aspects, and processes make up the framework as a system. While biosemiotics supports a phenomenological notion of life-genre, in turn, this notion also contributes to the development of the former, bridging a gap between organisms' sign experience on a micro-level and organisms' phenomenal lifeworld/Umwelt. Comparisons of lifeworld and Umwelt reveal that, although not identical, these are sufficiently similar to be perceived as an overall macro-level for signs and communication. Starting from a construal of utterance and genre as dynamic, dialogical, and reciprocal, genre is positioned as meso-level, mediating between signs in utterances and the lifeworld/Umwelt level. We propose genres, understood as semiotic scaffoldings built through affordances, as an analytical concept to capture meso-level phenomena. Scaffolding is determined by both ongoing
This article is based on the presentation we gave at the Juri Lotman Centenary International Cong... more This article is based on the presentation we gave at the Juri Lotman Centenary International Congress, “Juri Lotman’s Semiosphere,” Tallinn and Tartu, Estonia, 25-28 February 2022.
This paper examines the Great Kanon (also Great Canon; in the original Greek, Ὁ Μέγας Κανών) of St Andrew of Crete (ca. 660–740) as a case study in how religious ritual texts deploy autocommunicative processes. To study this complex liturgical hymn that occupies a key role in the ritual practice of Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic Christians we employ a theoretical framework rooted primarily in Juri Lotman’s theory of autocommunication, as complemented by more recent developments in social and cognitive semiotics, particularly ideas of multimodality and viewpoint. We find that the Great Kanon performs a variety of autocommunicative functions, primarily through its provision of a rhetorical metalanguage for the interpretation of the Old and New Testaments. This is a metalanguage which is multimodally enacted in ritual performance. The process makes the believer’s experience of reading the Bible an open and unfolding dialogue, in which the viewpoints of biblical characters beco...
This paper sets a framework for using semiotics as an analytical method for Earth system science.... more This paper sets a framework for using semiotics as an analytical method for Earth system science. It illustrates the use of such a method by analysing a dataset consisting of 32,383 abstracts of research articles pertaining to Earth system science, modelled as semantic networks. The analysis allows us to explain the epistemological advantages of this method as originating in the systems thinking common in both Earth system science and semiotics. The purpose of this methodological proposal is that of bringing the recent and critical planetary boundaries framework to the attention of ecosemiotics and biosemiotic criticism, and vice versa. Ecosemiotics is a branch of the biosemiotic modelling theory and is thus grounded in Charles Peirce's schematic semiotics, but also developed in inspiration of Juri Lotman's systemic semiotics. Both of these foundations of ecosemiotics are compatible with the rationale of Earth system science, given the schematism of Peirce's semiotics and Lotman's notion of meaning as an affordance of the biosphere. Far from exhausting the hermeneutic possibilities evoked by the discussed dataset, we argue that such semiotic analysis, made possible by the digital capacity of modelling large amounts of data, reveals new horizons for semiotic analysis, particularly regarding humans' modelling of the environment.
Reading History: Education, Semiotics, and Edusemiotics
This chapter explores the common history shared by semiotics and educational theory. By looking a... more This chapter explores the common history shared by semiotics and educational theory. By looking at some of the major moments in the history of semiotics, the chapter elucidates the co-evolution of education and semiotics. The entanglement of education and semiotics, due to their common roots in the hermeneutics of medieval mystical theology, later effectuated some anthropological and ecological bearings that edusemiotics takes into consideration. If we, humans, are the interpreters of the world, we can co-create, ‘read’ and ‘write’ the semiotic reality, the reality of signs, both linguistic and extralinguistic. The chapter critically examines some important texts in the history of philosophy from the perspective of semiotics and in view of the relational dynamics between man and cosmos and their co-evolution. Reading and interpreting the texts by St. Augustine, Ibn Arabi and others elucidates the holistic approach to educational philosophy in conjunction with metaphysics. The chapter contrasts the rich semiotic legacy through history with the non-semiotic dualist philosophy of modernity that oriented education toward utilitarian curriculum thus dismissing the relevance of the body and material environment for the learning process. The chapter stresses the ecological bearing of edusemiotics and considers its present position as a proper continuation of the medieval liberal education project while also acknowledging the importance of contemporary research across biosemiotics and edusemiotics.
This article reviews and discusses some the main aspects of the growing edusemiotic research move... more This article reviews and discusses some the main aspects of the growing edusemiotic research movement. The authors briefly explore the historical antecedents to educational semiotics in antiquity, before going on to discuss edusemiotic’s fundamental “triadic” (non-dualistic) orientation. They focus on the use of Peirce’s categorical semiotic philosophy to conceptualize educational dynamics; the alignment of edusemiotics with biosemiotics; the relevance of Thomas Sebeok’s modeling theories to education; and the primacy of iconicity in learning. Throughout the article, it is emphasized how edusemiotics doesnotmean semiotics applied to education, as a pedagogical aid or teaching/research tool, but is rather, “thinking” semiotics as the foundation for educational theory and practice at large (cf. Stables and Semetsky, 2015).
This paper examines the Great Kanon (also Great Canon; in the original Greek, Ὁ Μέγας Κανών) of S... more This paper examines the Great Kanon (also Great Canon; in the original Greek, Ὁ Μέγας Κανών) of St Andrew of Crete (ca. 660–740) as a case study in how religious ritual texts deploy autocommunicative processes. To study this complex liturgical hymn that occupies a key role in the ritual practice of Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic Christians we employ a theoretical framework rooted primarily in Juri Lotman’s theory of autocommunication, as complemented by more recent developments in social and cognitive semiotics, particularly ideas of multimodality and viewpoint. We find that the Great Kanon performs a variety of autocommunicative functions, primarily through its provision of a rhetorical metalanguage for the interpretation of the Old and New Testaments. This is a metalanguage which is multimodally enacted in ritual performance. The process makes the believer’s experience of reading the Bible an open and unfolding dialogue, in which the viewpoints of biblical characters beco...
An Embodied Approach to Intercultural Communication
Handbuch Chemische Reaktoren, 2019
The main stake for a semiotic theory of multiculturalism consists in understanding communication ... more The main stake for a semiotic theory of multiculturalism consists in understanding communication in cross- and inter-cultural contexts. This chapter explains how the semiotic approach to multiculturalism, as developed in this book, questions the main lines of argumentation in intercultural communication theories. The first observation is that, in view of an embodied and multimodal construal of meaning, no communicational instance can be labelled as non-intercultural, just like no particular translation can be monomodal. This hypothesis is pursued on account of the argument that an embodied notion of meaning implies that organisms’ modelling of environments is a process of design, wherein resources are used according to competences. Such design loops lead to new competences, which make possible the discovery of new resources and, thus, the acquisition of higher degrees of semiotic freedom. The concept of text here becomes useful as it allows for an exploration of modelling as morphological, in conjunction with insights from typographic design. From this unified semiotic perspective, every communicational act supposes a translation, which is always multimodal. The implications of regarding higher degrees of inter-culturality in communication as corresponding to higher degrees of multimodality are explored.
If all knowing comes from semiosis, more concepts should be added to the semiotic toolbox. Howeve... more If all knowing comes from semiosis, more concepts should be added to the semiotic toolbox. However, semiotic concepts must be defined via other semiotic concepts. We observe an opportunity to advance the state-of-the-art in semiotics by defining concepts of cognitive processes and phenomena via semiotic terms. In particular, we focus on concepts of relevance for theory of knowledge, such as learning, knowing, affordance, scaffolding, resources, competence, memory, and a few others. For these, we provide preliminary definitions from a semiotic perspective, which also explicates their interrelatedness. Redefining these terms this way helps to avoid both physicalism and psychologism, showcasing the epistemological dimensions of environmental situatedness through the semiotic understanding of organisms' fittedness with their environments. Following our review and presentation of each concept, we briefly discuss the significance of our embedded redefinitions in contributing to a semiotic theory of knowing that has relevance to both the humanities and the life sciences, while not forgetting their relevance to education and psychology, but also social semiotic and multimodality studies.
Uploads
Books by Alin Olteanu
Peirce’s semiotics offers insights into the phenomenon of learning and contains an implicit philosophy of education. The application of Peirce’s phenomenological categories to education reveals the semiosic character of education. Learning, education, and research constitute a triad, having the structure of a sign (phenomenon of signification). As such, they are correspondingly governed by Peirce’s three criteria of evolution: chance, necessity, and love. Therefore, Peirce’s theory of education can only be understood in the context of his theory of evolution.
I develop three central arguments: (1) that according to Peirce’s taxonomy of signs, learning is the evolution of signification from the Icon sign type to the Argument sign type, (2) that learning is the Universe’s way of discovering itself through life forms, thus being both an evolutionary factor and an explanation for the emergence of life and (3) that learning can only be fulfilled in self-denying love for the other. Using Peirce’s taxonomy of signs I analyse the student/teacher relation, explaining how the passage from Icon to Argument proceeds and how learning is fulfilled in self-denying love.
Papers by Alin Olteanu
This paper examines the Great Kanon (also Great Canon; in the original Greek, Ὁ Μέγας Κανών) of St Andrew of Crete (ca. 660–740) as a case study in how religious ritual texts deploy autocommunicative processes. To study this complex liturgical hymn that occupies a key role in the ritual practice of Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic Christians we employ a theoretical framework rooted primarily in Juri Lotman’s theory of autocommunication, as complemented by more recent developments in social and cognitive semiotics, particularly ideas of multimodality and viewpoint. We find that the Great Kanon performs a variety of autocommunicative functions, primarily through its provision of a rhetorical metalanguage for the interpretation of the Old and New Testaments. This is a metalanguage which is multimodally enacted in ritual performance. The process makes the believer’s experience of reading the Bible an open and unfolding dialogue, in which the viewpoints of biblical characters beco...