Semiotics With A Conscience

Demonstrating how semiotic theory and method can be applied to decoding false representations and dangerous discourses, this book explores how semiotics can be used as a potentially powerful science of conscience. Confronting the sometimes negative perception of semiotics as academically inward-looking and lacking in morality, Marcel Danesi turns this view on its head. Instead, Danesi highlights how the same techniques that have allowed the use of semiotics for self-serving commercial purposes, such as advertising or marketing, could also be applied to deciphering current world problems. Through describing the semiotic notions and methods that can be used to analyze misrepresentations, propaganda, or meaning collapses, the book enables readers to become conscientiously aware of their hidden meanings and the harmful effects that they have on society. Identifying key issues of concern, such as climate change and anti-science discourses, it shows how they can be interpreted in terms of basic semiotic theory. This analysis of crucial issues demonstrates how semiotics can be used to raise awareness of critically important matters in modern society, and to encourage the development of more robust and ethical attitudes towards them.

Demonstrating how semiotic theory and method can be applied to decoding false representations and dangerous discourses, this book explores how semiotics can be used as a potentially powerful science of conscience. Confronting the sometimes negative perception of semiotics as academically inward-looking and lacking in morality, Marcel Danesi turns this view on its head. Instead, Danesi highlights how the same techniques that have allowed the use of semiotics for self-serving commercial purposes, such as advertising or marketing, could also be applied to deciphering current world problems. Through describing the semiotic notions and methods that can be used to analyze misrepresentations, propaganda, or meaning collapses, the book enables readers to become conscientiously aware of their hidden meanings and the harmful effects that they have on society. Identifying key issues of concern, such as climate change and anti-science discourses, it shows how they can be interpreted in terms of basic semiotic theory. This analysis of crucial issues demonstrates how semiotics can be used to raise awareness of critically important matters in modern society, and to encourage the development of more robust and ethical attitudes towards them.

This volume stresses the contemporary relevance of semiotics. The introductory chapter shows how the collection of papers emphasises crossings at the material level of physical reality as well as in their semio-cognitive and cultural implications, questioning the delimitation of interdisciplinary borders between the social sciences and humanities and STEM disciplines. The volume shows how semiotics continues to provide a framework for emerging knowledge traditions without completely disregarding its past. Through explorations in fields as wide apart as ecological psychology and visualisation systems, by finding correspondences between the arithmetic of music and cosmic energies or between the pedagogic significance of images and habitat facilities, as well as using investigation tools ranging from the mathematical representation of concepts to science education, this book addresses multifarious aspects and implications of culture and cognition, standing convincing proof that semiotics is as alive, productive and scholarly useful as ever.

Existential semiotics involves an a priori state of signs and their fixation into objective entities. These essays define this new philosophical field.

Integrates structural and historical perspectives on the semiotics of religion and gives an account of the distinctive features of religious language and symbolism.

As the culmination of many years of research, I have developed Semiotic Linguistics, a new linguistic discipline, which I present in this book. The domain of Semiotic Linguistics is human language conceived of as a folk model of the world. By a folk model of the world we mean that every language is a particular conventionalized form of the representation of the world imposed on all the members of a language community by the social need to have a common instrument of communication. The folk model of the world is in fact a collective philosophy unique to each language. As intermediaries between man's thought and the world, languages function as different forms of the perception of the world by man's thought, every language is both a communicative and cognitive form of thought. Semiotic Linguistics is neither a philosophy of language nor a new series of general discussions of the relation of language to thought. Semiotic Linguistics is a technical inquiry into the intrinsic mechanism of language as opposed to thought. The technical question central to Semiotic Linguistics is this: What are the laws of the intrinsic mechanism of language as an intermediary between man's thought and the world?

The more human knowledge increases, the more signs grow and, with this expansion, the more the boundaries of the science that studies signs also grows. In Semiotics Unbounded, Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio explain the explosion of the sign network in the era of global communication and discuss the important theoretical responses offered by semiotics. Providing a much-needed introductory guide to the subject, Petrilli and Ponzio explore the ever-growing frontiers of semiotics through the thought of prominent sign scholars such as Charles Peirce, Victoria Welby, Mikhail Bakhtin, Charles Morris, and Thomas Sebeok. In an era of global communication, a global approach is necessary, and what may seem to be the whole, is only a part – a view being at once globalizing and open. Each and every sign is never self-sufficient and closed but exists always in a relation of otherness. This is true of the signs forming animals and human beings, individuals and communities, and involves the implication of all living beings in the life of all others. Semiotics Unbounded offers a new and original survey of the science of signs, evaluating it in relation to the problems of our time, not only of a scientific order, but also the problems concerning everyday social life.

This volume differs from the volume, Semiotics 1980, in that it is no longer an experimental product, but the result of a permanent commitment of the Semiotic Society of America to publish each year henceforward those papers presented at its Annual Meeting which are submitted to the Secretariat in timely and proper form. Thus Semiotics 1981 marks the beginning, following upon the experimental Semiotics 1980 volume, of an indefinite series of volumes presenting the cross-fertilization of styles, topics, methodologies, and traditions "in which new ideas vie for survival and experiment is at a premium." It is this cross fertilization which is at the heart of the vitality and integration and redistribution of the world of knowledge. The historical value of such a record is obvious. But the more immediate objective of these volumes of annual proceedings is to promote participation in the work of "semioticizing" traditional perspectives and disciplines by providing a forum in which young scholars can meet regularly and find an outlet for their efforts at interdisciplinary thinking which are not always welcome in the journals and proceedings devoted to the promotion only of traditionally specialized perspectives.