Augusto Ponzio

Theory of Meaning and Theory of Knowledge: Vailati and Lady Welby

Abstract Welby and Vailati both have a special interest in problems relating to language, sign, meaning, and knowledge. Both evidence the relevance of sign and meaning to every sphere of human life and experience. Vailati was fascinated by Welbys significs with its focus on the relation between signs and values. In this essay I propose the term “ethosemiotics” for the first time, now developed in terms of “semioethics.”

Transcendence and alterity: On life, communication, and subjectivity

Abstract The question of being in todays global communication-production system concerns all life forms over the planet. Global semiotics describes life and semiosis as converging and in this framework faces the question of ontology. Three contexts for a critical approach to the study of signs include the socio-economic, the phenomenological, and the ontological. These are closely interconnected and in this paper are considered from the perspective of global semiotics and semioethics. Politics, war, communication, and subjectivity are critiqued in terms of a dialogic approach to life, signs, and human relations, where dialogism is not only viewed as a cultural but also a biosemiosic phenomenon implying detotalization and otherness beyond the logic of short-sighted identity.

A Tribute to Thomas A. Sebeok

According to the approach developed by Thomas A. Sebeok (1921–2001) and his ‘global semiotics,’ semiosis and life converge. This leads to his cardinal axiom: ‘semiosis is the criterial attribute of life.’ His global approach to sign life presupposes his critique of anthropocentrism and glottocentrism. Global semiotics is open to zoosemiotics, indeed, even more broadly, biosemiotics which extends its gaze to semiosis in the whole living universe to include the realms of macro- and microorganisms. In Sebeok’s conception, the sign science is not only the study of communication in culture, but of communicative behaviour from a biosemiotic perspective.

Political ideology and the language of the European constitution

Abstract This paper interrogates the conditions of possibility of the European constitution and asks where we must search for these conditions. Beyond common historical and cultural traditions, beyond some pact or convention, a third possibility is considered: the idea that Europe has no future without a European constitution founded on awareness that all European nations participate in a common destiny, which in the era of globalization is the destiny of the whole world. Such participation must be based on the logic of otherness and reasonableness of which the human being alone as a semiotic animal is capable.

Dialogic Gradation in the Logic of Interpretation: Deduction, Induction, Abduction

1. the semiosis as a whole: Z; 2. the organism of the interpreter: (O); 3. the interpretandum (‘signal’): S; 4. the channel: Ch; 5. the signifier (the signal represented in the organism): (Rs); 6. the interpretant: (I); 7. the signified (the object represented in the organism): (Rg); 8. the interpretatum (‘objet’): G; 9. the disposition for instrumental behavior: (Rbg); 10. the disposition for signaling behavior: (Rsg); 11. instrumental behavior: (BG); 12. signaling behavior: (SG); 13. external context: (C); 14. internal context: (c).

On Language as Work and Trade

The views put forward by Ferruccio Rossi-Landi in his most recent writings are that language is work, that the various languages are its products, and that this makes it possible to investigate the phenomena of language by means of categories drawn from economics. We shall try to show that this approach adequately and opportunely opens a path amidst the diverse positions and trends of contemporary linguistics and philosophy of language. On the one hand, this approach offers to theories to which it draws near instruments for a better explication of their most original significance and structure: by avoiding the ambiguities that make them seem the victims of traditional prejudice, it allows their more rigorous formulation. On the other hand, the approach to language as work brings to light, more than their critics have been able to do so far, the impossibility of maintaining other theories against which, in an implicit or explicit manner, it takes stand. Rossi-Landis interpretation is a new alternative with respect to traditional alternatives on the problems of language, such as mentalism and

Language as Primary Modeling and Natural Languages: A Biosemiotic Perspective

Our paper concerns general linguistics and discusses standpoints in both taxonomic and generative-transformational structuralism. The question that linguistics most often fails to address is “why so many languages?”; this is the enigma of Babel. We attempt an answer in a biosemiotic key, with special reference to Sebeok’s global semiotics. What is implied is the problem not only of the plurality of natural languages (Fr. langue/It. lingua), but also of the different “languages” (Fr. langage/It. linguaggio) of different discourse genres, as well as the infinite differentiation in individual speech. Babel does not only concern difference among languages (Fr. langue/It. lingua), but also the different ways in which single individuals use the word. Far from acting as an obstacle to communication, the otherness relation among the word of single individuals is the condition for communication to obtain, for expression and understanding.

The Semiotics of Karl Marx

Abstract This paper claims that, as a “cryptosemiotician” and a philosopher, Marx practiced semiotics. Thus the paper examines Marx’s semiotics and its historical and theoretical developments in Europe. The relation between semiotics and Marxism is understood in the sense that the study of signs is not secondary with respect to historical-dialectical materialism. Marxism is an “open system” in that the elements that constitute it are related in such a way that modification of one element provokes modification of the others. It is an open system because it is a scientific system; it is subject to the laws of science and thus continuously susceptible to verification and exposed to confutation. I propose a critical reading of so-called Marxist interpretations of Marxian semiotics.

Sign, dialogue, and alterity

Abstract Not only verbal signs, but any situation or semiosis is a relational process that presents different degrees of dialogism. In fact, the sign calls for a response from another sign, that is, the interpretant. Semiosis is an open dialogue among various interpreted and interpretant signs. In this sense, the sign is a dialectic unit of self-identity and otherness. All communication processes are based not only on modeling (Sebeok), but also on dialogism. Modeling and dialogism are pivotal concepts in the study of semiosis. The dialogic relation between sign and interpretant has semiotic consequences from the perspective of the typology of signs, and logical consequences from the perspective of the typology of inference and argument. Logic is dia-logic. A new critique of reason is a critique of dialogic reason.

Comparing the incomparable and legal discourse

Abstract It is not with the State that personal responsibility arises towards the other. According to Emmanuel Levinas, the other is every single human being I am responsible for, and I am this responsibility for him. The other, my fellow, is the first comer. But I do not live in a world with just one single “first comer”; there is always another other, a third, who is also my other, my fellow. Otherness, beginning with this third, is a plurality. Proximity as responsibility is a plurality. There is a need for justice. There is the obligation to compare unique and incomparable others. This is what is hidden, unsaid, implied in legal discourse. But recourse to comparison among that which cannot be compared, among that which is incomparable is justified by love of justice for the other. It is this justification that confers a sense to law, which is always dura lex, and to the statement that citizens are equal before the law. From this point of view, State justice is always imperfect with respect to human rights understood as the rights of the other, of every other in his absolute difference, in his incomparable otherness.