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This paper argues against assuming that analysis, in the sense of breaking things into their constituent parts, can result in understanding of either universal truths or unequivocal local realities. “Analysis” most commonly refers to the process of looking into things to identify their constituent parts and the relations between them. To Kant, an analytic fact is self-evident. However, a phenomenon is only recognized as such at particular ontological, or perceptual, levels; when approached as a series of sub-phenomena, the question to which we are responding is not “what is this made of,” so much as “what are you reminded of when you look into this?” Therefore, analysis is a process of semiotic interpretation rather than pure logic: the response to a series of prompts in a particular context, where those responses are individual variations on sociocultural habits of response. Analysis is therefore analogical and intersubjective, and this should be recognized within educational and scholarly practices. On this account, ontological levels are better understood as perceptual levels. Analysis should therefore be preceded by explanatory sensitivity, as construals of any entity are dependent on the contexts that locate that entity. Some practical examples and implications for education are offered.

Edusemiotics emerges as a fresh field of inquiry that benefits from the mutual reciprocities between design thinking and semiotic interpretation. By revealing these mutual reciprocities, edusemiotics emerges as one of the most important developments in educational philosophy, bridging the gap between the humanities and sciences that was fashioned by modernity and postmodernity. In a transmodern world, we are free and able to cross over diaphanous boundaries among diverse disciplines and transcend our assumptions about the ephemeral phenomena of reality. The transdisciplinarity of edusemiotics encourages us to integrate theoretical investigations and practical applications in both humanities and sciences, and turns our attention to the development of our capacity to integrate factual information and imaginative interpretation. Therefore, we truly become educators of adult learners.

Grounded on archival files, the general development of Jakobson’s tripartite division of translation (intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic) and its current situation in the academic world is recovered to reveal its influence on linguistics, semiotics, and translation studies worldwide, and to point out the significance of criticizing the triadic division in terms of the broad sense of translation as a term and the classifications of signs. Gideon Toury (1986), Umberto Eco (2001), Peeter Torop (2002), Dinda Gorlée (2010), Zhonglian Huang (2015), Hongwei Jia (2016b and 2016c), and others criticized this division and constructed their own systems, but these have their own problems and limitations. Therefore, it is necessary to construct, with reference to Lotman’s idea on semiosphere, a new division system (intra-semiospheric, intersemiospheric and supra-semiospheric) for translation semiotics.

Victoria Welby conceived a special approach to the theory of meaning, which she designated with the expression Significs . A central concept in her works is what she names mother sense , which she discusses in her correspondence with such figures as the English philosopher Ferdinand C. S. Schiller and the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce, among others. Beyond her contribution to questions of the linguistic, semiotic, practical ethical, and pedagogical orders, the implications of her theory of meaning are particularly interesting for the “woman question” and for feminist discourse generally.

Scholars have mostly focused on “positive materiality,” studying the meaning of materials and techniques in the production of artifacts. Matter, however, means not only when it is shaped into materiality but also when it is destroyed. The essay that follows is meant to represent a first tentative enquiry into the meaning of anti-materiality. The study of destroyed artifacts aims at pointing out that matter is always materiality. It always conserves a shadow of meaning, independently from how profoundly its earlier form was disintegrated. The crepuscular significance of damaged materials has mostly escaped the attention of scholars. The essay attempts an initial exploration of it, proposing a condensed cultural history of broken glass. It therefore seeks to combine, in the same exposition, a chronological and a structural overview of broken glass, from Greco-Roman antiquity until early modernity.