Volume 10, Issue 4

Since China adopted the reform and open-up policy in the late 1970s, cultural semiotics from the former Soviet Union has been introduced into China, and has exerted substantial influence on Chinese academia. This essay starts from the perspective of research discourse to review the influence of Soviet literary theories among Chinese scholars over the past half century, and to demonstrate the positive role played by Soviet cultural semiotics in the evolution process of the Chinese literary community from revolution through aesthetic discourse to dialogue and polyphony. The essay then proceeds to the discussion of the revolutionary shift in the critical mindset caused by the changes in research discourses, namely the shift from the scientific way of thinking, featuring scientific induction, to the artistic way of thinking, featuring pluralism and the co-existence of various elements. The last part of the essay provides an in-depth discussion of the Chinese adaptation of Soviet cultural semiotics, i.e. the rediscovery of the nature of cultural semiotics by Chinese semioticians.

Is India’s legacy of intellectual supremacy at odds with the vast landscape of the everyday? In the context of Modernity, everything social, cultural and political is subject to interpretative filters. How do we make sense of any of these, or all of these? Several slippages of meanings, several residues, and lengthy ‘liminal’ spaces characterize the semiotic landscape of contemporary India. Do we understand negotiations, between the past, the present and the continuous of some of the significant cultural discourses in contemporary India as dialogues? Dialogue is also a genre of discourse and can be seen as the modality itself of thought The roles of the traditional postulates like ‘Maya’, ‘Dharma’ and ‘Rasa’ for example as cosmological schema, readily translatable interpretative frameworks in contemporary discourses has often been questioned by critical theory in modern India. Critics are also of the view that, in Rasa theory, the human onlooker is just a locus and not an active agent in what is a global alchemy of properties and perceptions. The same, according to them, can be said of Dharma as an inhuman theodicy that often exists over and above the movements of detection, discovery, reasoning and proof in modern methods of justice.

Writing is a dialogic practice of which the essence lies in intertextuality. Taking intertextuality theory and Lotman’s late text view, which is in harmony with the essence of intertextuality theory as the theoretical basis, this paper aims to introduce four types of texts involved during the writing process, namely, intertext, consisting of both schema text and exterior text, reader text, context text and the individualized text referring to the final output of writer and also the offspring of the intertextuality of the aforementioned three texts. Moreover, the paper briefly analyzes the intertextual relationships among these four texts in the hope of raising more interest in intertextual practice and intertextual awareness of writing.

Textbooks, authorized by the national education agency to be major teaching materials used in schools in China, are a kind of cultural capital. Textbooks assimilate and spread the culture of a certain society, which standardizes and restricts the compilation of textbooks. The culture of a society, especially the main ideology inevitably permeates textbooks. Therefore, what content is chosen in textbooks, how to organize the knowledge and how to present it to the target readers and evaluate it，are surely influenced by ideology. And the influence is neither obvious nor hidden. EFL teaching materials, the bridge between students and their teachers, are indispensable from English language instruction. Within the framework of Critical Linguistics, this paper studies the complicated relationship between language, power and ideology, based on one of the widely used EFL textbooks in Mainland China Fun with English. It tries to expose hidden sexism in Fun with English through quantitative analysis, textual analysis and comparative analysis. Moreover, it shows how sexist EFL teaching material affects their users and tentatively suggests several practical suggestions for overcoming negative effects of such materials.

That what underlies the possibility of semiosis in the first place at any level is the irreducibility of relations to subjectivity (including intersubjectivity), together with the singularity of relations as the only form of being capable of being positively verified to exist whether the existence is an awarenessdependent or awareness-independent occurrence, remains to be generally understood. Yet just this understanding, along with appreciation of the irreducible triad (significate, representamen, interpretant) unified by any given relation of a semiosic character, is required to explain the vis a prospecto uniqueness of signs as able to transmit through present circumstances an influence of the future rearranging the relevance of past occurrences to what will be even though it may not be yet.

Biosemiotics holds that all forms of life are capable of interpretation. Regardless of the complexity of the inner world of the organism there is always found some rudimentary negotiation of code duality or the presence of incompatible codes, which necessitates a sort of ‘translation’ of those codes into meaningful action. The bioluminescent anti-predatory behavior known as counterillumination serves as an example of a relatively simple non-human behavior that nonetheless exhibits the traits of semiosis. These traits are described in detail using some semiotic terminology.

These pages introduce the three papers on the works of Charles Peirce and their authors. The authors and their papers are: Eliseo Fernández, “Semiosis between Action and Passion”; Charls Pearson, “Paradigm Inversion: An Important Principle of Experimental Semiotics”; and Xu Peng, “Application of the Pragmatic Maxim to Mathematical Concepts”.

All organisms are autonomous, self-organizing wholes separated by semi-permeable boundaries from a surrounding environment. Across these boundaries conveyances of action and passion are channeled through efferent and afferent pathways. I analyze this scheme in terms of two fundamental processes: semiosis and control. I propose a unified account of the functioning of semiosis and of controlling and controlled actions by viewing organisms as systems that separate their responses (actions) from the actions their environment exerts upon them (passions). Semiosis and goal-directed action are seen as complementary forms of causation. Examples from cell physiology and the functioning of efferent and afferent pathways in plants and animals illustrate and expand these ideas. Based on this interpretation of the relations between semiosis and control I reach a generalized conception of purposeful action, linking the expansion of semiotic capacities throughout biological evolution to a concomitant increase in an organism’s powers for intervention in its environment. The fruitfulness of these ideas is substantiated through examples showing how they make intelligible phenomena previously deemed disparate. Examples include similarities and differences between signs and instruments, and analogies in the evolution of organisms and artifacts.

I have previously discussed various ways of designing semiotics experiments. One method that plays a very important role is governed by the Principle of Paradigm Inversion. The word “paradigm” here refers not to what Kuhn called the overall scientific paradigm, but to what experimentalists call the experimental paradigm - the design principle of the particular experiment. In this essay, I discuss this unique design method in more detail. How do you invert an experimental paradigm? How do you turn the semiotic sock inside out? When is it possible to invert an experimental paradigm and obtain a semiotics experiment? How do you establish the measurement scale for an inverted paradigm? What kinds of experiments are ripe for inversion? What are the performance parameters of the inverted experimental design? These and other important experimental semiotics questions are discussed in this essay.

Peirce expressed his pragmatic maxim in the 1870s. If, as Peirce maintained, this original definition is a maxim of logic, it is mainly a maxim of the logic of science, as the title “Illustrations of the Logic of Science” indicates. Pure mathematical conceptions, and the logic of mathematics, if not totally excluded, have at least not been emphasized. During his years at Johns Hopkins University, pure mathematics became his subject of most concern, while logic was also conceived as semiotics during this time. So around the turn of the century, when the popular movement of pragmatism began with James’ “Berkeley Address”, Peirce found that the main difficulty with his original definition of the pragmatic maxim was how to make pure mathematical conceptions clear. He mentioned this problem repeatedly but only gave a tentative solution admitting that, at least according to his original definition, some meanings of pure mathematical conceptions cannot be clarified. This, I believe, is the most important reason for Peirce’s renaming and redefining the pragmatic maxim in semiotic terms. If other pragmatists, and scholars of pragmatism, had noticed this, then most criticisms of pragmatism could have been avoided and the history of pragmatism may have taken a different direction.