Jeffry H. Morrison offers readers the first comprehensive look at the political thought and career of John Witherspoon—a Scottish Presbyterian minister and one of America’s most influential and overlooked founding fathers. Witherspoon was an active member of the Continental Congress and was the only clergyman both to sign the Declaration of Independence and to ratify the federal Constitution. During his tenure as president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, Witherspoon became a mentor to James Madison and influenced (...) many leaders and thinkers of the founding period. He was uniquely positioned at the crossroads of politics, religion, and education during the crucial first decades of the new republic. Morrison locates Witherspoon in the context of early American political thought and charts the various influences on his thinking. This impressive work of scholarship offers a broad treatment of Witherspoon’s constitutionalism, including his contributions to the mediating institutions of religion and education, and to political institutions from the colonial through the early federal periods. This book will be appreciated by anyone with an interest in American political history and thought and in the relation of religion to American politics. “I have been waiting a long time for such a book on John Witherspoon. This book is not only well-researched, but well-written. The story Morrison tells is quite wonderful.” —_Michael Novak, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research_ _ _ "Dr. John Witherspoon is at once an exceptionally influential figure in Early American history, and a sadly neglected one. Professor Morrison's book fills this gap in American political history brilliantly. It is especially revealing of 18th century views on the interrationships between education, religion, and society. Morrison presents new insights into the Early American understanding of balancing faith, government, and society. It will change our conceptions of this period and provide fresh perspectives on contemporary problems. Everyone interested in the American Founding era is indebted to Morrison for this illuminating book." —_Garrett Ward Sheldon, University of Virginia's College at Wise_ "At last we have a full and learned account, as the title states, of _JOHN WITHERSPOON aND THE FOUNDING OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC_. Including discussion of Witherspoon's direct role in the crucial events of 1775-1790 as an advocate of Independence and friend of the Constitution, as a contributor to early American religious and political thought, and most important, as a mentor to James Madison and other Princeton revolutionairies and nation-builders, Morrison reveals Witherspoon's high standing in American religious, educational, and political history. Madison remembered Witherspoon's injunction to his students to 'Lead useful Lives;' he provided an excellent role model." —_Ralph Ketcham, Syracuse University_. (shrink)

This study was designed to address the issue of whether there is a general processor for the perception of emotion or whether there are separate processors. We examined the relationships among three channels of emotional communication in 100 healthy right-handed adult males and females. The channels were facial, prosodic/intonational, and lexical/verbal; both identification and discrimination tasks of emotional perception were utilised. Statistical analyses controlled for nonemotional perceptual factors and subject characteristics (i.e. demographic and general cognitive). For identification, multiple significant correlations (...) were found among the channels. For discrimination, fewer correlations were significant. Overall, these results provide support for the notion of a general processor for emotional perceptual identification in normal adult subjects. (shrink)

As the English word “scientism” is currently used, it is a trivial verbal truth that scientism—an inappropriately deferential attitude to science—should be avoided. But it is a substantial question when, and why, deference to the sciences is inappropriate or exaggerated. This paper tries to answer that question by articulating “six signs of scientism”: the honorific use of “science” and its cognates; using scientific trappings purely decoratively; preoccupation with demarcation; preoccupation with “scientific method”; looking to the sciences for answers beyond their (...) scope; denying the legitimacy or worth of non-scientific (e.g., legal or literary) inquiry, or of writing poetry or making art. (shrink)

Language is the species-specific human version of the animal system of communication. In contrast to non-human animals, language enables humans to invent a plurality of possible worlds; reflect upon signs; be responsible for our actions; gain conscious awareness of our inevitable mutual involvement in the network of life on this planet; and be responsibly involved in the destiny of the planet. The author looks at semiotics, the study of signs, symbols, and communication as developing sequentially rather than successively, more synchronically (...) than diachronically. She discusses the contemporary phenomenon that people in today's society have witnessed and participated in, as part of the development of semiotics. Although there is a long history preceding semiotics, in a sense the field is, as a phenomenon, more "of our time" than of any time past. Its leading figures, whom Petrilli examines, belong to the twentieth and twenty-first century. Semiotics is associated with a capacity for listening. This capacity is also the condition for reconnecting to and recovering the ancient vocation of semiotics as that branch of medical science relating to the interpretation of signs or symptoms. The pragmatic aspect of global semiotics studies the impact of language or signs on those who use them, and looks for consequences in actual practice. In this respect, Petrilli theorizes that the task for semiotics in the era of globalization is nothing less than to take responsibility for life in its totality. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica - Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies / Revue de l'Association Internationale de Sémiotique Volume: 2013 Issue: 196 Pages: 533-548.

The contribution that may come from the general science of signs, semiotics, to the planning and development of education and learning at all levels, from early schooling through to university education and learning should not be neglected. As Umberto Eco claims in the “Introduction” to the Italian edition of his book Semiotica and Philosophy of Language (1984: xii, my trans.), “[general semiotics] is philosophical in nature, because it does not study a particular system, but posits the general categories in light (...) of which different systems can be compared. And for general semiotics philosophical discourse is neither advisable nor urgent: it is simply constitutive.” To the title of their book Semiotic Theory of Learning, at the centre of our attention in the present text, Andrew Stables, Winfried Nöth, Alin Olteanu, Sébastien Pesce, and Eetu Pikkarainen, rightly add the subtitle New Perspectives in the Philosophy of Education. This multivoiced contribution to research in learning and education in a semiotic framework has a unifying reference in the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce, but without disregarding an array of other distinguished exponents of the teaching and education sciences from different disciplines, semioticians and philosophers alike. This book, a polyphonic effort, with its appeal to “act otherwise,” and to do so investing in learning and education, no doubt makes a significant contribution in such a direction: education for transformation, for humanizing social change. Beyond evidencing what to us are particularly interesting aspects of the topics under discussion in Semiotic Theory of Learning, we also propose to continue and amplify this multivoiced dialogue. While highlighting still other aspects and contributions made by the same semioticians and philosophers presented by the authors of this book, involving such figures as Charles Peirce, Charles Morris, Thomas Sebeok, John Deely, etc., we have further introduced other voices made to resound throughout, whether directly or indirectly, like that of Victoria Welby, Mikhail Bakhtin, Emmanuel Levinas, Adam Schaff, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Marcel Danesi, Augusto Ponzio, and Genevieve Vaughan. (shrink)

How does sign language compare with gesture, on the one hand, and spoken language on the other? Sign was once viewed as nothing more than a system of pictorial gestures without linguistic structure. More recently, researchers have argued that sign is no different from spoken language, with all of the same linguistic structures. The pendulum is currently swinging back toward the view that sign is gestural, or at least has gestural components. The goal of this review is to elucidate the (...) relationships among sign language, gesture, and spoken language. We do so by taking a close look not only at how sign has been studied over the past 50 years, but also at how the spontaneous gestures that accompany speech have been studied. We conclude that signers gesture just as speakers do. Both produce imagistic gestures along with more categorical signs or words. Because at present it is difficult to tell where sign stops and gesture begins, we suggest that sign should not be compared with speech alone but should be compared with speech-plus-gesture. Although it might be easier (and, in some cases, preferable) to blur the distinction between sign and gesture, we argue that distinguishing between sign (or speech) and gesture is essential to predict certain types of learning and allows us to understand the conditions under which gesture takes on properties of sign, and speech takes on properties of gesture. We end by calling for new technology that may help us better calibrate the borders between sign and gesture. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 204 Seiten: 173-237.

The woman who anoints Jesus is unique within Mark’s Gospel, since her action is to be remembered wherever the Gospel is proclaimed. She is portrayed as a prophetic figure because her act of anointing points to Jesus’ kingship, which is revealed at the time of his death. Her critics condemn her gift as wasteful, arguing that the perfume should have been sold and the money given to the poor. The Greek term ap ōa leia, however, may be translated as ‘waste’ (...) or ‘loss’. In the literary context of Mark’s Gospel the ‘waste’ of the perfume corresponds to the ‘loss’ of Jesus’ life, since it recalls the teaching of Jesus on discipleship in which the use of the cognate verb apollumi is used to show that only those willing to lose life will save life. The woman’s action of breaking the jar and pouring out the perfume foreshadows the Last Supper in which Jesus identifies the bread with his body, and refers to the cup of wine as his blood which is poured out for many. Her prophetic action aligns her with Jesus’ suffering and death, and her extravagance affirms the preciousness of life in the midst of death. The woman’s gift encapsulates the message of the Gospel because it foreshadows the new creation that comes about through Jesus’ death. (shrink)

This article employs Umberto Eco’s 2004 novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana as an exemplar of the hypertextuality of Eco’s semiotic theory. Eco’s project illustrates existential semiotics, providing a corrective to Euro Tarasti. For Tarasti signs reveal possibilities for transcendence in the lived world with ‘omnipresent’ meaning in an enunciative dialogue between signs and a semiotic subject. Tarasti’s existential signs are communicative alerts that illuminate a semiotic subject’s journey of transcendence, creating meaning via infusion of signs with signification. This (...) article forgoes Tarasti’s insistence on transcendence. The vitality of existential semiotic signs is displayed through Eco’s hypertextual approach to semiotics manifested in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Eco’s insights model an existential semiotic, correcting Tarasti’s pragmatically flawed but theoretically significant undertaking. Our rationale for explicating the scope of Tarasti’s work exemplifies an existential disconnect between information accumulation and signification. We present Tarasti’s project due to its fundamental signification for understanding the importance and vitality for existential semiotics. Existential semiotics illuminates the signifying function of communication in the presence of the ineffable. (shrink)

This book features the full scope of Susan Petrilli's important work on signs, language, communication, and of meaning, interpretation, and understanding. Although readers are likely familiar with otherness, interpretation, identity, embodiment, ecological crisis, and ethical responsibility for the biosphere—Petrilli forges new paths where other theorists have not tread. This work of remarkable depth takes up intensely debated topics, exhibiting in their treatment of them what Petrilli admires—creativity and imagination. Petrilli presents a careful integration of divergent thinkers and diverse perspectives. (...) While she abandons hope of attaining a final synthesis or an unqualifiedly comprehensive outlook, there remains a drive for coherence and detailed integration. The theory of identity being advocated in this book will provide the reader with an aid to appreciating the identity of the theorizing undertaken by Petrilli in her confrontation with an array of topics. Her theory differentiates itself from other offerings and, at the same time, is envisioned as a process of self-differentiation. Petrilli's contribution is at once historical and theoretical. It is historical in its recovery of major figures of language; it is theoretical in its articulation of a comprehensive framework. She expertly combines analytic precision and moral passion, theoretical imagination and political commitment. (shrink)

Although children learn more when teachers gesture, it is not clear how gesture supports learning. Here, we sought to investigate the nature of the memory processes that underlie the observed benefits of gesture on lasting learning. We hypothesized that instruction with gesture might create memory representations that are particularly resistant to interference. We investigated this possibility in a classroom study with 402 second‐ and third‐grade children. Participants received classroom‐level instruction in mathematical equivalence using videos with or without accompanying gesture. After (...) instruction, children solved problems that were either visually similar to the problems that were taught, and consistent with an operational interpretation of the equal sign (interference), or visually distinct from equivalence problems and without an equal sign (control) in order to assess the role of gesture in resisting interference after learning. Gesture facilitated learning, but the effects of gesture and interference varied depending on type of problem being solved and the strategies that children used to solve problems prior to instruction. Some children benefitted from gesture, while others did not. These findings have implications for understanding the mechanisms underlying the beneficial effect of gesture on mathematical learning, revealing that gesture does not work via a general mechanism like enhancing attention or engagement that would apply to children with all forms of prior knowledge. (shrink)

In discussing Drucilla Cornell's remarks about Toni Morrison's Beloved, I consider epistemological questions raised by the acquiring of understanding of racism, particularly the deep-rooted racism embodied in social norms and values. I suggest that questions about understanding racism are, in part, questions about personal and political identities and that questions about personal and political identities are often, importantly, epistemological questions.

In the UK, the writing of Doris Lessing has frequently been associated with left–wing politics and the second–wave feminist movement. Critics have concentrated primarily on issues of class and gender and have focused their attention on novels published in the 1950s and 1960s. This essay suggests that Lessing's work is over–ripe for reassessment in relation to ideas from post-colonial theory. Her writing repeatedly addresses questions about national identity and its imbrications with ‘race’. These ideas intersect in complex ways with her (...) more familiar analysis of gender and class. This essay discusses Lessing's recent novel The Sweetest Dream (2001), which was widely read as an attack on the political idealism of the 1960s. It relates the novel to her collection of essays, African Laughter (1992), her recent essay on the situation in Zimbabwe, ‘The Jewel of Africa’ (2003) and the second volume of her autobiography, Walking in the Shade (1997). Zimbabwe (previously Southern Rhodesia) is of crucial importance in these works. The article explores how Lessing makes use of notions of city, home and memory that can be instructively compared with some of Toni Morrison's ideas in her novel Beloved (1987) and the essays ‘Home’ (1998) and ‘The Site of Memory’ (1990). Lessing revises the notion of ‘home’ so that it becomes capable of both recognizing racial and national differences and moving outside them. She also interprets memory as productive for the individual and the nation only when it becomes, as Morrison would say, ‘rememory’: when it can acknowledge the importance of imagination in dealing with trauma and thus suggest the fluctuating, mobile status of identity. The article demonstrates that similar ideas about home and memory are present in her fiction, essay and autobiography, indicating that her intention is to explore generic classification and blur the boundaries between different methods of writing personal and political history. Lessing's work strongly suggests the possibility that apparently ‘fictional’ writings may be more fruitful than ostensibly factual ones in allowing individuals and nations to make sense of their immediate pasts. (shrink)

Semiotics has the merit of demonstrating that whatever is human involves signs. Indeed, it implies more than this: viewed from a global semiotic perspective we now know that whatever is simply alive involves signs. And this is as far as cognitive semiotics and global semiotics reach. But semioethics pushes this awareness even further by relating semiosis to values and by focusing on the question of responsibility, of radical, inescapable responsibility inscribed in our bodies insofar as we are ‘semiotic animals,’ on (...) the human capacity for responsibility for life over the entire planet. Semioethics develops our awareness of the extension of the semiosic network in the direction of ethics; from a semioethic perspective the question of responsibility cannot be escaped at the most radical level (that of defining commitments and values). (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Life and Character Socrates in Aristophanes' Clouds Plato's Apology of Socrates Socratic Method Moral Psychology Education and Politics Irony Xenophon Conclusion Bibliography.

By exploring a competition for authority on health and human nature between Plato and Hippocratic medicine, this paper offers a fresh perspective on an overarching debate today involving health and the role of healthcare in its safeguarding. Economically and politically, healthcare continues to dominate the USA’s handling of health, construed biophysically as the absence of disease. Yet, notoriously, in major health outcomes, the USA fares worse than other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Clearly, in giving (...) pre-eminence to healthcare, the USA is doing far less than it could to protect and improve health. Meanwhile, mounting evidence supports the view that health impacts of social determinants besides healthcare (eg, education) surpass healthcare in heft. Circumscribed shifts in the USA’s current frame will not suffice: what’s needed is a change in its overall template for addressing health. Unless this is widely seen, the sway of biomedicine will likely be reduced slowly, if at all. That biomedicine’s role in relation to health is raised increasingly as a question is a sign that its ongoing supremacy is not a forgone conclusion. But making the most of this opportunity requires appreciating that ’How should health’s relationship to medicine be conceptualised?’ is not the most fundamental query that we need to pose. Through consideration of Hippocratic medicine and Plato, I argue that the most availing answer to this particular question can come only after exploration of three larger questions involving health’s status as a human good and its relationship to human flourishing. Exploration of the Greeks is, thus, valuable methodologically. What’s more, it supports today’s advocacy of ’health promotion’, a perspective tying health closely to well-being that has yet to achieve the overall prominence that it warrants. (shrink)

The more than fifty years of dialogue since Vatican II launched the Catholic Church into the ecumenical movement have resulted in significant convergence, but reception of these results remains slow and inconclusive despite the stunning success of the Joint Declaration on Justification signed in 1999. This presentation explores some of the challenges for reception within the ecclesial and social context of ecumenical relationships today and discusses why the ecumenical imperative is even more critical at this point in time. It also (...) suggests a model of ecclesiology for the reception of relationships of full communion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:To Recognize the Person: Learning from Narratives of Psychiatric TreatmentLinda J. MorrisonTo know what patients endure at the hands of illness and therefore to be of clinical help requires that doctors enter the worlds of their patients, if only imaginatively, and to see and interpret these worlds from the patient’s point of view(Charon, 2006, p. 9).These narratives of psychiatric hospitalization are rich and evocative. We are fortunate to have (...) twelve descriptions appearing side-by-side, each unique in its focus, outlook, detail and narrative tone. Together their interwoven contexts describe personal and work relationships, internal and external help-seeking, encounters in community and hospital settings, and experiences of the psychiatric (psychiatrized) self as supplicant, victim, recipient, participant, product, and active agent over time (Morrison, 2005).Through their collected narratives, the authors create a distinct counterpoint to the more familiar clinical narratives of psychiatric encounters. Ordinarily the professional narrative drives interpretation of a clinical experience, whether medical or psychiatric. The caregivers populating these narratives would probably tell different stories, and the hospital notes and treatment records yet another (Hinsby & Baker, 2004; VanDerNagel et al., 2009). The disjunction between professional and patient narrative is especially true for psychiatric hospitalizations, in which the inpatient’s active narrative becomes a part of the diagnostic and treatment process (Steslow, 2010).In this symposium, the patient’s narrative is a window for interpretive insights into personal experience of the process. Each is a situated retrospective, in which added dimensions of feeling, thought and interaction provide the reader a fuller and more complex awareness of the experience of psychiatric hospitalization. The narratives provide insights about choice and agency, control and harm, safety and strength, hope and frustration, resilience and recovery, empathy and humanity; they also reveal various ethical issues related to the experience of help-seeking and treatment.It is vital to consider what each person wrote: what choices they made in representing their experience; what aspects they focused on, and what they (we imagine) left out. The authors used their own voices to create their own representations. In each narrative, “the person” provides an important standpoint. Who is this person, what is his or her experience? Where is the person in the situation; in what way does he or she appear to those who provide treatment or care? How, if at all, is the treatment pertinent to the person’s concerns? Does it feel helpful or harmful? How does the person find a way to continue, to push through, with the help of (or in spite of) those we hope are providing care? This is the first sign of agency, of choice, of “dreaming.” [End Page 35]As V. Barnard writes in Dreaming: A Recovery Story, “to make a film, one has to dream it first.” All of the authors in this symposium took the risk and the opportunity to create their own stories: what to include, what to leave out, how to tell what they wanted to say. These choices gave them the power to dream: how it was, how it might have been; how it felt, good and bad; the chance to represent their own reality—to themselves, and to unknown others (Morrison, 2006).Dreaming, Choice and Agency“My psychiatric illness is only one part of me. I am a person with hopes, dreams, love, an artist and a fellow helper of my peers.” V. BarnardV.’s narrative describes the potential for positive action, of dreaming herself as a whole into existence. Her themes of choice and agency emphasize the importance of autonomy and the capacity for autonomous action. On the farm, V. was free to choose and take risks, to take on responsibilities, to be “treated with respect as a human being trying to get better rather than a criminal suffering from something that was optional.” From disconnection, she was able to find connection, on her own terms.The support of peers adds a valuable dimension. Being recognized as a peer, a person who shares similar psychiatric experiences and respects the challenge of everyday life, brings another level to supportive relationships. Negative judgments and stigma are reduced by mutual support and acknowledgement of common goals. Mental health... (shrink)

. Some disagreements have arisen in the last few years regarding the role played by material properties when modeling, simulating and experimenting on physical systems (Morrison 2008, Parker (forthcoming), Winsberg (forthcoming), Guala 2002, 2005; Morgan 2005). The question has proven more involved than it first appears. A number of significant and correct points have already been made, but some confusions remain. In this paper I attempt to sort them out. After pointing out the importance of some distinctions that need (...) to be drawn, I explain the ways in which material properties matter in modeling and simulations. (shrink)

The innkeeper’s sign recalls another “inn,” mentioned by Kant in a work published the previous year - the inn [Karavenserair; Wirthshausr] as emblem of the world, where “each man must be content at every turn-in in life’s journey to be soon pushed out by a successor.”. Kant there suggests that such an image of this world is what remains if one lacks hope that man in this world constantly progresses. If our world is to be better than a hostelry for (...) nomads the idea of perpetual peace must somehow be our orienting signal. Philosophy may critically secure itself a worldly home; but mankind generally finds itself, at best, perpetually moving in the right direction. Constant progress implies constant approach, and with it, a perpetually deferred arrival. Kant’s title, like the ambiguous signpost it replaces, advertises a repose at once attractive and repellent, promising a rest that draws us on while also putting us on guard. (shrink)

Variability in the symptom experience in patients diagnosed with chronic conditions may be related to social determinants of health (SDoH). The purpose of this critical review was to (1) summarize the existing literature on SDoH and symptom clusters (i.e., multiple, co‐occurring symptoms) in patients diagnosed with common chronic conditions, (2) evaluate current variables and measures used to represent SDoH, (3) identify gaps in the evidence base, and (4) provide recommendations for the incorporation of SDoH into future symptom cluster research. We (...) identified 118 articles including information on SDoH in chronic condition symptom cluster research. Articles primarily focused on cancer populations. Few articles had the explicit purpose of investigating relationships between SDoH and symptom clusters, and the inclusion of SDoH was often limited to variables used to describe samples. Future studies should be designed to “move beyond Table 1” in their utilization of SDoH as variables and examine relationships between SDoH and symptom clusters. Attention should be paid to the appropriateness of measures being used to collect information on SDoH, and analysis methods that estimate causal connections between variables should be considered. Research regarding the relationship of SDoH with symptom clusters in patients with chronic conditions has the potential to reveal mechanisms of symptom disparities and guide changes to alleviate these disparities. (shrink)

Les milliers de milliards de dollars injectés pour renflouer les institutions financières pèseront sur les économies intérieures pour les années à venir. Mais les interventions massives des États ont-elles signé la fin du modèle néolibéral ? Au plan idéologique, les créations de richesse mirifiques de la haute finance ont été son principal instrument de légitimation. On a senti, et pas seulement à gauche, que le paradigme néolibéral ne sortirait pas indemne de la crise, qui pouvait même porter un coup fatal (...) à l’hégémonie américaine. L’humiliation des géants de Wall Street semblait indiquer que le monde se trouvait au seuil d’une nouvelle ère. Entre-temps, le système financier a été stabilisé sans qu’aucun de ses problèmes de fond n’ait été résolu. Malgré le déferlement d’analyses consacrées à la crise, sa portée historique reste obscure. À quoi la crise de septembre 2008 a-t-elle mis fin ? À quoi n’a-t-elle pas mis fin ? (shrink)

usually brings to mind images of picket signs held by laborers striking for better wages and benefits. Collective action, however, need not be limited to the withholding of labor. Nor need it involve only the working or middle classes, as airline pilots have recently demonstrated. Finally, collective action need not have as its only purpose the self-interest of the group. Collective action does, however, always involve a joining together of individuals united by common goals or interests in order to consolidate (...) power for the purpose of negotiating with another group or entity. Examples of collective action obviously include striking, other withholding labor actions, and slowdowns, but can also include many other activities. for example, have been threatened or used by house officer organizations in the past. In a paper strike, patient care continues but without documentation, and thus, the institution suffers from absent or delayed financial remuneration. (shrink)

According to the approach developed by Thomas A. Sebeok (1921–2001) and his ‘global semiotics,’ semiosis and life converge. This leads to his cardinal axiom: ‘semiosis is the criterial attribute of life.’ His global approach to sign life presupposes his critique of anthropocentrism and glottocentrism. Global semiotics is open to zoosemiotics, indeed, even more broadly, biosemiotics which extends its gaze to semiosis in the whole living universe to include the realms of macro- and microorganisms. In Sebeok’s conception, the sign science is (...) not only the study of communication in culture, but of communicative behaviour from a biosemiotic perspective. (shrink)

Charles Peirce, Mikhail Bakhtin and Thomas Sebeok all develop original research itineraries around the sign and, despite terminological differences, canbe related with reference to the concept of dialogism and modelling. Jakob von Uexküll’s biosemiosic “functional cycle”, a model for semiosic processes, is alsoimplied in the relation between dialogue and communication.Biological models which describe communication as a self-referential, autopoietic and semiotically closed system (e.g., the models proposed by Maturana,Varela, and Thure von Uexküll) contrast with both the linear (Shannon and Weaver) and (...) the circular (Saussure) paradigms. The theory of autopoietic systems is only incompatible with dialogism if reference is to a linear causal model which describes communication as developing from source to destination, or to the conversation model governed by the turning around together rule. Dialogism understood in biosemiotic terms overlaps with the concepts of interconnectivity,interrelation, intercorporeity and presupposes the otherness relation.As Uexküll says, the relation with the umwelt in nonhuman living beings is stable and concerns the species; on the contrary, in human beings it is, changeableand concerns the single individual, which is at once an advantage and a disadvantage. Thanks to “syntactics”, human beings can construct, deconstruct and reconstruct an infinite number of worlds from a finite number of elements. This distinguishes human beings from other animals and determines their capacity for posing problems and asking questions. The human being not only produces his or her own world, but can also endanger it, and even destroy it to the point of causing the extinction of all other life forms on Earth. The unique capacity for reflection on signs makes human beings responsible for life across the planet, both human and nonhuman. Such reflections shift semiotic research in the direction of semioethics. (shrink)

Como se usa act ual ment e l a pal abr ainglesa “scientism”, es una verdad verbaltrivial que se debe evitar el cientismo –una actitud inapropiadamente deferentehaci a l a ci enci a. Pero const i t uye unacuestión sustancial determinar cuando,y por qué, la deferencia hacia las cienciases inapropiada o exagerada. Este artículot r a t a d e r e s p o n d e r a e s t a c u e s t i ó (...) narticulando “seis signos de cientismo”: eluso honorífico de “ciencia,” etc.; el empleode los símbolos de la ciencia de manerapuramente decorativa; la preocupaciónpor la demarcación; la preocupación porel “método científico”; la búsqueda derespuestas en las ciencias para preguntasque est án más al l á de su al cance; l anegación de la legitimidad o valor dela indagación no-científica o de actividades como escribirpoesía o producir arte.As t he Engl i s h wor d “ s c i e nt i s m” i sc ur r e nt l y us e d, i t i s a t r i vi al ve r baltruth that scientism-an inappropriatelydeferential attitude to science-should beavoided. But it is a substantial questionwhen, and why, deference to the sciencesis inappropriate or exaggerated. This papertries to answer that question by articulating“six signs of scientism”: the honorific useof “science,” etc.; using scientific trappingspur e l y de c o r a t i v e l y ; pr e o c c upa t i o nwith demarcation; preoccupation with“scientific method”; looking to the sciencesfor answers beyond their scope; denyingthe legitimacy or worth of non-scientific inquiry, or of writingpoetry or making art. (shrink)

The problem of the subject in global communication is that of persisting as a subject and maintaining identity. A biosemiotic perspective as developed by T. A. Sebeok can contribute to correctly thematizing the subject in a globalized world. Globalizationtoday evidences the status of the subject as an embodied subject, a body structured in the intercorporeal relation with other bodies, interconnected with other bodies. We believe that ‘global semiotics’ developed in the direction of what we have called ‘semioethics’ isthe discipline that (...) can best provide us with the instruments necessary for an adequate understanding of global communication today and of the subject that inhabits it. Semioethics points to the need of recovering the relation between signs and values and ultimately the human dimension of semiosis if life, human and nonhuman, is to flourish over the entire planet. (shrink)

Welby’s correspondence with Peirce began with his review of What is Meaning? (1903), a contribution not only to spreading Peirce’s later thinking, but also to reproposing Welby’s “significs.” This is encounter between the pragmatist Peirce’s approach to semiotic and Welby’s significs oriented by mother-sense. A dialogue between two conceptions of meaning which, notwithstanding differences, meet in a participative contribution to constructing the sign sciences – from Peirce to semiotics, from Welby to significs. Their focus does not only concern signs but (...) also values which are inextricably interconnected. In this encounter, significs doubtlessly exerts a non-negligible influence on semiotics. If with (Peirce’s) “play of musement” we are endowed to imagine different worlds from the present, a male-dominated world, to resist the world as-it-is and construct new worlds presupposes what Welby calls mother-sense. In human signifying processes the epistemological dimension is clearly not separable from the axiological, aesthetic or ideological-political. (shrink)

The question of being in today's global communication-production system concerns all life forms over the planet. Global semiotics describes life and semiosis as converging and in this framework faces the question of ontology. Three contexts for a critical approach to the study of signs include the socio-economic, the phenomenological, and the ontological. These are closely interconnected and in this paper are considered from the perspective of global semiotics and semioethics. Politics, war, communication, and subjectivity are critiqued in terms of a (...) dialogic approach to life, signs, and human relations, where dialogism is not only viewed as a cultural but also a biosemiosic phenomenon implying detotalization and otherness beyond the logic of short-sighted identity. (shrink)

Two years after the death of his small son, Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote of the experience, "I cannot get it nearer to me" (CW 3:29). Most readers have been troubled by this remark, reading it as a sign that Emerson's relationship to grief and even to his son was disturbingly oblique, and the predominant response has been that it demonstrates he was detached, cold, and disconnected in the service of his transcendental philosophy.1 Such a response is grounded in the (...) tacit assumption that philosophy seems to be, or to call for, some intellectually grounded transcendence of the personal, whether the personal is whimsical or fatal. Emerson himself worried at times that he was too cold, too intellectual, even as .. (shrink)

Identity as traditionally conceived in mainstream Western thought is focused on theory, representation, knowledge, subjectivity and is centrally important in the works of Emmanuel Levinas. His critique of Western culture and corresponding notion of identity at its foundations typically raises the question of the other. Alterity in Levinas indicates existence of something on its own account, in itself independently of the subject’s will or consciousness. The objectivity of alterity tells of the impossible evasion of signs from their destiny, which is (...) the other. The implications involved in reading the signs of the other have contributed to reorienting semiotics in the direction of semioethics. In Levinas, the I-other relation is not reducible to abstract cognitive terms, to intellectual synthesis, to the subject-object relation, but rather tells of involvement among singularities whose distinctive feature is alterity, absolute alterity. Humanism of the other is a pivotal concept in Levinas overturning the sense of Western reason. It asserts human duties over human rights. Humanism of alterity privileges encounter with the other, responsibility for the other, over tendencies of the centripetal and egocentric orders that instead exclude the other. Responsibility allows for neither rest nor peace. The “properly human” is given in the capacity for absolute otherness, unlimited responsibility, dialogical intercorporeity among differences non-indifferent to each other, it tells of the condition of vulnerability before the other, exposition to the other. The State and its laws limit responsibility for the other. Levinas signals an essential contradiction between the primordial ethical orientation and the legal order. Justice involves comparing incomparables, comparison among singularities outside identity. Consequently, justice places limitations on responsibility, on unlimited responsibility which at the same time it presupposes as its very condition of possibility. The present essay is structured around the following themes: Premiss; Justice, uniqueness, and love; Sign and language; Dialogue and alterity; Semiotic materiality; Globalization and the trap of identity; Human rights and rights of the other: for a new humanism; Ethics; The World; Outside the subject; Responsibility and Substitution; The face; Fear of the other; Alterity and justice; Justice and proximity; Literary writing; Unjust justice; Caring for the other. (shrink)