Serial form as entertainment and interpretative framework: Probability and the ‘black box’ of past experience
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Michael Betancourt
Abstract
This essay presents and discusses the ways that prior experience constitutes a logical black box in Umberto Eco’s discussion of serial forms in ‘Interpreting Serials’ by using the complex adaptive system model for how complexity arises and is sustained over time, as proposed by John Holland. In exploring how Holland’s model can account for some aspects of Eco’s past experience, it becomes evident that a modification of both theories to accommodate multiple, contradictory potentials simultaneously suggests we consider meaning as a range of potentials rather than as a singular choice. Even though the model proposed here is incomplete and tentative, it is suggestive of possible strategies for justifying interpretations without precluding their rejection or revision at a later time. Individual interpretations are justified not by comparison to an external truth but by the existence of other possible interpretations with shared characteristics that nevertheless contradict each other.
Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG
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- It took Spinoza and structuralism to teach Deleuze that meaning is not necessarily attributed to the cinematic sign
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- Le statut de la pulsion dans la sémiotique narrative morphodynamique
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- 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
