Abstract
This article offers an analysis of the cognitive role of diagrammatic movements in the theater. Based on the recognition of a theatrical work’s inherent ability to provide new insights concerning reality, the article concentrates on the way by which actors’ movements on stage create spatial diagrams that can provide new insights into the spectators’ world. The suggested model of theater’s epistemology results from a combination of Charles S. Peirce’s doctrine of diagrammatic reasoning and David Lewis’s theoretical account of the truth value of counterfactual conditionals. I argue that in several theatrical works – in particular those whose central image is dominated by movements – the relation of what Lewis names “comparative overall similarity” between the fictional and the actual world is based on diagrammatic homology. The cognitive process involved in deciphering them is, hence, based on diagrammatic reasoning. The main emphasis of the analysis is on the previously unnoticed but important cognitive role of observation in the theater: the idea that observation takes an active role in the reasoning process that enables the spectators to form new knowledge about their actual world. Samuel Beckett’s plays Quad and Come and Go serve here as case studies.
Funding source: Israel Science Foundation
Award Identifier / Grant number: 101817
References
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Towards a stratified metafunctional model of animation
- ‘Away’ gestures associated with negative expressions in narrative discourse in Syuba (Kagate, Nepal) speakers
- Hyper(in)visibility and urban-mediatic populism in São Paulo: a sociosemiotic approach
- Narration et prédation: Pascal Quignard et la théorie cynégétique du récit
- Visual affect in films: a semiotic approach
- Measuring diagram quality through semiotic morphisms
- Pragmatic impacts, representation, and regulation
- Joint origins of speech and music: testing evolutionary hypotheses on modern humans
- Spatial diagrams and geometrical reasoning in the theater
- Modelizing epistemologies: organizing Catholic sanctity from calendar-based martyrologies to today’s mobile apps
- Signic knowledge: its niche in semiotics and its various aspects
- How Saussure is misinterpreted in Cognitive Grammar
- Operationalizing Peirce’s Syllabus in terms of icons and stereotypes
- Understanding and translating Confucian philosophy in the Analects: a sociosemiotic perspective
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Towards a stratified metafunctional model of animation
- ‘Away’ gestures associated with negative expressions in narrative discourse in Syuba (Kagate, Nepal) speakers
- Hyper(in)visibility and urban-mediatic populism in São Paulo: a sociosemiotic approach
- Narration et prédation: Pascal Quignard et la théorie cynégétique du récit
- Visual affect in films: a semiotic approach
- Measuring diagram quality through semiotic morphisms
- Pragmatic impacts, representation, and regulation
- Joint origins of speech and music: testing evolutionary hypotheses on modern humans
- Spatial diagrams and geometrical reasoning in the theater
- Modelizing epistemologies: organizing Catholic sanctity from calendar-based martyrologies to today’s mobile apps
- Signic knowledge: its niche in semiotics and its various aspects
- How Saussure is misinterpreted in Cognitive Grammar
- Operationalizing Peirce’s Syllabus in terms of icons and stereotypes
- Understanding and translating Confucian philosophy in the Analects: a sociosemiotic perspective