Volume 5, Issue 1

During the current transmitting period of semiotics and humanities in the world the term semiotics can and should be only a general index about a new direction of doing theoretical scholarship in social-human sciences without being able, however, to attain a more precise definition about its identity, aim, zone and methods. Semioticians have got used to organizing their scientific practice according to the related professional frames and channels that are often motivated by some competitive-utilitarian aims easily losing insight into the internal criteria of the semiotic elementals. The present paper proposes to go back to the internal criteria to pay attention to the semiotic merits as such. A proposal is raised here about the possible change of some basic conception in the current semiotic practice that the general semiotic scholarship can be further divided into several different categories or types implicative of different criteria and procedures. Thus, the main division should be made between the American-communication-directed trend (semiotics 1) and the Frenchsignification- directed trend (semiotics 2). The so-called cross-cultural semiotics (in an exact sense it amounts to global semiotics; but in a popular sense it is used as an alternative of the non-westem semiotics; in this paper it means almost the latter) or part of it could become another category so as to be able to more pertinently grasp the semiotic elementals in more detailed ways. Then we could find out or create more pertinent signifying units to carry out more effectively anatomizing and recombining operations in semiotic practice.

Ontologically, Baruch Spinoza and Rene Descartes take significantly different stands on truth, mind and meaning. It this respect, the latter can be regarded as the founder of modern epistemology, phenomenology, and scientific thinking. Nevertheless, Spinoza's mysticism and resounding Spinozist rejections of Cartesian rationalism can be found at the root of modern analytic philosophy and, even more surprisingly, in most basic assumptions of current cognitive science. The main issue of this "metaphysical" debate is the status of mind, consciousness, mental representations, truth, and meaning in general, and therefore the debate concerns the possibility of a cognitive semantics.

Through a tattooed body image in the short story "Parker's Back", O'Connor illustrates a possibility of "convergence" in the boundary-crossing encounter of the antithetical concepts separately possessed by the protagonist Parker and his wife. This paper would like to adopt a semiotic approach developed by Roland Barthes to study first, how Parker as a sign can perform the rhetorical function of the paradoxism, and second, through his function of mediation to contribute to the construction of the narrative. Taking Parker's body as the place of meditation of the material and the spirit helps illustrate the rhetorical and symbolic power embedded in the short story that starts and completes the life of the literary narrative. The religious concept of convergence in O'Connor's " Parker's Back" will surprisingly reveal to us certain similarities between the semiotic analyses and the religious interpretation of sign functions.

This article is based on my research in the field of semiotics, a field in which I have been involved for over 25 years. Throughout that time, I felt that my work was situated on the boundary between semiotics and philosophy. Recently, I concluded that all semiotic activity related to scientific research is part of epistemology, in that it deals with certain aspects of the acquisition of knowledge. Semiotic activity is a significant part of all scientific research. Along with observation and experimentation, it is included to varying degrees in all stages of the scientific process. Scientists rely on signs throughout their research work, from the time they plan a project through the summarizing of their conclusions. Every branch of science develops its own sign-system or systems. The development process is one of constant and continuous innovation, because the system of signs used by a science must grow and develop along with the science itself. My research has led me to conclude that sign-systems evolve in predictable patterns, gradually becoming more abstract by incorporating increasingly abstract symbols. If we can identify these patterns, we may be able to determine the stage of maturity of a given scientific theory at a particular time. The essays in this article are one of the first attempts to begin identifying and characterizing these patterns.

The Chinese verb CHI (吃) can be virtually used with any NP in the language and the numerous papers published on this issue up to now basically focus on metonymy or metaphor interpretations for this phenomenon. In this paper, however, the author first categorizes the CHI + NP construction into ET (extended) and CT (contextualized) types, and then discusses the location dilemma (i. e. ET1 sub-type) and the semantic ubiquity (i. e. CT sub-type) typical of Chinese in order to show that the location dilemma (e. g. CHI immediately followed by a location NP) is neither the consequence of some vacuous syntactic raising nor an economy-driven equivalent of its counterpart longer expression. The ET1 use of CHI connotes an abstract sense of direction. Likewise, the semantic ubiquity (i. e. novel uses of CHI) of the CT category is not blindly metaphorical either but is better understood as the Chinese proclivity for eating and culinary arts projecting onto some pertinent cultural-linguistic fossilization and pragmatic entrenchment. The author believes that the idiosyncratic behavior and the rambunctiousness of the "CHI + NP" construction in terms of its consequent semantic omnipotence of the CT category is a further cognitive extension from the ET2 sense of DEPEND-UPON. Such flexible sense extensions are sanctioned further by the comparatively loose Chinese V + NP combination in general.

The article proposes a semiotic comparison between the phenomenological structure of rituals and routines, and claims that they share the same features of repetition through time, impossibility of change, unavailability of choice, and transcendental conception of origin. If a modern, structural conception of meaning based on alternative is adopted, both rituals and routines can be considered as meaningless. However, if the non-structural, pre-modem conception of meaning based on repetition is embraced, rituals and routines appear to be meaningful, although they do not have a meaning according to the structural semiotic ideology. The sense of belonging that emerges from rituals and routines (from routines as rituals) relies exactly on the feeling that no alternative is possible, that meaning depends on a subject's repetitive frequentation of a physical or conceptual space, and that dis-placement does not exist. The section concludes by focusing on the main phenomenological difference between a ritual and a routine- whereas the former is collective, the latter is individual-, contending that this is the main reason for which the existential value of rituals in pre-modem societies is not satisfactorily replaced by that of routines in contemporary societies. Routines offer to (post-) modern subjects an alienating feeling of belonging that fails to replace the sense of belonging guaranteed by pre-modem rituals. Only through rituals do subjects feel part of a collective routine that secures their feeling of belonging.

Peircean semiotics is a cognitive science, namely, a cognitive semiotics. The current cognitive linguistics is a branch of cognitive semiotics, the application, embodiment and, in a sense, development of its fundamental theories, thus serving as a great propelling force in developing disciplines of modem linguistics. Cognitive linguistics, following the philosophical tradition of Peircean semiotics, belongs to the trend of thought of scientism of contemporary western philosophy and to the type of linguistic science of studying the physiological and psychological activities of language from the intraorganic point of view.

The exploration of the modification of signifieds, which interpret human activities, social phenomena and the dialectics between them, has as indispensable presupposition the acceptation on a methodological level of the process of transformation of three necessary elements (thought, semiosis, world) for the perception and ontological identification of physical entities or cultural objects. The phenomenological theory of the beginning of the 20th century seems to consolidate this acceptation and, at the same time, refute it. According to this philosophy, it is very important for one to know the structure of the action of "taking into consideration of something". This structure is perceptible if, free from theoretical schemes of interpretation and bias, one examines what is revealed by itself. This principle seems to contradict a possible theory of semiotics, which intends to define the borders of semiotics by exploring the evolution of phenomena, concepts and interpretations. Notwithstanding, Husserl, citing Franz Brentano's term intentionality, speaks of the extensive character of the conscience, which is not defined as an interior sealed space, but as a flux of experiences, opened towards the world. This paper aims at questioning the term intentionality and its importance for a theory on the borders of semiotics by evoking the example of Aristotle's terms synonymy and homonymy.

This paper is part of Chapter One "The Origin of Art and Artistic Thinking" in the book An Introduction to the Logic of Narrative Art. But before discussing artistic thinking, we find it necessary to investigate the origin of thinking and its relation with symbols. Since it's impossible for us to go back to the ancient times, what we can do is to examine the occurrence of thinking and symbols and their relation by means of studying babies' and aborigines' thinking methods and animals' cognition of symbols. The developmental process of thinking proves that thinking is undoubtedly prior to each conscious action. It's not the case that labor creates human beings or language, but that labor, language and writing mark the developmental level of thinking. It also proves that the two-way motion ("concrete to abstract ←→ abstract to concrete") of thinking occurs at all times. Human modes of thinking experience a gradual evolutionary process from primitive thinking to mythological thinking and then to abstract thinking. And mythological thinking is retained in artistic creation and becomes various figures of speech which are still in use now.

This study addresses some significant semiotic, communicative and rhetorical aspects of postures. It deals with basic Russian postures and compares their functions, meanings and regularities of usage with those of Russian manual gestures. The notions of nonverbal ethics and etiquette of interactive communication are introduced that estimate, among other things, the measure of freedom which one body possesses toward another. The paper focuses on some cross-cultural discrepancies in postures and postural representations of emotions and on different semiotic oppositions and postural patterns that serve to communicate ethical information, and explain how social and cultural meanings such as " decent" and " indecent" can be expressed nonverbally.

Bakhtin regarded every sign as a dialogic sign while Peirce regarded every sign as a sign of thought. But a sign of thought is in dialog with the self. Thure von UexkOII even said that" life is always and everywhere a dialogue between self and self". Thus troth thinkers agreed on the dialogic nature of all signs. All three thinkers even agreed on the presence in the sign of two interpreters-the self and other, thus displaying a unity in their three theories. The current standard theory of semiotics, the USST-2000, handles the presence of two interpreters quite well but is not able to explain the semiotic details of dialog. Since dialog is a well attested function of signs, there is an empirical need to modify the USST-2000. This paper attempts to make the minimum adjustments to the USST- 2000 in order to bring dialog within its explanatory power. The theory presented here is successful in doing that and I therefore refer to it as the USST-2010. The structure of the USST-2010 still maintains a recognizable Peircean heritage and hence can be regarded as a further extension of Peirce's original semiotic theory.

Charles Sanders Peirce is quite possibly the greatest philosophical genius the United States has ever produced. His thinking was radical and unconventional and illuminated profound novelty in the form of bold and at times wildly speculative ideas. The arbiter of history has shown his thinking to be well ahead of its time. Peirce has numerous scientific advances to his credit and his ideas both anticipated and helped create the ground for the physics of both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. In addition, he and his friend and colleague William James were the two most central figures responsible for the creation of the philosophy of Pragmatism. This paper is a personal exploration of an encounter with Peirce's approach to inquiry and illustrates how his willingness to courageously follow any line of questioning to its ultimate end led him to breakthrough insights that are still at the forefront of American philosophy today. Abstract

In the first part of this paper I argue that the majority of the interpretations of Peirce's understanding of instinct have come through the 1898 lecture where Peirce says that instinct and reason should remain distinct, a statement that is accepted at face value by many Peirce scholars. However, there is a more comprehensive way of understanding this division and it hangs on the interpretation of instinct. I intend to test this distinction of reason and instinct against Peirce's other writings, By the end of the first part of this paper, the traditional definition of instinct will have been freed up. In the second part I show how there is a deeper understanding of instinct that helps to explain how we can be so right in our guesses about nature. Our ability to be right so much of the time can be accounted for by looking at what Peirce means by " rheme", one of his semiotic categories formed by his theory of inquiry.

With this issue, Chinese Semiotic Studies introduces a section on the Tartu Semiotics School. This regular feature, appearing potentially in every issue, is justified by several arguments: this school has been persisting on the semiotic scene already since the 1960s; this is the school that founded the semiotics of culture and actively studied it ever since; the Tartu school has the potential to bridge the different approaches of semiotics-structuralist and dynamic, Western and Eastern, cultural and biological; and, as it is situated on many boundaries, the Tartu Semiotics School may be used as a source for creative ideas or new approaches.

The identity of cultural texts and the creolisation of cultural languages and the existence of these texts and languages in media environment compel science to combine different possibilities of study more flexibly. Science itself is part of this culture and the study of communication in culture is inseparable from attempts to understand the process of communication between science and culture.

The position of semiotics in university can be discovered by the study of the position of semiosis in the universe. Sign action is what constitutes knowing of all kinds, including both propositional and non-propositional knowing. Contemporary semiotic studies have well proved that semiotics belongs to the core of knowledge, which means that semiotics should be one of the main domains, one of the core disciplines in university teaching in parallel to the natural sciences. At several universities in the world this is already happening. One of these-the University of Tartu-can be used as an example worthy of a case study, as it is where semiotics is taught as a major specialty in undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate levels, and where a course in semiotics is also provided as a core ( methodological) course for students of many specialties. The proper place for semiotics in university entails the cooperation between biosemiotics and cultural semiotics.

The article gives a brief overview of Jakob von Uexküll's (1864-1944) biosemiotic heritage as it has been studied, interpreted and integrated into Tartu semiotics and other academic fields in recent decades.