Semiotics as science

Jornal Internacional de Estudos em Educação Matemática, 2020

That language is essential to the human nature has never been doubted. However, nowadays it becomes more and more obvious that language is not enough to characterize our destinations, because the relationship between nature and society seem essential when reflecting on the development or destination of humanity. Starting from the belief that semiotics provides the basis of a new conceptualization and understanding of humanity in its relations to nature as well as within the context of social history this paper tries to introduce some related semiotic concepts and provide basic orientations for further research in the philosophy of science as well as cognitive theory. Keywords: Saussure. Peirce. Semiotics. Complementarity of intension and extension. Resumo Que a linguagem é essencial para a natureza humana jamais foi posta em dúvida. No entanto, atualmente torna-se cada vez mais evidente que a linguagem não é suficiente para caracterizar nossos destinos, pois a relação entre natu...

SHORT COURSE of GENERAL SEMIOTICS, 2022

My first book on semiotics was published in Moscow in 1992; it was called "Language as a Sign System". After that, I wrote and published many books and articles, trying to understand the intricacies of semiotics and highlight its main characteristics. Over time, some of my views have undergone metamorphoses, and I have adjusted my earlier statements to express new formulations. Now, on the threshold of my 95th birthday, I want to sum up my vacillations and doubts in a short concluding essay, which seems to me worthy of attention. Whether this is really so, is for the readers to judge. I want to say a few words about what general semiotics means. De facto, semiotics originated in ancient Greece and Rome − no science or craft can exist without its own signs. But only at the end of the 19th century did a movement arise for the creation of semiotics that would formulate general principles for all branches of this science. In contrast to particular semiotics, such science can be called general semiotics.

2012

When the Managing Editors of this journal asked us to undertake this special issue on the position of semiotics in the vast domain of contemporary cultural studies, we accepted with great pleasure, given our personal involvement with structuralism and semiotics during nearly half a century. While we ourselves work within the tradition of semiotics defined by Ferdinand de Saussure in the early years of the 20 century as the study of how sign systems function in the life of society, we did not limit the scope of this volume to classical Saussurean semiotics (or semiology, as it is also known). In our Call for papers we asked for submissions “on all aspects of semiotics, focusing on analysis informed by a reflexive theoretical and methodological awareness” and it is our hope that readers will find these qualities in the papers selected. It has become something of a ritual in introductory courses, handbooks and papers on semiotics to pay respects to the two founders of the discipline, F...

World Wide Web

In this paper we present an overview of semiotics with particular emphasis on those concepts that offer promise to psychologists. We make no pretense that we are able to represent semiotics as that term is always used. We believe that most semioticians would agree, however, that semiotic theory offers the position that a wide variety of problems in modern inquiry, taken from a number of different disciplines, are actually special cases of one general set of problems: What is a sign? How does it work? How can I use it? Once the commonalities among all these inquiries are recognized, a substantial bonus is realized: researchers from a variety of disciplines who adopt a semiotic viewpoint become able to communicate across those disciplines and share valuable insights. We conclude with a series of short reviews of books on semiotics.

2022

Semiotics, collective and politics. The case of people Applied semiotics have been practicing the analysis of political discourse for a very long time, and more recently the analysis of political practices and interactions, but without the political dimension being considered as a structuring element of the theoretical and methodological organon of semiotics. Politics, in this case, would be just one object of study among others, such as advertising, photography, literature or electronic social networks. Yet another approach is possible, which targets politics as a semiotic problematic, and not just as an object of study; in other words: a political dimension integrated into the global architecture of semiotics. Therefore, we must choose an epistemological horizon and an entry point that allows such integration. This horizon will be that of anthropology, a semiotic anthropology that teaches us and insists that the political dimension of our societies, our civilizations, our daily worlds begin with the choice of a collective reference actant. This collective reference actant will be our entry point: what is it made up of? how is it constituted? how and why is it maintained? what are the possibilities and limits of its metamorphosis? what repositories is it on the initiative of and is it carrying? what is the nature of its interactions with the individual actants that compose it? with other collective actants? Etc. Today, for example, it seems to go without saying in intellectual and academic circles (cf. the popularity of the actor-network theory) that the relevant collective actants, those who can refer to, facing the challenges of our common future, must necessarily be heterogeneous, and include non-humans as well as humans, machines as living beings, natural elements (a river, a mountain) as much as technical or cultural artefacts. But no one can ignore that this perspective is both fundamentally political because it because it challenges the hierarchical and sectoral organization of our societies and our daily lives, and semiotic, because it deeply reconfigures the way in which we conceive our categories of analysis, in particular that of actant or that of values systems, or even the global hierarchy of our conceptual system. The main part of this conference will be devoted, first, to gradually laying down the theoretical and methodological elements which thus make it possible to integrate a political dimension into the semiotic organon, and then to examine the consequences for a type of collective actant which today constitutes a particularly problematic type of collective actant, namely the "people." Bionote Jacques FONTANILLE, born in 1948, is emeritus professor of semiotics at the University of Limoges, and honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He is also Honorary President of the International Association of Visual Semiotics, and Honorary President of the French Association of Semiotics. Jacques FONTANILLE was President of the University of Limoges from 2005 to 2012. From 2012 to 2014, he was Advisor and Chief of Staff of the French Minister of Higher Education and Research. He is the author of over two hundred and seventy scholarly publications, in the fields of theoretical semiotics, literary semiotics, visual semiotics, rhetoric and general linguistics, semiotics of practices and biosemiotics. Most of his books have been translated in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Korean, Arabic, etc. He was visiting professor or guest lecturer in eighty American, European, Asian, and African universities. Most of his former PhD students now hold faculty positions at universities in Europe

Sign Systems Studies, 2008

Semiotic and linguistic studies of the 20th century have been important mostly in two senses -(1) they have opened a road for comparative research on the origin and development of language and other systems of signs adding a new dimension to the history of culture; (2) they have shown a possibility of uniting different fields of humanities around semiotics suggesting a way to trespass separation and atomisation of different trends in investigating culture. In the 21st century one may hope for closer integration of semiotics and exact and natural sciences. The points of intersection with the mathematical logic, computer science and information theory that already exist might lead to restructuring theoretical semiotics making it a coherent and methodologically rigid discipline. At the same time, the continuation of neurosemiotic studies promises a breakthrough in understanding those parts of the work of the brain that are most intimately connected to culture. From this point of view semiotics may play an outstanding role in the synthesis of biological science and humanities. In my mind that makes it a particularly important field of future research. 1 1 This paper was presented by V. V. Ivanov in the conference "Современная семиотика в приложении к гуманитарным наукам" ("Contemporary Semiotics as Applied in Humanities") in Moscow, Aug. 30 -Sept. 1, 2007. The current publication preserves the style of the original presentation. The publication has a special historical value for Tartu School of Semiotics. Editors' note.

1995

In order to estimate the current situation of teaching materials available in the field of semiotics, we are providing a comparative overview and a worldwide bibliography of introductions and textbooks on general semiotics published within last 50 years, i.e. since the beginning of institutionalization of semiotics. In this category, we have found over 130 original books in 22 languages. Together with the translations of more than 20 of these titles, our bibliography includes publications in 32 languages. Comparing the authors, their theoretical backgrounds and the general frames of the discipline of semiotics in different decades since the 1960s makes it possible to describe a number of predominant tendencies. In the extensive bibliography thus compiled we also include separate lists for existing lexicons and readers of semiotics as additional material not covered in the main discussion. The publication frequency of new titles is growing, with a certain depression having occurred in the 1980s. A leading role of French, Russian and Italian works is demonstrated.