Semiosis as a Model of Purpose-driven Representation

The paper examines a particular aspect of the way semiosis models complex anthroposemiotic activity as exemplified by the "persuasion path" implicit in any source or origin of intentional influence in human communication.Now,in theory,we should be able to account for every stage in the process of semiosis,and this ability has a bearing on the way signs are to be classified according to the nature of their immediate objects.The topic is a pretext,consequently,for exploring the stages in semiosis from the dynamic object to the sign via the immediate object in selected pictorial examples of purpose and intentionality in semiosis,since,to be understood successfully—indeed,to function at all—any such persuasive or influential activity depends upon the formal organisation of its representation.The paper thus presents one possible explanation of the role of the immediate object in cases of evident intentionality.However,in view of the fact that Peirce never developed a clear idea of semiosis,it is necessarily speculative and abductive.

Deely’s Augustine: Ethics, Semiosis, and the Revelatory

The analysis outlines John Deely’s commitment to Augustine’s implications for a valueladen semiotic understanding of postmodern inquiry.Deely’s value-laden project centers on semiotic signification and semiosis.His work announces the inexorable link between semiotic theory and the search for understanding that matters.He uplifts the importance of engaging signs via context and relational association,uniting ethics and semiotics.Deely’s orientation shaped his inquiry on biosemiotics,semioethics,and ongoing discussions of Augustine.My inquiry centers on Deely’s explication of value-laden signs that illuminate Augustine’s understanding of existence,comprehended as God’s world.Thus,I explore Deely’s value-laden semiotic mission through an examination of Augustine’s God-filled background narrative assumption.

Umwelt-Semiosis:A Semiotic Perspective on the Dynamicity of Intercultural Communication Process

Semiotics has shed much light on both communication studies and cultural studies,and thus informed the investigations into intercultural communication,an area increasingly concerned in academic research.This paper incorporates our previous semiotic probes into intercultural communication,especially the semiotic model of the intercultural communication process,with the insights that have been recently highlighted in studies of edusemiotics and biosemiotics to further explore the detailed sign-relations embodied in intercultural communication contexts.Based on the conceptualizations of umwelt and semiosis and their interrelation which constitutes an umwelt-semiosis framework,we explore in depth the dynamic process of intercultural communication.Through an analytic of the mutual affection between the communicator’s umwelt as the functional cultural background of the communicators and semiosis as the act of communication,we explain in detail the dynamicity by which communicators’culturally embedded manners of thinking and behaving cannot only affect,but also be affected by the process of intercultural communication.Finally,we indicate that such dynamicity can be consciously manipulated by communicators should we reconceptualize communication following a triadic viewpoint instead of the dualistic one that has dominated sociological studies.

Signs, Forms, and Models: Modeling Systems Theory and the Study of Semiosis

The approach to studying signs and sign systems, known as modeling systems theory, derives from the work of the Moscow-Tartu School of semiotics. After being largely excluded from mainstream semiotic theory and practice, it is now becoming more and more a major trend in semiotics. The theory envisions a sign structure(or form) as a model of some referent and that the models we make of the world become signs that elicit interpretation of that world. The theory has been applied to the study of biological systems, mathematical cognition, and the origins and development of human cultures. This paper presents an overview of modeling systems theory; differentiation among "forms", "signs", and "models" as separate, yet interrelated, dimensions of semiosis. It describes the features of these dimensions, integrating them into an overall theory of semiosis. The main aim is to synthesize several of the suggestions that the present author has previously put forward in this regard and which refl ect a growing trend in semiotics to revisit basic sign theory in terms of the concept of modeling systems.

From a Mystery to a Myth:How the Panda Was Established as a Symbol of China

In recent decades,the panda has been established as a national"sign of China".However,the panda was seldom ever mentioned in the historic records from ancient to recent times.The very few possibly relevant descriptions of panda-like animals seem to portray ambiguous mythic creatures.The naming,re-naming,symbolisation and resymbolisation of the panda has involved several stages of semiosis.An exploration of this process reveals the ways in which historical contexts and the aesthetics of popular culture have combined to reinterpret the panda from a little-known,seemingly magical creature to an animal of great symbolic importance for the nation.This detailed examination of the great panda explores how a wild creature in nature became established as a symbol with multiple cultural connotations.

“Animal Symbolicum”in the Natural and Cultural Semiospheres

The human as an“animal symbolicum”(by Ernst Cassirer)is a unique being included simultaneously in two semiospheres.One of them is the semiosphere of conventional signs and symbols created by himself in culture.The other semiosphere of natural signals and indexes is available to the human as an animal together with other living beings.Both these semiospheres described correspondingly by Y.Lotman and E.Hoffmeyer,are the subjects of anthroposemiotics and biosemiotics,semiotics of culture,and semiotics of nature.Their interaction is a subject of human ecosemiotics.Both external communicative processes among people and the internal mental activity of individuals contain together natural and cultural semiotic components that interact and counteract with each other.In these processes,the natural signal-indexical codes can be transformed and supplemented by cultural conventions(if,for example,natural expressive movements are subordinated to cultural norms of gesticulation)or modified from pure cognitive means to means of communication―as the codes mediating transmission of perceptual images by depictions.Natural codes can compete with systems of cultural signs on the force of influence on people(as in various fashion systems)or in accordance with them participate in the creation of complex heterogeneous texts(as in arts).

Sketches toward a Theory of Every Thin/kin/g

The status of the social and human sciences as genuine sciences on a par with the natural sciences has widely been held in doubt, and the subject-oriented approach （SOA） to knowledge also shows the traditional scientific view to be misleaded. Its shows that it is mandatory to dismiss the idea that personal knowledge is a representation of a common world created by some God, and also the mistake to take the seductive noun/verb structure as for given. We need a new methodological paradigm of science--an approach that avoids the pitfalls of dualism and realism--and take the effort to couch its thinking in a re-interpretation of natural language. This line of reasoning paves the way for the SOA--a new epistemology that takes the individual knower and its feelings as the coherent point of departure. The traits of a new foundation are sketched and to that end a bootstrap model is proposed that departs from the early man＇s first experience. In doing so, we, in a subject-oriented manner, can bring man＇s living experience and his priverse （or private universe）, under the collective umbrella of a consensual science. This approach brings the promise to provide a sound theory of everything-or rather a theory of every thin/kin/g-which in one step removes the cleft between the natural and social sciences.

Transformations of the Orientalist Agenda in Israeli Modernism(1920s-1970s)

The purpose of the article is to review the dynamics of the Orientalist agenda in Israeli modernism from the 1920s to the 1970s as the establishment of sign-object relations(semiosis)in the national art and music.The article considers,as a key issue,the phenomenon,which was not explicitly voiced as such,but was present at a conscious level in the artistic palette of the first and second generation of Israeli artists and composers.This refers to rather Eastern than Jewish narratives(or at least the delicate balance between them)in Israeli visual art and music created over the decades following World War I and up to the postmodern era.The main milestones in this process are reviewed based on the analysis of several selected artifacts.The scope of the topic begins with artists’acquaintance with the local motif and proceeds to the work with(and conceptualization of)various Eastern,Jewish,and Israeli symbols.

The Image and Text Relationship in TANG Yin＇s Scroll of Poetry and Painting

This paper seeks to examine the image and text relationship in TANG Yin＇s scroll of poetry and painting from three aspects： The first aspect focuses upon the schema type of its image and text relationship in physical form; the second aspect, explores the text＇s/poetry＇s functions of anchorage and relay while appreciating those images/paintings; the third aspect, traces the semiosis process of image, exploring how image and text as cultural products in the epistemological world mediates with the phenomenological world

Semiosic Translation:a Bayesian-heuristic theory of translation and translating

In the context of Semiosic Translation,two elements are essential for a translation to emerge:the body–brain–context interface(extended mind)and the sign systems making up a translation output.In this paper,I explain how a renewed view of the body as a Bayesian-heuristic Semiotic Prior helps to understand in a more holistic manner the motivations and agentive character of translation,defined herein as a phenomenological grasp of the world.Central to the present proposal is the idea that bodily self-stabilization(homeostasis)and brain-driven correction(allostasis)provide translator-agents with maps of action upon the world that are semiotic in nature.All this occurs thanks to information weighing(Bayesian)and cue-driven(heuristic)types of inference whereby exteroceptive(exogenous)and interoceptive(inner-body)signals converge to create a sense of bodily awareness responsible for the construction of the symbolic persona(the translator-agent).

The traumatic narratives of sexuality in Chinese writer Shao-Lin Chu’s trilogy

This paper explores the narratives of the Chinese woman novelist Shao-Lin Chu’s trilogy to see how the problem of female sexuality and resistance to parental wedlock tragedy becomes a traumatic experience.The traumatic symptoms in the narratives are taken as Peircean signs for tracing the negative influences of traumatic experiences on the formation of personal identity and the associated depressive disorder.The scenes portrayed in Chu’s traumatic narratives of female and male sexuality are implications and representations of how sexuality is conceptualized and confined by the traumatic events while backgrounded with regulations and restrictions of a traditional society.The stories of Chu’s female narrators reveal the persistent and resisting feminine power.This paper adopts the concept of feminist narrative to analyze the traumatic and sexual events in Chu’s trilogy.The decoding and re-encoding of resistance and sexuality in the traumatic narratives prove that the narratological textual analysis and semiotic reading strategy together offer a solid approach to the discovery of the persistent traumatic impacts of the secret veiled in the narratives and reveal the probable strength of compassion that has its roots derived from deplorable trauma but later transforms itself to stimulate a positive reconstruction of the traumatic survivors’identity.

Biosemiotics and Peirce

Peirce's final statements on the sign were consigned in various ways over a hundred years ago as a form of logic,a branch of the science of enquiry based upon observation.This means inevitably that some parts of the theory will have been contested or considered superseded by more recent pronouncements on cognitive activity in general,both within and without the field of semiotics.Two such areas that have been host to innovative developments concern central preoccupations of the entire Peircean edifice:the basic unit of semiotics and its function,and ways of looking.First,following Thomas Sebeok's pioneering integration of semiotics and the biological theories of Jakob von Uexkull,biosemiotics,it is claimed,has espoused a Peircean approach to the definitions of sign and semiosis.Second,observation involves the relation between the observer and the object observed,and,as a theoretical consequence,the relation between an organism and its environment,von Uexkill's Umwelt.In view of the importance accorded Peircean semiotic theory in this more recent science,the paper compares and contrasts aspects of the later theory with the earlier,and concludes that there are significant theoretical differences between the two conceptions of the sign and its theoretical implications.

The Two-Way Interpretation Process in Peirce's Late Semiotics: A Priori and a Posteriori

On his own admission Peirce's priority in his work in semiotics concerned the identification of all possible signs, and it is clearly for this reason that of the two typologies announced in the letter to Lady Welby of 23 December 1908—one yielding twenty-eight classes and the other sixty-six—it was the latter that he found the more interesting, to the complete neglect of the former. And yet contributing to the originality of this particular typology is the fact that after 1906 Peirce appears no longer to employ his phaneroscopic categories as the criteria for establishing the various subdivisions in his classifications, preferring instead three modally organized universes, and, in the period from 1907 on, a growing appeal to the requirement of collateral observation of the object in definitions of the sign—both these factors being associated with a greater understanding of the nature of the dynamic object, particularly in the period 1908-1909. The paper thus seeks to demonstrate the potential for semiotic analysis of Peirce's neglected 28-class classification system by showing its originality within the fifteen or more typologies he developed between 1866 and 1908. This, it is to be hoped, will compensate for Peirce's neglect by showing how an examination of the evolving typologies sheds light on the development of his conception of signs and on the shift in the theoretical framework which underwrote it.

The World,Seen From Within(Ⅱ)Sorts of Reality--A Semio-Cognitive Ontology and Phenomenology

This short essay discusses the conditions—and the general contours—of a viable ontology assigning a place to meaning in the architecture of the sorts of reality we acknowledge in the framework of a non-reductive realist philosophy(John Searle^1, Barry Smith^2) compatible with both cognitive and semiotic approaches to the human world.

The Role of Abstraction in the Evolution of Semiotic Systems

The action of signs in human lives and in the evolution of cultures is to be understood in the light of semiosis, the process by which a meaning is given to all things in the world. Writing systems, as a sort of semiotic creation, evolve according to the laws of semiosis and the rhythm of human stepping ahead. This paper is an attempt to afford evidence of three relevant facts: a) A close contact, or at least a remarkable coincidence, of writing cultures in ancient times. b) An apparent and undeniable process of divergence of writing systems over centuries. c) A tendency to a new convergence of writing systems, as an ongoing process inferable from the new symbols of an increasingly globalised world. We propose that one of the elements that push these processes forward is abstraction, and we suggest that abstraction might be the leading factor in the evolution of writing and semiotic systems.

Peirce’s Other Ten-Class Typology

In the manuscript of the 1903 Syllabus intended to accompany his Lowell lectures on logic,Peirce developed what is one of his best-known semiotic constructions,namely a ten-class,three-division typology of signs.The nine subdivisions in the typology define,amongst others,the icon-index-symbol division much used in visual semiotics and even in competing theories of the sign,and were based upon the three phenomenological categories as Peirce conceived them at the time.However,within five years he had developed a different ten-class typology left as a scrap of information in a post-scriptum to a draft letter intended for,but never sent to,Lady Welby.Now,this new typology was established following a period in which Peirce’s thinking on signs had undergone considerable developments;it was underwritten by a different set of theoretical choices from which it was impossible to construct the earlier icon-index-symbol division.The paper seeks to tease out the differences between the two typologies,the interpretation of the latter presenting Peirce scholars with an interesting theoretical challenge.After summarising the 1903 system for purposes of comparison,the paper examines the theoretical developments leading to the 1908 post-scriptum typology,establishes the ten classes it yields and attempts to illustrate some of them.The two ten-class taxonomies show in a striking manner how significantly Peirce’s criteria for the classification of signs developed in the five years between the Syllabus and the draft post-scriptum.It is to be hoped that this will contribute to our understanding of how Peirce came later to conceive the sign and the way it functions.

Gadamer： Ethics and the Dialogic Character of Play

Hans-Georg Gadamer＇s project of philosophical hermeneutics is an interpretive welcome for new insights and meaning, emerging from respectful dialogic encounter with the particularity of a given text. Gadamer＇s revelatory undertaking walks between the extremes of subjectivism and objectivism. As the title of Richard Bernstein＇s （1983） book, Beyond Objeetivism and Relativism, still suggests, there is a life world between interpreter and text. This dialogic meeting of a text constitutes a meaningful third, a living form of interpretive semiosis. This new dwelling, a horizon of revelatory meaning, garners life via dialogic play that engages a text in the interpretive process of respectful seriousness.

Saussure’s View of Language as a System of Arbitrary Signs

Saussure’s view that signs stand for their referents in an arbitrary fashion reflects a view of semiosis that separates sensory-bodily processes from cognitive ones.It remains Saussure’s most controversial assertion within semiotics,even though it is a perspective that is found as an axiom in various cognitive sciences.This paper revisits Saussurean arbitrariness theory,showing how it breaks down in various ways when considering concrete semiotics phenomena.Nevertheless,as a model of semiosis,it has provided a basis on which to discuss and research semiosis in real-world terms.

Pansemiotism： A Cognitive Semiotic Reflection on Plant, Animal and Human Lives Correlates

This essay is a follow-up to my earlier paper with Akinwale （2013） and my monograph （2016）; the two studies focus on how natural/environmental phenomena enrich Yoruba proverbs and Yoruba musical discourse respectively. In the present essay, I elucidate the theory of pansemiotism or pansemiotics. I also dwell on how such panserniotic phenomena as actions of some animals and plants serve as signs or sign vehicles for understanding certain human activities or practices and for explaining some of the riddles and metaphors of life. The essay indicates that some aspects of the semiosis in plants and animals are ontologically associated with human conducts as the Yoruba view-ise 6niyhn nise .eranko （human actions are exact correlates of animal actions） suggests. The study also shows that some aspects of plant and animal semiosis further serve in creating several dimensions of knowledge for humans and that they can be called upon in re-defining, modifying and even in justifying （if it is sensible to do so） quite a number of human thoughts and practices across cultures. The essay is significant in contributing to the understanding of pansemiotics as a sub-theory of ecosemiotics and of the notion of naturalistic epistemology, a sub-field of philosophy, which conceives of all knowledge in terms of nature.

Levi R.Bryant's Universe Perfused with Machines

The paper is a critical review of Levi R.Bryant's books Onto-Cartography:An Ontology of Machines and Media(2014) and The Democracy of Objects(2011) from the perspective of semiotics.It contrasts Charles S.Peirce's notions of semiosis and the agency of the sign with Bryant's speculative realism,according to which the universe of things as well as the biosphere of living beings are universes of machines.It also draws parallels between Saussure's 1916 postulate of semiology as a new science of the meaning of cultural objects and Bryant's postulate of a new science of the universe of things under the name of mechanology.