Education, Signs, and the History of Ideas

1 Peirce and education

CC: Back when it came out in 2015, I read your book Philosophy of education in the semiotics of Charles Peirce: A cosmology of learning and loving In the years leading up to this, I had fallen into doing something quite similar to you, more or less, by accident. I was interested in Peirce as a young student and I was also a music-teacher, interested in education. Then I figured out, gradually, very slowly, “Oh, there is such a thing as educational semiotics!” And I kind of fell into it that way. And your book was basically doing this thing that I had been so interested in for the last five, six years. So, it was exciting for me to see a book like yours. It was very relevant to me.

One aspect of your work that I’ve been very interested is in how you’ve been showing through the history of philosophy and ideas that semiotics and education have a common history – that it’s possible to propose semiotics as a sort of implicit philosophy of education. Could you speak to this common history; what constitutes it and what brought you this sort of historical approach in the first place? How did you start seeing this common history between educational philosophy and semiotics?

AO: Well, it’s the first time I’ve been told something like this regarding my book, so thank you very much. To answer your question... it’s a long story [unfolding] in my mind. The first thing that attracted me was, during my bachelor’s degree, which is in communication studies, I noticed all the different theories that I was studying seemed to be missing something essential. At some point when I started studying semiotics I thought, “Finally a theory that takes into consideration all the rich processes of interpretation going on in what might look like a simple interaction.” It felt like I had found a theory that doesn’t look at humans, at organisms, as machines simply answering an output to an input.

And as for philosophy of education, and how I came to be interested in this: a couple years down the line from this earlier event, while I was doing a master’s in cognitive semiotics in Denmark [Aarhus University], it occurred to me quite clearly that semiotics is very much concerned with learning; but learning in a very broad sense. During this time, I started finding Charles Peirce a fascinating scholar [particularly thanks to Frederik Stjernfelt’s lectures in Aarhus]. And like I said, like semiotic literature generally, Peirce talks about learning a lot, but he hardly ever addresses education. Now, in my book that you mentioned, which comes out of my PhD, I argue that there is an implicit philosophy of education in Peirce. Not only because he speaks so much about learning and knowledge, but I think that a case can be made that Peirce explicitly mentions education so rarely because it is implicit. Because his entire philosophy actually orbits around such a basis.

He talks about many of the major topics in education studies: he talks about early years, sense making, and he talks of course, all through his work, about learning and knowledge. He’s always been concerned in defining the sciences. He was very concerned with developing a methodology for discerning among the sciences…

CC: Yes, the “classification of the sciences.”

AO: Exactly, and the way Peirce addresses this, it occurs to me, is with the preoccupation of an educationalist. And in the whole Peircean corpus, he perhaps mentions pedagogy once, maybe a couple more times. But there’s one point where he mentions pedagogy and that’s a clear landmark for me. It explains why he so seldom talks about learning in the pedagogical sense, mainly because he explains that pedagogy is a practical science not a theoretical science, and as such it can’t be part of a liberal education curriculum. It’s rather a skill that can be developed, let’s say. But it’s not a subject of a liberal curriculum.

2 Semiotics and liberal education

AO: As for history, the schema of science of Peirce’s that we’re talking about, so obviously continues a historical development which he inherits from the Medievals, which they inherited from Aristotle – a pretty clear narrative here. In the book of mine which you mentioned, I ponder upon how the text which is classically associated with the beginning of semiotics is also associated with the beginning of medieval liberal education. I am thinking of course of St Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana Already this observation was enough for me to be interested enough to pursue this link further down in history. To be honest, that was my temptation, my instinct. However, the context and my PhD supervisor oriented me somewhat differently, so I didn’t insist as much as I might have liked to back then, and thus the book gets a more pragmatic scope: What does semiotics actually tell us about education? I’m mentioning my supervisor because he’s one of the main reasons I got to study semiotics in education –

CC: Andrew Stables?

AO: Yes, exactly, Andrew Stables, Andy. He’s perhaps one of the main scholars to have developed edusemiotics among of course Inna Semetsky and Winfried Nöth and several others [Sébastien Pesce, Eetu Pikkarainen]. Towards the end of my masters I was looking to continue my academic career, so I was looking for a PhD in semiotics. It was at that time, and I consider myself very lucky, that Andy was advertising a PhD position at the University of Bath in, he called it, “semiotics as foundation for education.” Until then I had read some very basic literature on education. We’d all read Aristotle and had read the big philosophers on the topic, among them Rousseau, Locke and Hobbes – so I had an idea of what education might be. But until then I hadn’t been particularly concerned with education. The fascinating thing for me was still learning, and semiotic approaches to learning. But of course, when I saw semiotics and education in the same title, I did not hesitate. A bit later I started the PhD.

You were saying earlier how you found my book in a moment when you were just starting to look at such things and it was the same for me: I found Andy in the right moment (but I would never compare myself with Andy).

CC: That helps me see how you came to it all. I remember a similar sort of thing – years ago, I just happened to open De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine’s text, not looking for anything in particular, and I was immediately astonished! The first sentence is: “Learning concerns either things or signs but it is through signs that we learn what things are.”^[2] I was excited, he gets into the semiotic meat of it immediately! So, those connections were sewn for me as well, also not knowing fully what I was getting into. The link to liberal education started from realizing that the foundational text of semiotics and the foundational text of liberal education, were shared. This connection between liberal education – education that prepares the intellect for knowledge in general and is not the instruction of this or that specific skill or craft – is dependent, I would think, on the emergence of a certain semiotic consciousness. In that sense, and this is what you argue, you can think about the development of semiotics, of having the rationale of serving liberal education.

Could you talk about how historically this emergence of semiotic consciousness is necessary for liberal education? How exactly are the two intertwined historically in your mind? You’re basically saying that you need a certain level of semiotic awareness (not simply using signs but knowing that there are signs) in order to have this idea of liberal education, and in fact, in order to even have these institutions like universities.

AO: It is a very interesting question. First of all, I’d like to mention that I don’t want to have a, if I can call it so, a semiotic imperialist stance. But I think in the context, it certainly makes sense, as you are saying, we actually have a historical case for it.

CC: I appreciate what you’re saying, because that’s the thing, [that’s] why people are sometimes scared of semiotics – it’s that imperialist tendency of the discipline which grows into everything…

AO: It takes over.

CC: It takes over, everything is a sign and so it needs to be said. But I appreciate that disclaimer.

AO: But yes, I think there’s a lot of room for research in this direction, the way it comes together in my mind – liberal education and semiotics – I suppose we can see in the literature at the time, in the first centuries of Christianity, an educational program had to be put together. Perhaps one of the questions to be answered was what to do with the inheritance of Greek and Roman philosophy. As it was predating Christianity, it would be regarded as pagan. And St Augustine gives the argument clearly in De Doctrina Christiana, that if non-Christians, or non-dogmatic Christians, are rhetorically prepared to defend their beliefs, then certainly so should Christians. And this justifies the good use of classical ancient philosophy. I am inclined to believe that semiotics (what we retrospectively think of as semiotics) starts in the early patristic age, where Semitic texts/hermeneutics meets Greco-Roman philosophy, which happens of course with the expansion of Christianity, Middle Eastern/Palestinian/Judaic religion spreading throughout the Greco-Roman world. This combination gives a philosophical background that is Hellenic, addressing the allegoresis by which Middle Eastern scriptural texts were written and interpreted.

CC: So, it’s an interpretive solution?

AO: Yes. Because, long story short, what had happened in the interpretation of such texts, would be that a text, or a fragment of a text, stands for a fragment of another text-summarized. And they have to be interpreted, sort of mirroring each other – and there’s an example of a sign relation. And to my opinion, throughout the patristic authors, this was their main textual concern. Patristic literature is full of such examples. They were not concerned with developing a theory of science or of allegories or something like that. And Augustine does it explicitly in only one book, we know that, we see that many of his books are filled with a semiotic awareness or filled with this dimension, but it is one book namely De Doctrina Christiana in which he explicitly addresses the theory of signs, semiotics and why is that? To justify an educational program.

Trying to put it concretely, a patristic author only found it useful to develop a theory of interpretation to develop education. And I think Augustine only made explicit the very broad framework of interpretation, a very broad hermeneutics that the Church Fathers were commonly using. He made it explicit, and he explicitly said that it was for an educational purpose. That’s what I see in De Doctrina. This is the link that I find between semiotics and liberal education.

CC: It does seem that these methods of interpretation, the interpretation of these spiritual texts, are very connected historically to this rise in semiotic thinking. I see what you’re saying, it is possible, and I think, credible, to say that semiotics comes about in the service of education.

And another thing I wanted to ask you about: I know some of your more recent work has focused on multiculturalism, and you were suggesting during the patristic age that there is a sort of coming together of various cultures that creates the need to develop this interpretive framework in the first place. Is that pluralism important to the development of semiotic thought? Or am I reading into what you’re saying too much?

AO: It’s certainly a link that I like to make, but I still need to read more until I can say something in a reliable way. Instinctively, I agree with you. We discovered that we both have some interest in the period of al-Andalus, because I see a very interesting echo of what happened culturally in the patristic age within the caliphate of Cordoba in Andalusia. I think [that in the case of] authors like Augustine, and many of his contemporaries, liberal education could not have hindered a flawless Christian belief, simply because knowledge of the natural world would not affect a mystical theology. And I think the same awareness was present in the caliphate of Cordoba. That same consciousness was found in the same age in Asia Minor and in the Byzantine Empire and in the Middle East. In that moment, central Europe, or Western Europe with the exception of Cordoba, starts mingling these two. Semiotics, the doctrine of signs, becomes allergic to explaining the sacraments, to explaining mystical theology. This is where they started mingling and this is when certain trends in this part of Europe started seeing liberal education and pre-Christian authors as a threat. Aristotle starts being banned. While this doesn’t happen in Andalusia. It was easier for them in al-Andalus to keep these things on the one hand, separated and on the other hand, compatible.

In some correspondence recently, we both mentioned how we see this present in Ibn-Rushd’s The incoherence of the incoherence; he criticizes al-Ghazali’s The incoherence of the philosophers, because (the bottom line I am

reading here) “how could this actually interfere with our Islamic doctrine.” And it’s worth mentioning, I am curious if this thread of thought carried on a bit longer in that region of the world because we know, for instance, from John Deely, that semiotics lasts longer in the Iberian scholastics, and also mystical theology lasts for longer there as well. I was thinking of John of the Cross (Juan de la Cruz), in the 16th century. Juan de la Cruz is persecuted and assassinated because he is a mystical poet, who just could not fit in a rather rigid educational context – what we would today call even a fundamentalist context – not allowing liberal education because it interferes with some beliefs.

CC: A lot of interesting things you’ve touched on there, and like you said, I was also finding these connections years ago when I was reading through some of the significant Andalusian authors, like ibn-Rushd and others in that canon. As John Deely has made clear through his work, it is really interesting that this perspective is continuing – it does not die out. We get up to 1630 and Poinsot’s Tractatus de Signus (1985[1632]) comes out. Completely concurrent with Descartes! The world, in many ways, has moved on to this modernist/idealist perspective, but this semiotic synthesis is still happening in places like Spain and Portugal, and even being spread into the New World, into the Spanish New World. It is indeed an interesting connection.

When you were speaking, I was thinking: if we’re drawing a connection between the patristic age and the work that was going on in the spreading of Aristotelian doctrine through Andalusia, it seems that cultural translation is extremely important to this emergence of semiotic thinking –when we have one culture or one historical group trying to translate the ideas and perspectives of an earlier or a different group, and developing a framework for this translation – such as what ibn-Rushd was doing when he was translating Aristotle, or what Augustine was doing integrating Greek philosophy with Christian thought. It seems that this translation aspect is an important ground for this emergence of a semiotic frame of mind, I would think?

AO: I agree with you – but first, I can only agree on an intuitive level, because there are so many gaps that I have to fill in for myself still. But intuitively, I’ll go in the same direction as you.

CC: Back when I was doing this reading, I was only barely coming into semiotics, so it’s also all very intuitive for me as well. It’s all speculative at this point. However, I appreciate you making these connections.

Another thing you touched on is that, with this coupling of semiotics and liberal education, you gain a perspective from which to say, out of this emergent semiotic frame of mind, comes the first universities in the early Middle Ages. But following this, is the emergence of what Deely would call a modern perspective: a modernist philosophy that comes about with Descartes and the Newtonian paradigm that actually puts an end in a sense, or challenges, this sort of liberal education that began in the Middle Ages. Could you perhaps talk about how you connect this change in Modern philosophy, and how exactly does this challenge the values and goals of liberal education?

AO: Tough topic, I have to say. What I can say about this for now… as I mentioned a few moments ago, liberal education was obstructed to some degree in a large part of Europe when a threat started to be perceived [in pre-Christian philosophy]. We started seeing bans on Aristotle and so on. Of course, philosophers such as Locke and Descartes were quite censored themselves and had to put up with these bans and fundamentalist censorship from the church hegemony. But yes, I find that they did not succeed in their struggle for it, because I see the culmination of modernity in the late 19^th century, when ideologies arose; we start talking about nationalism, about socialism – Marxism. I don’t want to sound judgmental or reductionist, but I see for instance in the critique or denial of spirituality such as we see in Voltaire, and other thinkers of the Enlightenment, I see this as ideological, and therefore to some extent, fundamentalist. It’s a fundamentalist reaction to fundamentalism: ideology as a reaction to religious persecution.

I don’t think I’m looking down on the results of modernity, because, what can we say, these were some very difficult centuries for scholars. Again, I think that, speculatively, maybe abductively, I would say that they failed to bring a critical answer to fundamentalism, and instead answered with a form of fundamentalism because they lacked what John Deely calls “a semiotic consciousness.”

When I use the term “because,” I don’t mean there are not other possible ways of thinking of liberal education and philosophy, or for critical engagement other than semiotics – but they lack precisely this. And their predecessors who didn’t lack it, I think managed better to face the dangers of their time. Take again, the Incoherence of the Incoherence; he [Ibn Rushd] manages to fight back a fundamentalist tendency in a liberal way, not with a different extreme.

CC: Yes, exactly! And that represents something important, that book. The modernist ideology, as you called it, is very understandable after years of, well centuries, like you said, of repression from the church, and it’s a natural reaction in a large sense. A natural rejection.

Just to get back to the idea of the university: you’ve suggested this in the first chapter of your book that it is possible to see the trajectory of the modern university as becoming more and more corporate. More and more a reflection of this same modernist philosophy. And Deely locates this ontologically in a change in thinking where instead of thinking of Being in relation or Being in the sign (that is, a mediation between a subject and object), the modernist is now locating this being in internal mental states. In the ´idea´. The idea becomes the locus of ontology. Where is this connection between this ontological change in thinking and the actual institutions that get created, like the university, and how does the modern corporate university reflect this modern ideology and philosophy?

AO: I think that we’re not naïve when we say that the university, in this moment, does not pursue a liberal rationale of education. Or to put it more precisely, the rationale of liberal education. Universities have to train their students to thrive in society; they have to equip their students.

CC: Yeah, they have to make learning productive, basically.

AO: Productive, practical. At the end of their module, the student has to have acquired this concrete, practical set of skills to produce capital. Now, of course this is not liberal education. As I said, it’s been quite a long time since it’s been like that. This practicum-oriented education, it’s been perpetuated for a long time and backed up ideologically, and now what we are seeing recently, not only that universities have to be skill-oriented, but they have to produce income. They work on profit. They’re pretty much a business, and because of this they have to adopt the success models [of capitalism], the corporate [business] models, which are ideological.

There’s plenty of research focusing on policies, which are hot topics in educationalist philosophy, on what educational policies can you afford to implement to empower students, say to detach the educational paradigm from the needs of a technocratic society. Certainly, all of this is very good. I think that sometimes a simple practical policy can have a very significant impact, but I think that the work of someone like me, who works on research the likes of which we are talking about now, we have to play the long game. We’re talking about the history of semiotics, so we’re referencing Deely of course, I think in a Deelian perspective, we’re on to explaining or generating a proper semiotic philosophy. To be honest I have no idea if it will succeed or not, we’re working on it. I don’t know which philosophical model will be more successful historically, we have to play our part to work on what we can understand. I think that if semiotic philosophy becomes in the next couple of years the mainstream, it will echo in education as well. Oriented towards a more liberal direction. And, of course, I should not be stuck stubbornly in research of a semiotic nature, if something else is more useful I should just go for something else and not just ideologically cling onto the purpose of making semiotics “great again.”

In this moment, I’d like to bring up I’m still working in the semiotic framework because it’s what I find most inspiring and most challenging for the contemporary stumbling blocks of philosophy.

CC: I would have to totally agree with you. Like you, I’ve studied semiotics for a long time, but I see a semiotic perspective in many different worldviews that are not necessarily called semiotics. But like you said, if you are dealing more explicitly with philosophy and philosophical problems, I tend to agree with somebody like Umberto Eco where he said, shortly before he died, semiotics is the only sort of philosophy that’s possible right now in the modern world. And that sounds super imperialistic but if you just take the essence of what he said – it’s really just that there’s a certain relationality that is returned to philosophy through a semiotic perspective. Your work has shown – and Deely’s, and Eco’s – that this general perspective is present in other historical epochs. There’s an emphasis on relationship, on complementarity, that we can use to challenge a lot of modernist/idealist assumptions that are prevalent in our time. I don’t think it’s naïve to link a lot of these modernist assumptions, as you have, to the university and ecological crises and the whole mess of a situation that we’re in right now. I think it reflects an important shift in thinking that was a reaction against an earlier way of thinking. You don’t have to necessarily call it semiotics. If there’s something more communicable, or another way of getting the essential ideas, then it should be valued. It doesn’t have to be packaged as semiotics. So, I agree with what you’re saying.

AO: It feels very flattering hearing my name next to Umberto Eco and John Deely. While I think in many regards I am arguing in the same direction as them, I am arguing in that direction because of them. I certainly would never compare myself to them.

CC: Just in the sense that they have also adopted this “history of ideas” approach to semiotics, the historical dimensions of semiotics. But yes, I know it’s a little foreboding to place your name next to these venerable scholars!

3 Edu and bio, semiotics

CC: The emerging edusemiotic research project has been tied more closely to the emerging biosemiotics project; I’d like to touch on this basic alignment. It’s an alignment I make as well, the basic idea being Thomas Sebeok and his work in aligning/understanding living processes, as distinct from non-living things, through semiosis, through the criterion of signification. Edusemiotics has recently followed a very similar perspective, saying that if the living can be defined through semiosis then we can also obviously view learning as coextensive with semiosis. In that sense, much of the aims of biosemiotics are shared with the aims of edusemiotics. Anything you want to say about the coming together of these disciplines, where you think this could be heading for future research, and the general significance of developing a biologically-informed educational philosophy?

AO: This is indeed a question that fascinates me. The biosemiotic and edusemiotic corpus are coming together, and it’s quite fascinating because as you just explained, they both explain through their own perspectives, learning in pretty much the same way. In terms of what’s practically going on right now, Andy Stables has the gift of putting things very clearly. The two gifts of identifying essential topics and of making things very clear. More than half a year ago, he suggested that we organize a panel called Learning as Adaptation at the Semiotics World Congress, which just took place in June of this year (2016). We organized that panel, I found it quite fascinating, because what we tried to do is to bring together some of the major bio- and edusemioticians. I found it very interesting. I hope some conversations on the topic will soon come out in various ways.^[3] And Andy’s idea was the compatibility of bio and edusemiotic approaches to learning. Where does it leave us in regard to natural adaptation and learning in a cultural sense? Is this another dichotomy that will be addressed and perhaps overcome? This is the direction in which this is going.

Another way in which I see the collaboration of these two frameworks developing is through the notion of semiotic scaffolding. Hoffemeyer a few years ago came up with this idea of semiotic scaffolding, he took the classic concept from educational theory, Bruner’s concept of scaffolding from constructivist educational theory, and expanded it in the scope of semiotics, to be more precise, the scope of biosemiotics, to develop a model of evolution different from Darwinism. The major difference being that in terms of scaffolding, Hoffmeyer talks about evolution where collaboration is a driving criterion, much more so than competition. This makes adaptation look much more similar to what we think of as cultural learning.

So that’s another project, if I can call it that.

CC: And that’s been the significance of biosemiotics to me, and what led me to make these connections as well. Biosemiotics is an interesting perspective, in my view. A lot of the recent mainstream biology has focused on the quantitative side of adaptation. Biosemiotics is, in my mind, a way of returning prominence to a more qualitative approach, or the various qualitative aspects of adaptation. When you approach biology this way, of course issues of cooperation, support, love, and all these other traits commonly neglected in evolutionary theories, become very important. When you view adaptation qualitatively, you realize pretty quickly that you are talking about all of the same forces involved in understanding learning processes.

Where do you see this heading? The notion of semiotic scaffolding is obviously fertile ground for future development; it’s just picking up now, and clearly there’s a lot more to say. Where else do you see the coming together of these two forces?

AO: Again, quite a question! Intuitively I think that a key concept here is modelling. Thomas Sebeok talked about semiotics as a modelling theory. The directions in which… when I write, I am guided by the idea that if we come to talk about both adaptation and learning under the larger umbrella of semiotic scaffolding, semiotic scaffolding could be a very good starting point for a modelling theory to be used in many sciences. One which I have in mind is digital humanities. In digital humanities recently, Peirce’s semiotics was already been usefully applied as a modelling theory, and now I think that the concept of semiotic scaffolding can also be embedded in the biosemiotics framework. Which would be quite spectacular, right in front of our eyes!

CC: That makes sense to me, how a very direct application of these ideas would be to the worlds of multimodality and digital education because, like you said, semiotics is already known there. My job at the moment is working for a research group that looks at multimodal education, so it’s all very much grounded in that social semiotic approach. I’ve always thought that the way social semiotics is framed for multimodal education – the focus of scholars like Gunther Kress and the surrounding school of thought –the emphasis is often very much on reading this text in front of you, reading a website for example, and there hasn’t been in my mind quite enough emphasis on the actual relational being of the sign, that complementarity between observer and observed involved in any interpretation process. We could apply modelling systems theory, semiotic scaffolding, to enrich multimodal education, digital education, I see the same possibilities.

AO: That’s the direction I find fertile, to answer your original question. I think you’ve put that very well, here.

CC: Thank you. I have one very general question left: What do you see as the advantages in the edusemiotic project that you don’t see offered in other educational projects, maybe in more rigidly constructivist programs – what is afforded by approaching learning as semiosis?

AO: Briefly, what is the main advantage that I see in approaching learning as semiosis, over approaching it from other major educational theories? It’s liberating the concept of learning from the domain of education. And rethinking education as a system, a program, that works in the service of learning, which is bigger than it – education – and not the other way around.

CC: That helps a great deal – the idea of learning and lifelong learning being the foundational aspects that educational processes and institutions are trying to channel, but not determine. The actual process of learning being the foundation, but not in a narrow instrumentalist sense.