Volume 2013, Issue 196

As Thomas Sebeok led the move globally from semiology as a part to semiotics as the whole of the doctrine of signs, so his close colleague, translator, and collaborator, Susan Petrilli, has proven to be a central figure in the extension of semiotics (as a theoretical understanding of the role of signs in nature and experience) to the practical question of human responsibillty – as the only animal able explicitly to realize the role of signs in the maintenance of life – for the impact of human behavior not only within human society but on the whole community of living things, the biosphere. Just as Charles Peirce was for Sebeok the lodestar for semiotics in its theoretical development, so the close correspondent of Peirce, Victoria Lady Welby, proved to be a lodestar for Petrilli in the development of the practical, ethical extension of semiotics called by Welby “significs” but by Petrilli “semioethics.” Petrilli's vast archival work “reading the works of Victoria Welby and the signific movement,” embodied in her volume Signifying and Understanding , ensures the work of Lady Welby will be central to the developing extension of semiotics into the ethical sphere.

Victoria Lady Welby dealt with all the major philosophical questions relevant to herself and to her environment. She also came to write about subjectivity and difference among I, Me, and Self as well as about transcendence. In that sense she is extremely “modern,” perhaps even au courant . Susan Petrilli's great work has rescued from oblivion an important scholar of the past, a pioneer in the history of the semiotic movement, whose thought provokes the most diverse interpretations. She ranks among the great classics of semiotics – in the side of Peirce and Royce – although her significs project never became part of mainstream philosophy nor even within the scope of semiotics. She herself was a true “significian” throughout her life, and much remains to be learned about her writings. Finally we have the access to the sources of Welby's activities, thanks to Petrilli's years of devoted research.

Victoria Lady Welby's notion of wit plays a pivotal role in her voluminous writings and, accordingly, in Susan Petrilli's illuminating expositions of the most relevant texts bearing on this central notion. The author of this essay translates Welby's conception of wit into ingenuity and shows how this translation aids us in appreciating the salience and subtlety of Welby's notion. He also follows up on a suggestion offered by C. S. Peirce in his review of Welby's What Is Meaning? (the suggestion that the primitive mind of our remote ancestors was hardly as deficient an instrument as such theorists as E. B. Tylor and Herbert Spencer depicted this mind). Moreover, he takes seriously Welby's insistence upon the gendered character of the specific form of human ingenuity to which she devoted her greatest attention. Finally, the author notes how the cultivation of ingenuity, precisely in Welby's sense, is inextricably linked to the cultivation of signs and especially symbols.

Beginning with the work of Lakoff and Johnson in the 1980s in cognitive linguistics there has been an intense exploration of image schemas, i.e., corporeal schemas that are projected into language at various levels. These include up is good, container, inside/outside, path to goal , and many others. I propose an intercorporeal schema derived from mothering and being mothered, giving and receiving, which I call the image schema of the gift. This schema, abstracted in early childhood from the experience of being nurtured, includes the other from the beginning as giver and receiver of nurturing. The image schema of the gift is mapped into language as transitivity in syntax but also exists in the communicative interaction per se. Many of the aspects of Welby's Mother sense or primal sense can be applied to the image schema of the gift. For example, like Mother-sense the schema is “an apriori with respect to sexual identity (indeed with respect to any form of separation based on the logic of identity)” (Petrilli 2009) though the Western construction of masculinity has become caught up in the abstract and ego oriented anti-maternal logic of the market (and vice versa). The transitive logic of the gift is other oriented, value-conferring, and humanizing. Projecting mothering and being mothered onto our surroundings provides a rationale for understanding signs and perceptions as need-satisfying gifts and services. Thus, like Mother-sense, the image schema of the gift can be considered part of the human species specific primary modelling device.

Lady Victoria Welby was born to an era when women were challenging their station as summarily subject to the discretion of the dominant male proprietors. The furtive soil of women's liberation had been enriched by the quill and fountain of epic female figures such as Abigail Adams (1744–1818, First Lady of the United States of America between, 1797–1801, promoted property rights for women), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797 – Vindication on the Rights of Women, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935 – The Home: Its Work and Influence). The Victorian period witnessed the burgeoning of a female authority in public consciousness with vigorous support from public figures such as John Stewart Mill (1806–1873 – The Subjection of Women), who openly rejected inequality between sexes, and John Ruskin (1819–1900), who urged women to “abandon trivial feminine pursuits in order to act as a moral force in countering the ills of society” (Ruskin, Of Queen's Gardens, Sesame and Lillie, 1865). It is, therefore, not astonishing that Lady Victoria Welby's authority among semioticians emerged from her endeavours interpreting scriptures. Moral gatekeeping was fast becoming a female authority widely respected, though most prominently within the confines of the private sphere. Women were socially groomed to manage the family's moral code, shape children's character, and nurture the husband's honorable conduct (Meyrowitz 1985: 200). However, respect for women's particular authority and power within the private sphere was limited and remained ancillary to the dominance of the masculine paradigm. Though common sensibility has changed toward women's mobility within the public sphere, the socio-operative dynamics of power between genders remains asymmetrical, the scale tipped decidedly in favour of the masculine domain. Given that the social world operates to a significant degree within the ambit of symbolic elocutions, there has never been a better moment in history to apply Lady Victoria Welby's theory of significs to examine the contemporary subordination of women, and Susan Petrilli's publication of Welby's correspondence is nothing short of timely.

Science is my theme in this paper devoted to a celebration of Susan Petrilli's pathbreaking book, Signifying and Understanding . Why science? Because it has a long conflicted history, yet it is the source of the greatest creative works of humans. I compare Welby's humanistic and unbounded science together with that of Peirce to the bumpy up and down that marks the American anthropological story of science. Welby describes clearly her modern and foresighted program. I believe that we need to accept hers and Peirce's paradigm for global semiotics.

In carrying out her archival research of Victoria Welby's collected scholarly documents and personal correspondence, Susan Petrilli has engaged in a demanding type of academic inquiry that requires critical and analytical skills of the highest order. The present essay focuses on this aspect of Petrilli's research, which culminated in her opus magnum Signifying and Understanding . It also addresses the need to continue to extract additional materials from these important documents, many of which are located at York University (Ontario, Canada). This will enable scholars to have easier access to them in order to facilitate future research on significs and Victoria Welby's role in its ideological development.

Just three years after Susan Petrilli's Signifying and Understanding was published in 2009, the one-hundredth anniversary of Victoria Lady Welby's death (1912) has arrived. Susan Petrilli's book is a great work manifesting a great English scholar, a significian, a “founding mother” of semiotics. In this paper, the author gives a brief introduction to Susan Petrilli's Signifying and Understanding , a milestone work in promoting the development of semiotics, indicating its important role in discovering Lady Welby and making her better known to the world, and then analyzes the commonalities between Lady Welby and Mikhail Bakhtin, following Susan Petrilli to establish an “ideal relation” between Welby and Bakhtin and to get them into a “dialogue,” which will help readers to understand the great significance of recovering an almost forgotten figure – Victoria Lady Welby.

The Peirce–Welby correspondence has been an invaluable source for the historians of logic and semiotics mapping the development of Peirce's thought and of the significs movement. The unpublished Peirce–Ladd-Franklin correspondence provides equally important insights into the development of theories of logic and meaning, science and reasoning, and language and intelligence. Taking Ladd-Franklin's contributions into account puts the received historiography on modern logic, semiotics, pragmatism, and linguistic philosophy in a new light. She was also a pioneer in women's rights in higher education and scientific research.

The correspondence between Victoria Lady Welby and Charles Sanders Peirce started in 1903 when Welby sent Peirce her book What is meaning? , and continued with the exchange of letters about language and meaning until 1911, when Welby died. While Welby elaborated from a linguistic and semantic perspective a new science of meaning and communication called significs, Peirce worked on semiotics, the study of the logic of signs, from a pansemiotic view in which the universe is perfused with, if not composed exclusively by, signs. Although Peirce and Welby probably had a different view on the concept of sign, they shared an interest on language and meaning, and their correspondence is a very important document for semiotic studies. The value of these letters is mostly noticed by Peirce's scholars, since an important development on his theory of signs can be found in them. In addition, their correspondence is of great significance for the history of modern semiotics. In the nineteenth century many modern theories of meaning were proposed, but for the first time a general theory of signs was developed and called semiotics. Both Peirce and Welby played a crucial part in this and their correspondence is a great source of signs for better understanding the development of semiotics.

Victoria Welby and the signific movement are discussed by Susan Petrilli, in the book Signifying and Understanding , chronologically and thematically, in connection with contemporary semiotics as well as with the intellectual and scientific landscape of Welby's own time. The book also contains priceless material from the archives that will permit anyone interested to continue this line of research. A selection of Welby's vast correspondence with intellectuals, researchers, and philosophers important to linguistics, semiotics, psychology, and anthropology, to mention a few of her interests mirrored in the exchange of letters, is included in the book. Appended to the book are also selections from Welby's writings. Some of the material is here published for the first time.

Though from two different points of view, both Charles Peirce and Victoria Welby examined the problem of time during the same years. In their correspondence, whereas Peirce explains his position about the indeterminacy of the future, Lady Welby proposes her theory about the dependence of time on space. Since they both tacitly refer to Kant's thesis on space and time, Kantianism can be an extremely important tool in order to understand similarities and differences between Peirce's and Welby's philosophical views. Continuity, as well as time and space, is a crucial notion to clarify Peirce's statements: the definite development of the concept of continuity in his philosophy allows us to better understand his notion of reality and experience. The present essay proposes to focus on the importance of time in Peirce's metaphysical thought by emphasizing its connection with Welby's remarks on the centrality of Motion and Change in our experience.

Susan Petrilli's work contributes to the history of world semiotics in so much as it allows one to measure the extraordinary and sometimes tragic efforts developed by Victoria, Lady Welby (Welby) in order to create a network of specialists of meaning. Thanks to Welby, the European and American streams of semiotics nearly came together at their very beginnings. However, if it is true that cognitive misunderstandings were not absent during that pioneering period, one may hope that, thanks to Susan Petrilli's volume, research will be able to deepen its epistemological requirements in a manner which will allow Peircean and Saussurian semiotics to cooperate in their investigations and to harmonize their results.

Lady Welby's significs centers on her pursuit of the seminal concepts of sense, meaning, and significance, fueled by her confluence of modern and postmodern thought. Of the encyclopedic wealth of Welbyan thought, this paper exploits her view of time and space, in which time is derivative from space. It does so by bringing into evidence fresh, raw human:canine zoosemiotic fieldwork to derive putative canine temporal and spatial percepts. Allied categories from pragmatics and concepts such as thought and language inextricably intertwine. Welby's question “Does the ‘animal’ ask ‘when’?” finds satisfaction.

Victorian epistemological debates surrounding the role of language and the relation between thought processes and knowledge, and therefore consciousness, were the legacy of the linguistic turn that took place at the end of the eighteenth century when the philosophical, a priori method of understanding language was abandoned for a historical, a posteriori one. In the nineteenth century, language was no longer conceived as a fixed form, but as a growing and developing medium. It was this shift in understanding that gave a model of thought for Darwin's evolutionary theory and that afforded new depths of investigation. It was against this backdrop that Lady Welby elaborated her significs theory of language, sign, and meaning. She focused on the interrelation between signs, meaning, and value, not only at the level of verbal language, but throughout the universe to show a fundamental continuity between the natural and cultural world as she believed that the universe is permeated with meaning.

Victoria Welby's concept of translation is a vital point for all modes of translation. In translation studies, which is a discipline dealing with interpretation, understanding, and communication between signs and sign systems in two semiosic systems, in source and target languages, societies, and cultures, Welby's concept of translative thinking is a relevant starting point in semiotics and in translation as communication focusing on the “translator”/”interpreter.” This is true, not only in translation proper, that is, interlingual translation, but in all other modes of translation, including intralingual translation and intersemiosic translation. Translation is, literally, trans-position. Furthermore, translation as a cognitive process uses thought-signs in interpreting, understanding, and signifying. It will be argued that for Welby, translation is a polyfunctional tool to understand, to not misunderstand, and to promote the self-understanding of humankind. The translating subject is a signifying subject, a homo interpres and a homo significans , dealing with the never ending sign process of semiosis. Moreover, the method of translation is a tool for the mind and for reasoning with thought-signs, for the dialogue between source and target languages in translation proper, or for intersemiotic translation between all types of sign systems in understanding life-signs, texts, societies, and cultures. In existential semiotics, the subject, the “I,” and “the Self” with the semiotic modalities are the very core. The translating subject is also a semioethic subject, a signifying subject, dealing with sense, meaning, and significance from an axiological point of view. Welby's concept of translation not only covers the interpretative-cognitive aspect of knowledge in the process of gaining new knowledge, and testing knowledge, but it covers the very idea of human thinking in the universe of discourse.

This paper explores Victoria Welby's fundamental assumption of meaning process (“semiosis” sensu Peirce) as translation, and some implications for the development of a general model of intersemiotic translation.

“Significs” is provisionally defined by Welby (1911: vii) as the study of the nature of significance in all its forms and relationships, of its workings in all spheres of human life and knowledge. Considering “significs” as a movement highlighting significance, Welby explores the action of signs in life; and more than the Saussurean sign composed of signifier and signified, the sign as understood by Welby refers to meaning as generated through signs in motion. This notion of “significs” empowers the study of signs when it considers the sign not in terms of the Saussurean structural representation of the union of the concept and acoustic image, but as (responsive and responsible) sign action in the world, in life. This also means to take into account the “extra-linguistic referent” (translinguistic and transdiscursive character of significs), history (space-time), subjectivity, the architecture of values connected to language, their communicative function. We believe that a dialogue can be established between Welby's vision of significs and the notion of ideological sign proposed by Vološinov in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language , expanding the notions of “meaning” and “sense.”

Although Victoria Lady Welby did not write that much explicitly about mathematics, what she did write shows a very strong connection with Gerrit Mannoury's ideas about mathematics and mathematicians. These views, however, underwent dramatic changes in the hands of L. E. J. Brouwer. We claim that today traces of Welby's and Mannoury's legacy are to be found in studies on mathematical practice through the semiotically inspired work of Paul Ernest and Brian Rotman.

The drafting process of international human rights instruments exemplifies the import of terminology. Government representatives meet over the course of years to discuss every word enshrined in international instruments. They understand that terminology determines the scope of rights and corresponding duties both legally, as such instruments are binding, and symbolically, as they constitute an apparatus of signs through which the existence of rights becomes universally acknowledged. The purpose of this article is to apply Lady Welby's Threefold Laws of Meaning to the Twin Covenants of the International Bill of Rights: the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights . First, this article will explore the Sense, Meaning and Significance of the original single Covenant and its subsequent division into twin Covenants. Second, it will provide a comparative analysis of the terminology defining States Parties obligations in the Twin Covenants. Third, it will examine two additional distinctive characteristics of the Twin Covenants: the absence/presence of a remedy and the Human Rights Committee. Lastly, this article will consider the ultimate Significance of terminology in the Twin Covenants as regards the implementation and universal recognition of Economic Rights, and the Promised Land of Human Rights.

“Language is ‘made for man’ and not man for language: he ought not to be its slave.” Thus writes Lady Victoria Welby. In this essay, I wish to explore in what sense that might be the case and why it is important that we take charge of the sign systems that would otherwise dictate our thinking. Drawing on Gunther Kress's distinction between the use and the Design of signs, I suggest that Welby's theory of significs and her emphasis on translating significantly gives us reasons to appreciate the need to Design signs that translate into meanings that have ethical import, are useful for engaging society, and are practiced critically. I compare her theory with John Finnis' quest for focal meanings, and argue in conclusion that professional education stands to benefit from adopting their method of clarifying and translating for the significant sense(s) of central terms in educational discourse.

In an earlier study of Welby's significs, a few brief remarks were incorporated on the denunciation of mysticism in Welby's writings. After the publication of Welby's oeuvre in a single volume – Susan Petrilli's (2009) Signifying and understanding – this aspect of Welby's intellectual output can now be investigated further. This is supplemented by archival work undertaken in the Welby collection at Senate House Library, University of London. Together, these additional sources provide for a deeper understanding of Welby's thoughts on the matter of mysticism.

The contribution of the thinking of Welby to Greek intra-linguistic translation is the theoretical support of her thought for the translation of liturgical texts from Greek to Modern Greek. Intra-linguistic translations of liturgical texts will function as a positive factor for the missionary work of the Church inside Greece and the translations will help priests and chanters with their own linguistic and prosodic contribution during the liturgical acts, an issue that will affect, dialectically, the participant of the congregation during the reception of the performance of liturgical texts. In the quest for significance in the intra-linguistic translation of liturgical texts, the identification of unity and distinction, unity and difference, convergences and divergences, common elements and specificity between Greek and Modern Greek, favors the clarification of concepts and terminology, and, more generally, the acquisition of liturgical linguistic and extra-linguistic competence. Furthermore, translating concepts and terminology from one historic area of the Greek language to another according to a significal perspective as is described in Petrilli (2007; cf. 1990, 2009), is a meta-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary linguistic act that allows different wording choices in Modern Greek liturgical texts and makes the subsystem of Greek liturgical language remain open and de-totalized, by enhancing the possibility of the participants in the Greek Liturgy to identify new links and connections in extra-linguistic reality of the performance of any ceremony and new correspondences, and therefore new results in the reception of the performance.

“Philosophical Terminology” (1899–1900), the essay by Ferdinand Tönnies with which he won the Welby Prize, constitutes the first – and for long the only – example of dialogue between sociology and semiotics. Tönnies delineated a complex theory of signs beginning from his theory of will as developed in his monograph Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887). Through an original interpretation of the analogy between word and money he was ahead of his times in foreseeing the fundamental role carried out by language in structuring social relations. All the same, his analogical approach to the relation between word and money – as had already been observed by Victoria Lady Welby – also represents the weak point in his argumentations in the essay in question. An important contribution for a better understanding of the relations subtending the social production processes of signs and language is that offered by Ferruccio Rossi-Landi with his homological method. Tönnies' own work can be read in this framework and further developed.

We argue that Welby misconstrues both the a-priori nature of formal logic and the need to understand it through metaphor. The writings of logicians since Aristotle illustrate that although Logic in itself is not metaphoric, we can learn about it only within the empirical world of imagery in which we live. It is argued that even logic itself cannot be defined without the use of commonplace images.

In this paper I concentrate principally upon Welby's paper “Truthfulness in Science and Religion” (1888) and Petrilli's discussion, in chapter Two of her book Signifying and Understanding (2009), of Welby's development “Between religion, science and philosophy: From biblical exegesis to significs.” I present Welby's arguments in the light of Bruno Latour's recent Gifford Lecture series entitled, “Facing Gaia: A new inquiry into Natural Religion” (Latour 2013). I discuss the relationship of science and religion with particular reference to Latour's attempt to bring them together in dialogue. The role of translation – whether this be Latour's proposed “translation tables,” or Welby's insistence upon translation as at the very heart of her significs – is also analyzed.

This essay employs the logic of otherness as the key concept to approach Welby in relation to her life and research. Her unconventional childhood and her network of relations (the “Welby Network”, as Susan Petrilli proposes) help shape a vision of the world that is characterized by its dialogic and polyphonic nature. Her response to the religious crisis of her age challenged by Darwinian evolutionary theory is to update religious discourse in the light of progress in science and philosophy beyond dogmatism and orthodoxy. For Welby, “woman” is the guardian of the logic of “differences” or “distinctions” that must interrelate dialogically. Her mother-sense recovers the connection with the body and the relationship between signs and values. Welby develops the concept of meaning with a special focus on the dimension of significance. She presents significs as a method for creating interconnections and encouraging dialogue among different voices, what she calls a “translative method” and “philosophy of interpretation, translation, and significance”. A development on significs today is Susan Petrilli's “semioethics.”

On the opportunity to celebrate Welby's centenary of death, I would like to enhance the contribution of her significs – which fortunately reached us, mainly, through the extraordinary effort of Susan Petrilli – to the research developed in the field of neurolinguistics, especially on aphasia. The vital need for signifying underlies all forms of communication – even when language is severely impacted by neurological episodes, as in aphasia states. Traditional approaches usually focus their analyses on what is missing in the linguistic system (generally taken as a code), not only to evaluate language and classify the aphasic into stable categories, but also – and even worse – to base clinical work on those classifications. In the opposite direction, within “discursive neurolinguistics” (as we have been calling the field we develop), we are interested in all kinds of resources that still remain (verbal and/or non-verbal signs) and aim to help aphasics to develop alternative/creative ways to continue in the discursive flow of signification. The refined terminology postulated by Welby and, mainly, her approach to the concrete processes of signification/interpretation enlighten and ground our reflections, as I intend to illustrate by bringing to this text analyses of some aphasic utterances in the significal perspective.

The soundtrack of The King's Speech plays a vital role in the semiotic structure of the film and reflects Victoria Welby's semiotic theory about language as articulate music. The innovative use of sound in the film allows the audience a space of its own. Instead of overpowering the audience with spectacle, the film invites the audience to use the soundtrack of the film to gain a conscious understanding of the visual dimension without being swept away by it.

In this article we outline how significs was formerly applied by the Netherland Signific Movement and how it influenced the work of Patrick Geddes in the field of urban studies. In the last section we analyze urban planning activities in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, from a signific viewpoint. These activities were inaugurated by the European Capitals of Culture nomination in 2011. We apply the signific method to the action of three stakeholders in the developing seashore area of city center – Kultuurikilomeeter. The influence of stakeholder activities considered in significal terms as communication acts will also be assessed with a view to possible future outcomes. Victoria Welby's significs was intended to be truly interdisciplinary, and interdisciplinarity is indeed an orientation that characterizes Welby's work as much as significs in general. Significs offers infinite interpretive possibilities and is applicable to the human sciences as much as to other scientific disciplines. The selection from Welby's writings and correspondence presented by Susan Petrilli in Signifying and Understanding evidences this particular aspect of significs very clearly. Texts and letters collected by Susan Petrilli in this volume offer a good overview of Welby's manifold research interests.

This presentation briefly describes the various research itineraries that lead into the present Special issue of Semiotica dedicated to Victoria Welby and her significs. These itineraries already begin when Welby was writing and Charles K. Ogden, then a university student, became interested in her work. They continue through a series of significant names on the horizon of studies on sign, language, and meaning, yesterday and today.

Welby and Vailati both have a special interest in problems relating to language, sign, meaning, and knowledge. Both evidence the relevance of sign and meaning to every sphere of human life and experience. Vailati was fascinated by Welby's significs with its focus on the relation between signs and values. In this essay I propose the term “ethosemiotics” for the first time, now developed in terms of “semioethics.”

This essay reads works by Victoria Welby and Mikhail Bakhtin together with special reference to their theories of sign and meaning. Despite significant differences in their personal and intellectual biographies their work is easily related on a theoretical level, such that these authors can be placed in a tradition of thought that we propose to indicate as “semiotics of responsive understanding.”

Welby's significs found official recognition in the spheres of semiotic and philosophical research as the nineteenth century gradually turned into the twentieth. Such recognition was expressed through a series of editorial initiatives including the publication of dictionary and encyclopedia entries. Moreover, it was extended to the Signific Movement in the Netherlands, which was originally influenced by Welby's research and which developed internationally and independently of Welby across the first half of the twentieth century.