Torkild Thellefsen

Emotion, information, and cognition, and some possible consequences for library and information science

We present our semeiotic‐inspired concept of information as 1 of 3 important elements in meaning creation, the 2 other concepts being emotion and cognition. We have the inner world (emotion); we have the outer world (information); and cognition mediates between the two. We analyze the 3 elements in relation to communication and discuss the semeiotics‐inspired communication model, the Dynacom; then, we discuss our semeiotic perspective on the meaning‐creation process and communication with regard to a few, but central, elements in library and information science, namely, the systems‐oriented perspective, the user‐oriented perspective, and a domain‐oriented perspective.

The information concept of Nicholas Belkin revisited – some semeiotic comments

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to examine and compare Nicholas Belkins information concept and his concept of communication with the authors semeiotic inspired communication model – the Dynacom. Design/methodology/approach – The authors compare the two communication models by comparing the requirements given by Belkin and the conditions of the Dynacom. Findings – The authors conclude that Belkins idea of information and his idea of communication lack the social aspect. Based on his theory, he is unable to point out how information becomes knowledge. These are two major issues the authors believe they can elaborate on by introducing the Dynacom and their semeiotic inspired concept of information. Originality/value – No one has previously specifically analyzed Nicholas Belkins concept of information and compared it to a semeiotic ditto.

Charles Sanders Peirce in his own words : 100 years of semiotics, communication and cognition

In 2014, Peirce will have been dead for one hundred years. The book will celebrate this extraordinary, prolific thinker and the relevance of his idea for semiotics, communication, and cognitive studies. More importantly, however, it will provide a major statement of the current status of Peirces work within semiotics. The volume will be a contribution to both semiotics and Peirce studies.

Paths – On the Formation of the Subject in a Theory of Semiotics

That semiotics has close relations with semantics, the latter having a logical-philosophical or rather linguistic origin, is a fact that is not only theoretically but also historically established. On one side, generative semiotics moves from structural semantics, so that the entire work by Greimas could be read as an expansion of his first work, his Sémantique structurale (Greimas 1966) properly indicating the opening of his research program (Fabbri 2000). On the other side, as a consequence of his philosophical milieu, Eco is not encumbered by the burden of linguistics: yet it is always in the light of the linguistic-structural semantic paradigm that he attempted in his crucial book, A Theory of Semiotics, that generalization of semiotics announced in the Italian translation (Trattato di semiotica generale, literally, Treatise on general semiotics). The thesis that I will try to develop in my contribution is that Eco’s reflection on semantics in his Treatise (that I consider his magna opus) implies a specific theory of semiotic subjectivity that will remain operative in his later works. Violi (2007) has already investigated some issues related to subjectivity in Eco’s Encyclopaedia. Here I will try to describe analytically how this specific subjectivity emerges in A Theory of Semiotics.