Volume 2011, Issue 187

Mathematics is one of the richest, if more abstruse, areas of higher human cognition. It is a formal system, founded on a minimum of primitive concepts, but involving cognitive mechanisms, such as blending and framing, in an iterative manner, which lead to the rich structure of “higher” mathematics. The use of such cognitive mechanisms is done in a very controlled way, so as to maintain the rigor of the discipline. It is suggested that blending and other such mechanisms are incorporated into the formal structure of the discipline. This thesis is examined via a number of examples. This has the effect that blends are easy to make in mathematics. On the other hand, before blends and other processes were incorporated into mathematics, some blends that are obvious, even necessary, in hindsight, have taken a long time — sometimes centuries — to be realized. We hypothesis there is a cognitive cost to actualizing blends, which must be overcome. This phenomenon is investigated via the historical record.

This essay presents a commentary on and rational reconstruction of Stephen Heath's influential and groundbreaking essay from 1976: “On screen, in frame: Film and ideology.” As a commentary, it attempts to make explicit the implicit assumptions behind Heath's dense and challenging essay; rewrite and clarify his inexact formulations; and develop a microanalysis of the essay's language. As a rational reconstruction, this essay follows Rudolf Botha's philosophical study into the conduct of inquiry to analyze Heath's formulation of conceptual and empirical problems and the strategies he uses to deproblematize them. This rational reconstruction rearranges the parts of Heath's essay according to the four central activities Botha identifies in the formulation of theoretical problems: 1) identifying the problematic state of affairs; 2) describing the problematic state of affairs; 3) constructing problems; and 4) evaluating problems according to well-formedness and significance. The result is a close reading of Heath's essay that reveals in minute detail his reasoning strategies, and highlights how he revolutionized film theory by attempting to integrate Lacanian psychoanalysis and Althusserian Marxism into continental semiotics, under the influence of Kristeva's theories of the signifying practice and the subject-in-process.

Disease is never truly a thing, but always an event. It is polysemic, multilayered, historically full, and dynamic. It is constructed over time and encumbered with interpretants according to the needs and preconceptions of those who argue they search only for the truth. The act of quarantining an individual or a community is an expression of governmental power, equal in its effect and the strength of its narrative to the government's authority to institutionalize the mentally ill, deprive criminals of their liberty, and draft individuals to serve in the armed forces. Power flows from and accrues to those who have been granted the right to identify and group those bodily “signs” that designate someone as dangerous. The public will likely be faced many times with a potentially fatal and infectious disease that requires that we identify and isolate those considered dangerous; we will once again face the ethical dilemma of how to choose between individual rights and the public's safety. Who is to be isolated from the balance of society, for what period of time, and under what conditions, may depend more on the individual's social, economic, and political status and categorization as “other” than upon his/her actual threat to the public's health.

Previous research has claimed that providing people with information about global warming may have a negative (and unanticipated) effect on their explicit attitudes towards climate change. One study found that more informed respondents felt less personally responsible for global warming and also showed less concern for the problem as a whole. This earlier study was, however, correlational in design and did not allow for firm conclusions regarding the direction of causality. For this reason, in our study we used an experimental approach — highly informative (and emotional) clips from An Inconvenient Truth were played to sets of participants and their mood states were measured as well as their explicit social attitudes/social cognitions on five critical scales (message acceptance/motivation to do something about climate change/empowerment/shifting responsibility for climate change/fatalism). Our study found that the clips did affect emotion, and in particular, they decreased the happiness and calmness levels of our participants, but they also felt more motivated to do something about climate change, more able to do something about climate change and, in addition, they were significantly less likely to think that they had no control over the whole climate change process. These were much more optimistic conclusions than the previous study had allowed, and they remind us of the power of strong informative and emotional messages on explicit attitude change and social cognition generally.

Over decades, plagiarism in academic writing has been viewed as a serious issue of academic integrity within educational institutions. Universities are increasingly investing time and capital in raising plagiarism awareness and investigating measures to detect and deter plagiarism. Many tertiary institutions appear to adopt legal and quasi-legal interpretations of criminal law in their plagiarism management practices and policies (Sutherland-Smith, Journal of English for Academic Purposes 4: 83–95, 2005, Plagiarism, the Internet and academic writing: Improving academic integrity, Routledge, 2008). In this paper, semiotic analysis of discourse (Danesi and Perron, Analyzing cultures: An introduction and handbook, Indiana University Press, 1999; Danesi, Messages, signs and meanings: A basic textbook in semiotics and communication theory, Canadian Scholars Press, 2004, The quest for meaning: A guide to semiotic theory and practice, University of Toronto Press, 2007) is used to explore notions of fairness and justice in the language of university plagiarism policies. Through examination of the plagiarism policies of twenty “top” universities across Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States of America, I argue that, in some cases, approaches to plagiarism management do not appear consistent with outward appearances of justice and fairness. In fact, policies and processes bear closer resemblance to punitive legal outcomes than the broader ethical approaches usually associated with concepts of justice and fairness. Rethinking plagiarism management in terms of ethically responsible relationships within institutional processes and policies is closer to societal notions of justice and a more educationally sustainable practice, which should be reflected in the discourse of university plagiarism policies and processes.

Based on two studies of different meaning-making phenomena, post-it notes and furniture, this paper highlights the role of materiality in everyday semiosis. A perspective on the semiotics of material artifacts is adopted, in which the “social” in combination with the specific affordances of materials are crucial for meaning-making. Partially in opposition to a Saussurean view of the semiotic sign, it is argued that materiality in itself contributes to meaning-making, through discourses and activity types. This paper contributes to the theoretical and the methodological dialogue between social semiotics and other approaches in the wider field of semiotic research.

This article proposes a method to analyze movies at a sequence level in dynamic terms based on the functional framework of analysis derived from systemic functional linguistics and developed by multimodal discourse analysis, and which focuses on the use of locative Circumstances as affordances implicitly selecting changes of perspective. The two perspectives that will be taken into consideration have been elaborated through the study of how human presence is construed in hyper-environments and how this construal affects the web user's degree of involvement. A parallel between the creation of hyper-environments and the creation of a movie is therefore also proposed.

Fame's essentially literary nature is evident even in the single basic prerequisite that for fame to exist, audiences must respond to a narrative either by or about an individual with enthusiasm or abhorrence strong enough to share that response with others. Nonetheless, fame has been colored by its classical characterization as a fickle, uncontrollable goddess, whose whims rapaciously ruin or fortunately further an individual, suggesting that the making of fame is not the responsibility of the one upon which it is bestowed. Political leaders, however, understand its literary foundation, even if “literature” per se is not how they would characterize their own attempts to author fame. To demonstrate their use of literary structures, rather than focus on embellishment or genres such as biographies, I adapt Roman Jakobson's six-node communication model for poetic language to the political arena and exemplify through four modern and contemporary leaders: Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, George Bush, and Willy Brandt.

Any great new theoretical framework has an epistemological and an ontological aspect to its philosophy as well as an axiological one, and one needs to understand all three aspects in order to grasp the deep aspiration and idea of the theoretical framework. Presently, there is a widespread effort to understand C. S. Peirce's (1837–1914) pragmaticistic semeiotic, and to develop it by integrating the results of modern science and evolutionary thinking; first, producing a biosemiotics and, second, by integrating it with the progress in cybernetics, information science, and system theory to create a cybersemiotics. In this paper, we focus on the understanding of the evolution of the universe that Peirce produced as an alternative to the mechanistic view underlying classical physics and try to place man in an evolving universe as a creative, aesthetical agent. It is true that modern non-equilibrium physics has made a modern foundation for a profound physical understanding of the basic evolutionary processes in the universe. But science still has not produced a theory that can explain how the creativity of the universe could produce signification, interpretation, and first-person consciousness. To this end, Peirce's thoughts on agapastic evolution coupled with the aesthetical influence of the growth of ideas and reasonableness on man could make a contribution.

We traditionally are used to a dichotomy between theoretical and applied levels in semiotic studies. Therefore, there exists a general-semiotics as the theoretical mode and a discipline-semiotics as the applied one. Clearly, the existing general semiotics arises from the West and all nonwestern semiotics seem to be reduced to the category of the applied- or discipline-semiotics. However, this scholarly dichotomy tends to be incomplete or unsatisfactory in the semiotic globalization era. This paper intends to point out that general or theoretical semiotics, far from being some original meta-semiotics or “semiotic philosophy,” is itself a synthetic body of a more general theoretical source outside of semiotic proper and found within various disciplinary scholarships. Thus, the composition of theoretical semiotics as such is also related to various conventional disciplines, including nonwestern ones. In this sense, a developed nonwestern or eastern semiotics would contribute also to the progress of semiotic theory in the future.

This research tackles computer linguistic terminology used incorrectly or ambiguously by Arab computer users in academic institutions and by English-to-Arabic translators. To serve the purpose of this research, we inserted and/or contextualized a number of computer linguistic terms in texts or contexts. The terms are computer signs and words loaded with technical meanings that are often used in word processing and statistical software packages. Five translators were requested to translate those texts including the chosen semiotic signs and/or codes. Simultaneously, we reviewed computer books taught in two Arab countries (Jordan and the UAE) because these countries have witnessed good educational developments. After filtering out the translators' products from English into Arabic and after investigating the computer terminologies (signs, codes, words, etc., and their semiotic meanings), we found that many computer terms and their levels of meaning are problematic. We classified the types of problematic vocabulary items and then tabulated them under four semiotic levels or categories: ambiguous, inaccurate, unchangeable, and statistical. We also found that problematic words were difficult to translate because of the Arabic culture or the inefficiency of English/Arabic bilingual dictionaries. The research concludes with a number of practical and research-directed recommendations.

In this study, the principles of Peircean semiotics are used to elucidate the interpretive process for Roentgen signs. We begin with the identification of terminological, propositional, and argumental interpretants in the context of Roentgen diagnosis. We examine the contributions of collateral knowledge and principles of inference, both associational and logical, to the formation of diagnostic interpretants. The Peircean modes of logical inference are then adapted to represent their use in clinical practice by a solitary interpreter. It is suggested that this semiotic model of Roentgen diagnosis may also apply to the interpretation of visual signs in other diagnostic domains.

In this paper, we present a discussion, on a scientific level, on both the viability of replacing the translator's figure with software for linguistic translation and the impact of such a replacement on the quality of the translated text.

This article offers a comparative analysis of the concept of the event in the philosophy of Jean-Luc Marion and Alain Badiou. Phenomenological and psychoanalytic approaches are brought together to describe how the event poses a limit problem to signifying mediation. A case study of visibility in painting is offered to illustrate how an event cannot be shown, but must show itself in excess of symbolizing practices. The article concludes by evaluating the analytic importance of this concept for critical research across the arts, media, and communication studies.

This interdisciplinary research explores the rhetorical and semiological concepts that examine the power, the practice, and the techniques employed by advertisers in cross-cultural settings. While sexual connotations dominate Western advertising, the Iranian government mandates that advertising agencies create ads that comply with Islamic law. A comparative analysis of semiological and rhetorical patterns in women's products advertising in Iran and the U.S. reveals that, despite restrictions, Iranian advertisers try to follow the Western canon of rhetoric. This study creates a prototype for critical analysis of persuasive images in different societies and suggests that advertising reflects the culture and also contributes to its constant change.

Group dynamics is extremely difficult to model and to analyze through formal methods. From an interdisciplinary perspective, and based on core ideas drawn from Peircean semiotics, Category Theory, and psychoanalysis, the current paper presents a novel semio-mathematical technique for excavating themes out of group dynamics. A theme is modeled as an elementary Topos that is systematically produced from the verbal interaction using triadic units of analysis. Each theme is interpreted in-context in order to excavate unconscious relational patterns. The technique is illustrated through the analysis of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie.

This article develops the discussion of “noun + noun compounds” in Semiotica (Bundgaard et al., Semiotica 161: 363–393, 2006, Semiotica 172: 363–393, 2008; Søgaard, Semiotica 168: 189–195, 2008). The approach is through analyzing phrases with several noun or noun-like premodifiers, and through a brief historical outline. It argues (first) that phrases with several nominal premodifiers constitute constructions, with a set order and well-defined semantic relations; and (second) that phrases with a single nominal premodifier grade off from those that invoke a fully conventionalized construction to ad hoc phrases with no conventionalization. It concludes that these constructions have been misunderstood because of a semiotic error: the meaning has been sought only in individual words as signs, whereas there is also meaning in a word's position in the construction, as a sign.