Volume 2009, Issue 176

This is the sixth in a series of papers on an algebra derived from mythology. A hierarchical lineup of sets, functions, relations, and operations is used to model symbolic processes. In this algebra, multiplication is defined as association. This allows the classical laws of association to be modeled with the algebra, leading to a process of sign creation. As an example, cargo cults are analyzed.

The linguistic sign “I” is commonly used in everyday conversation and analytical sessions. However, the ubiquity of the first-person singular pronoun does not mask the mysterious fact that, unlike other signs, “I” does not have a concrete signified. This missing signified is the focus of my study. In this article, I propose one way in which the meaning of the “I” is created and discovered through collateral experience with significant others. Moreover, by drawing on the work of C.S. Peirce, I present an analytical-linguistic technique for uncovering the relational matrix in which the “I” is embedded, and some of the transformations used to frame it. This technique is illustrated through an analysis of passages from Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie .

In the present era, there has appeared a shift in literature and culture: from traditional verbal writing to the newly emergent picture or image writing. As a result, a visual culture has come into being severely challenging the traditional verbal culture. Writing with words is challenged by writing with pictures or images, so is the criticism and studies of today's literature and culture. Confronted with such a challenge and irresistible trend, traditional criticism and studies with words should more or less shift its focus to that of iconological criticism, and iconological studies. But in any event, the rise of iconographical writing does not necessarily mean the degradation of verbal writing and the reading and appreciating habit of human beings, but on the contrary, it will promote the heightening of the reader's aesthetic perception, enabling the reader not only to interpret a verbal text, but also a visual text toward a reconstruction of visual culture. Since translation is viewed as a sort of “rewriting,” the essay also deals with cross-cultural intersemiotic translation. To the author, it is a newly emergent research area long overlooked by both traditional verbal-centric translation scholars or semioticians.

This article brings together C. S. Peirce's semiotics, Jung's analytical psychology, and the ancient system of Tarot. When interpreted, Tarot images create a narrative that represents a process of individuation based on the integration of the unconscious into consciousness. The interpretation is based on a semiotic code constituting the “language of signs” structured in accord with Peirce's genuine triad. The therapeutic function of Tarot readings consists in the transformation of habits and discovering meanings in experience. The article presents Tarot typology in general, and specifically focuses on a documented case study for “Marina,” who consented to having her case discussed and published. The reading and interpretation of signs at the deep level of Marina's psyche brings many unconscious feelings to the level of conscious awareness. The new level of self-awareness empowers Marina with the ability to choose a novel course of action and achieve emotional security. Such a transformative effect would have been impossible in the absence of Tarot that provides an unorthodox epistemic access to the semiotic reality, thereby confirming Peirce's insight that all cognition is sign-mediated.

In his two Cinema books, Gilles Deleuze updates his lifelong philosophical inquiry using semiotic terminology, which explicitly draws on concepts of Peirce. In a direction that is arguably of utmost significance for contemporary semiotics and media studies, Deleuze upgrades his lifelong interest in philosophy and psychoanalysis using a pragmatic semiotics that involves major claims for the non- linguistic status of semiotics, as suitable for his subject matter, film, and for a fundamental distinction between semiotic and logical or linguistic based semiology. Philosophy as theory, and semiotic theory at that, becomes grounded in innumerable case studies of individual films. In the same way, Peirce drew on case studies in science, mathematics, and logic, synthesizing these in proposals for existential graphs that could assist practical reasoning, so the Cinema books are quite distinct writings by a conceptual philosopher like Deleuze, in their sustained attention to enumerated technical subject matter. The Cinema books can be regarded in part and, interpretively, as a whole, as an inspired, albeit intuitive, translation of Peirce for and as media studies, and through extrapolation, new and televisual media. This paper argues that the Cinema books provide a pertinent and foundational basis for an encompassing semiotic model of contemporary media.

According to Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) the universe is perfused with signs. There is an objective sign-logic at work in the universe which constitutes a growth of concrete reasonableness. However, this process is not value neutral but the Summum Bonum. Man is now cabable of a high degree of self control and can cultivate his habits of feeling, action, and thought in accordance with the ideal. A theory of these efforts of cultivation fall within Peirce's three normative sciences — aesthetics, ethics, and logic. Even though Peirce never did formulate a fully coherent normative theory, there lies in his work an important sketch in understanding the ideal and how it should be followed, and in connection to this a model for rational behaviour including self-control.

This article examines the uncanny parallels between Peirce's sign theory and practice and the philosophy of Vipassana Meditation. It argues that Peircean phenomenology has much to add to our understanding of the physical experience of meditation as well as Buddhist theology. A Peircean lens helps elucidate the mechanics of the technique itself, the Buddhist interpretation of thought, and, most significantly, the realms of consciousness meditation accesses. By the same token, the introspective world of bodily sensations and physiological states encountered while in a deep meditative state vindicate the heuristic value of the trichotomies Peirce invented.

Advertising has been researched and conceptualized in various different fields and using various different approaches and methods. Therefore advertising research remains theoretically disjointed and lacks a coherent set of premises. This article provides a meta-theoretical view on the tradition of advertising research. The research tradition of advertising is approached here from the point of view of communication and interpretation. The general conclusion is that communicative theories of advertising must start out from the assumption that the research object is steered by various pluralistic principles. These are introduced as the fuzzy theory of advertising.

This article analyzes the iconography of Saint Nicholas from the retrospective angle of the interrelation of constituent meanings. I propose that the persona of Saint Nicholas is a “complex symbol” consisting of a number of simple symbols (e.g., the crosier and miter in Western Christianity representations, the blessing in Orthodox icons, the bag in secular and hyper-secular renditions, etc.). These simple symbols entail implicational structuring, which might be called the visual syntax of Saint Nicholas. My visual qualitative model based on constructivist relational philosophy (e.g., Bateson, Mind and nature: A necessary unity, Bantam, 1979; Lenk, Filozofia praktycznego interpretacjionalizmu, Oficyna Naukowa, 1995, Lenk, Das Denken und sein Gehalt, Oldenbourg, 2001) serves to interpret the signification changes in terms of the spreading and delinking of the correlations.

Two advertisements for Coffee-mate were selected from a large corpus of advertisements to conduct a qualitative analysis. We analyzed the different approaches used to address the anglophone and francophone language group considering both the visual and verbal text ( Coffee-mate constitutes a representative example of the entire corpus). We concluded that the English advertisement shows characteristics of a hard sell ad while the French advertisement contains elements of a soft sell ad. Moreover, whereas the English advertisement uses more imperatives, stresses performance, and addresses the reader personally, the French advertisement has more interrogatives, is more passion-oriented, and only implicitly demands the reader to act.