Frederik Stjernfelt

The following two review papers have a common origin. Pietarinen’s book Signs of Logic and Stjernfelt’s book Diagrammatology were both published in the same Synthese Library Series being published by Springer. The two books also share the common topic of diagrammatic reasoning in Charles Peirce’s work. Beginning in a conference Applying Peirce held in Helsinki in conjunction with the World Congress of Semiotics in June 2007, two authors have commented upon these books under the headline of Synthese Library Book Session on several occasions, including the Aarhus meeting on Signs and Meaning held in February 2008, the Diagrammatology and Diagram Praxis workshop in Lisboa in March 2009, and the Peirce and Early Analytic Philosophy symposium in Helsinki in June 2009. Therefore, these two review papers form a continuing discussion on the contributions Peirce’s diagrammatic epistemology and logic will have to a broad range of issues at the intersections of philosophy, logic, cognitive sciences and beyond

A basic form of iconicity in literature is the correspondence between basic conceptual schemata in literary semantics on the one hand and in factual treatments on the other. The semantics of a subject like espionage is argued to be dependent on the ontology of the field in question, with reference to the English philosopher Barry Smith’s “fallibilistic apriorism”. This article outlines such an ontology, on the basis of A. J. Greimas’s semiotics and Carl Schmitt’s philosophy of state, claiming that the semantics of espionage involves politology and narratology on an equal footing. The spy’s “positional” character is analyzed on this basis. A structural difference between police and military espionage is outlined with reference to Georges Dumézil’s theory of the three functions in Indo-European thought. A number of ontological socalled “insecurities” inherent in espionage and its literary representation are outlined. Finally, some hypotheses are stated concerning the connection between espionage and literature, and some central allegorical objects — love, theology — of the spy novel are sketched, and a conclusion on the iconicity of literature is made.

It is a well-known fact that Ernst Cassirer was inspired by his colleague, the biologist Jakob von Uexkiill at the university of Hamburg. This paper claims this inspiration was double—affecting both Cassirer's philosophical anthropology and Cassirer's epistemology of biology, but in two rather different ways. Thus, the paper intends to shed light on a corner of the history of the development of German thought of the interwar period. It may also have an actual interest because both Cassirer and Uexkiill enjoy, for the time being and each in their way, a renaissance, e.g. in the recent field of biosemiotics

​This book investigates the nature of aesthetic experience and aesthetic objects. Written by leading philosophers, psychologists, literary scholars and semioticians, the book addresses two intertwined issues. The first is related to the phenomenology of aesthetic experience: The understanding of how human beings respond to artworks, how we process linguistic or visual information, and what properties in artworks trigger aesthetic experiences. The examination of the properties of aesthetic experience reveals essential aspects of our perceptual, cognitive, and semiotic capacities. The second issue studied in this volume is related to the ontology of the work of art: Written or visual artworks are a specific type of objects, containing particular kinds of representation which elicit a particular kind of experience. The research question explored is: What properties in artful objects trigger this type of experience, and what characterizes representation in written and visual artworks? The volume sets the scene for state-of-the-art inquiries in the intersection between the psychology and ontology of art. The investigations of the relation between the properties of artworks and the characteristics of aesthetic experience increase our insight into what art is. In addition, they shed light on essential properties of human meaning-making in general.

The aim of this paper is to make a concise presentation and comparison of classical anti-psychologism in the semiotics of Peirce and Husserl in order to actualize anti-psychologism for current semiotic studies. A reason why this seems again necessary is the introduction of cognitive science and the neurosciences in semiotics. This is not to claim that this development necessarily leads to psychologism. The important study of the relations between semiotics and cognition and the many investigations of how the brain and mind process sign use form central and important parts of actual semiotics; yet, the oblivion of anti-psychologism may, in some cases, lead researchers to assume untenable dreams of the complete reduction of things semiotic to psychology, thereby unknowingly repeating late nineteenth century cul-de-sacs of psychologism and leading to erroneous or exaggerated interpretations of experimental findings.

Two different concepts of iconicity compete in Peirce's diagrammatical logic. One is articulated in his general reflections on the role of diagrams in thought, in what could be termed his diagrammatology — the other is articulated in his construction of Existential Graphs as an iconic system for representing logic. One is operational and defines iconicity in terms of which information may be derived from a given diagram or diagram system — the other has stronger demands on iconicity, adding to the operational criterion a demand for as high a degree of similarity as possible and may be termed optimal iconicity. Peirce himself does not clearly distinguish these two iconicity notions, a fact that has caused some confusion. By isolating them, we get a clearer and more refined conceptual apparatus for analyzing iconic signs, from pictures to logic

Peirce’s notion of “habit” is famously wide, including also natural dispositions. Another Peircean notion generalized from its normal use is his term for propositions, “Dicisigns”. What is the connection between the two? It goes via the pragmatist notion of belief: “A belief in a proposition is a controlled and contented habit of acting in ways that will be productive of desired results only if the proposition is true” (Kaina Stoicheia 1904). This paper charts the important connection between habits, beliefs and Dicisigns.

The paper develops a characterization of nominal compounds. The analysis is carried out on frame-schematic and construction-grammatical grounds. It rests on assumptions about cognitive processing long since known within cognitive linguistics, but it criticizes certain linguistic applications of Fauconnier and Turner's theory of conceptual integration, which historically is a reelaboration of Lakoff and Johnson's theory of metaphor.The first section sums up two classical approaches in the analysis of nominal compounds; it comments on their inadequacies, and how these have been assessed by Fauconnier and Turner; next, it sketches out the way these two authors and other scholars in blending theory have traditionally analyzed nominal compounds in terms of conceptual integration, and finally one of the major drawbacks of this approach is identified: namely, its limited descriptive import.In the following section, the authors unfold their own semantic analysis. A non-trivial and non-standard compositional theory is proposed, likely to capture the general way in which semantic parts of a compound configure into a semantic whole. Hereafter the authors proceed to a summary survey of how this scaffolding is actually instantiated or processed cognitively. A crucial difference between processing of literal and metaphorical compounds is established. Thus, the approach has a double scope: it aims at characterizing both the semantics of compounds and the way the semantics is cognitively accessed.

This paper investigates the classical issue of ‘point of view,’ but from a cognitive stance. Under the headline of ‘enunciation,’ the paper argues that the cognitive linguistics tradition may provide a better understanding of the subjective aspect of language in general and of the narrative aspect of fiction in particular. The paper introduces the contributions of Leonard Talmy and Wallace Chafe. Talmy frames the issues of enunciation within his notion of conceptual structures, while Chafe reinterprets point-of-view as the issue of devices permitting different representations of consciousness in a text. The paper further develops these insights with reference to analyses of a string of fiction examples.