The semiotic stance
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Paul Kockelman
Abstract
This essay argues that the pervasive twentieth century understanding of meaning — a sign stands for an object — is incorrect. In its place, it offers the following definition, which is framed not in terms of a single relation (of standing for), but in terms of a relation (of correspondence) between two relations (of standing for): a sign stands for its object on the one hand, and its interpretant on the other, in such a way as to make the interpretant stand in relation to the object corresponding to it own relation to the object. Using this definition, it reanalyzes key concepts and foundational arguments from linguistics so far as they relate to anthropology and psychology. Such terms include: concept, intentional state, motivation, ground, iconicity, speech community, norm, performativity, joint-attention, embodiment, intersubjectivity, agency, role, functionalism, pragmatics, social construction, realism, and natural language.
Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG
Articles in the same Issue
- Semiotic systems of works of visual art: Signs, connotations, signals
- Art — depression — fiction: A variation on René Thom’s three important kinds of human activity
- Formes narratives de l’action et dangers de dérives en narratologie
- Crossing borders: Towards a cognitive aesthetic approach to Caravaggio and Beckett
- Iconicity, Ratosh’s lexical innovations, and beyond
- What you should know to survive in knowledge societies: On a semiotic understanding of ‘knowledge’
- Vers une théorie générale de la fiction
- Back to ‘cinema is filmed theatre’
- The dimensionality of notation
- Learning by abduction: A geometrical interpretation
- Political representation within the libidinal economy of a pictorial space: A political-semiotic reading of three propaganda posters of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
- The semiotic stance
- A semiotic study on the Transworld Skateboarding magazine
- Serial form as entertainment and interpretative framework: Probability and the ‘black box’ of past experience
- It took Spinoza and structuralism to teach Deleuze that meaning is not necessarily attributed to the cinematic sign
- Making sense of the visual — is Google the seventh language?
- Theatrical fictional worlds, counterfactuals, and scientific thought experiments
- PTSD: A situated look at the semiotic process and role of individual umwelts in human existence/function
- The semiotics of intercultural exchange: Ostensive definition and digital reason
- De l’esprit, de la culture, et des signes
- Le statut de la pulsion dans la sémiotique narrative morphodynamique
- Une typologie des relations
- Biology, semiotics, complexity: An experiment in interdisciplinarity
- Sign values in processes of distinction: The concept of luxury
- Analyse sémiotique de la webpublicite
- On signing translation
- Giambattista Vico’s open agenda of modernity
Articles in the same Issue
- Semiotic systems of works of visual art: Signs, connotations, signals
- Art — depression — fiction: A variation on René Thom’s three important kinds of human activity
- Formes narratives de l’action et dangers de dérives en narratologie
- Crossing borders: Towards a cognitive aesthetic approach to Caravaggio and Beckett
- Iconicity, Ratosh’s lexical innovations, and beyond
- What you should know to survive in knowledge societies: On a semiotic understanding of ‘knowledge’
- Vers une théorie générale de la fiction
- Back to ‘cinema is filmed theatre’
- The dimensionality of notation
- Learning by abduction: A geometrical interpretation
- Political representation within the libidinal economy of a pictorial space: A political-semiotic reading of three propaganda posters of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
- The semiotic stance
- A semiotic study on the Transworld Skateboarding magazine
- Serial form as entertainment and interpretative framework: Probability and the ‘black box’ of past experience
- It took Spinoza and structuralism to teach Deleuze that meaning is not necessarily attributed to the cinematic sign
- Making sense of the visual — is Google the seventh language?
- Theatrical fictional worlds, counterfactuals, and scientific thought experiments
- PTSD: A situated look at the semiotic process and role of individual umwelts in human existence/function
- The semiotics of intercultural exchange: Ostensive definition and digital reason
- De l’esprit, de la culture, et des signes
- Le statut de la pulsion dans la sémiotique narrative morphodynamique
- Une typologie des relations
- Biology, semiotics, complexity: An experiment in interdisciplinarity
- Sign values in processes of distinction: The concept of luxury
- Analyse sémiotique de la webpublicite
- On signing translation
- Giambattista Vico’s open agenda of modernity
