Joao Queiroz

Against the view that symbol-based semiosis is a human cognitive uniqueness, we have argued that non-human primates such as African vervet monkeys possess symbolic competence, as formally defined by Charles S. Peirce. Here I develop this argument by showing that the equivocal role ascribed to symbols by “folk semiotics” stems from an incomplete application of the Peircean logical framework for the classification of signs, which describes three kinds of symbols: rheme, dicent and argument. In an attempt to advance in the classifying semiotic processes, Peirce proposed several typologies, with different degrees of refinement. Around 1903, he developed a division into ten classes. According to this typology, symbols can be further analysed in three subclasses (rheme, dicent, argument). I proceed to demonstrate that vervet monkeys employ dicent symbols. There are remarkable implications of this argument since ‘symbolic species theory’ fails to explore the vast Peircean semiotic philosophy to frame questions regarding the emergence and evolution of symbolic processes

The skin can be described as a niche structured by semiotic artefacts (tattoos) that work as symbolic–indexical devices (dicisigns). New biocompatible technologies responsive to organic and environmental variations change the role of the skin as a semiotic niche. New devices are transforming the skin into a niche of interactive interfaces. In this article we introduce a variety of techno-scientific artefacts, which are readily available, and their main characteristics. We are interested in the recent proliferation of devices based on biotechnologies that can be coupled to the body, especially epithelial (superficial or invasive), and how they change what we know as ‘embodied communication’.

Based on formal-theoretical principles about the sign processes involved, we have built synthetic experiments to investigate the emergence of communication based on symbols and indexes in a distributed system of sign users, following theoretical constraints from C.S.Peirce theory of signs, following a Synthetic Semiotics approach. In this paper, we summarize these computational experiments and results regarding associative learning processes of symbolic sign modality and cognitive conditions in an evolutionary process for the emergence of either symbol-based or index-based communication

Philosophers and social scientists of diverse orientations have suggested that the pragmatics of semiosis is germane to a dynamic account of meaning as process. Semiosis, the central focus of C. S. Peirce’s pragmatic philosophy, may hold a key to perennial problems regarding meaning. Indeed, Peirce’s thought should be deemed seminal when placed within the cognitive sciences, especially with respect to his concept of the sign. According to Peirce’s pragmatic model, semiosis is a triadic, time-bound, context-sensitive, interpreter-dependent, materially extended dynamic process. Semiosis involves inter-relatedness and inter-action between signs, their objects, acts and events in the world, and the semiotic agents who are in the process of making and taking them.

VIA is a mobile art project (video-dance and computational music) semiotically translated to photographic media by means of formal constraints derived from selected properties of Rio de Janeiro’s predefined downtown routes. Under the constraints of street buildings and the morphology of the routes, questions regarding the influence of the bodily movements of the urban space led to the creation of a dance typology. This typology is related to pedestrians in the area and to the structure of the buildings spans where the performance happened. The dance movements captured in the videos were restricted and regulated by the physical environment and its main features. Here, an intersemiotic translation of a mobile art project to a photographic essay is presented and described. It strongly relates, and tentatively explores, both an artistic research praxis and a theoretical discussion. The essay explores an analogous semiotic effect from the VIA project on the photographic essay as a result of this investigation.

Os grafos existenciais (GE) são uma notação lógica de caráter topológico e estão entre as mais originais invenções de C.S. Peirce (1839-1914). Trata-se de um sistema gráfico de diagramas lógicos por meio do qual, segundo Peirce, “qualquer desenvolvimento do pensamento pode ser representado com precisão” (CP 4.530). Eles se dividem em três subsistemas – alfa, beta e gama –, aproximadamente equivalentes ao cálculo proposicional clássico, ao cálculo de predicados clássico de primeira ordem, e a um tipo de lógica modal. Nosso propósito é apresentar o sistema beta. O que apresentaremos se restringe ao cálculo de predicados monádicos, com ênfase na silogística categórica de Aristóteles.

Palast der Republik, by the photographer Christoph Rokitta, is an independent photobook published in 2013 in Berlin. In the photobook different semiotic resources are coupled in order to iconically model the demolition of the homonymous building in Berlin. In opposition to the trivial notion of icon as sign that stands for its object in a relation of similarity, we analyze the photobook as an icon whose main feature is the possibility of discovering information about its object through its manipulation. This specific feature is called operational criterion for iconicity, and it stresses the inherent quality of icons of revealing information available through their manipulation and observation. Our aim is to describe and analyze the relations between semiotic resources in this photobook by exploring the operational criterion of iconicity, and models as epistemic artifacts. We are interested in how couplings between semiotic resources in the photobook can iconically model a spatio-temporal process.

Como representar, por intermédio de modelo geométrico, diagramático, gráfico ou topológico, o signo e a semiose é uma questão cujo tratamento recorrente, por especialistas na obra de C.S. Peirce, sugere a medida de sua importância. Nossos propósitos aqui são: (i) definir signo e semiose, (ii) definir sumariamente “modelo”, (iii) apresentar diversos modelos da semiose, (iv) relacionar os modelos com algumas constrições derivadas da teoria das categorias de Peirce, e, finalmente, (v) apresentar um modelo baseado no “estruturalismo hierárquico” de S. Salthe.

How should one describe the irreducible relationships in photopoetry observed in intermedial literary photobooks? According to most authors, in literary photobooks, the verbal sign system is linked to the photographic image as a bidirectional interaction, creating a coupled system that can be seen as a new sign system. Mutually modulatory influences link verbal text and photography. But the nature of such influences needs to be explained in detail and with accuracy. What kind of relation are we dealing with? Many authors have tried to explain this phenomenon through several epistemic metaphors. The problem is that these metaphors are rarely subjected to any general theory of meaning. Surprisingly, this is not even mentioned as a problem. In this article, we propose a general semiotic model to describe the irreducible photography-poetry relation, derived from C. S. Peirce’s pragmatic theory of signs, and we also present some preliminary results of the analysis of Quarenta Clics em Curitiba, a photobook by Paulo Leminski and Jack Pires. Our purpose here is to introduce and explore this model to describe the photography-poetry relationship in coupled systems. This relationship is decomposed, in the functional roles occupied by poems and photographs, into a sign-object-interpretant relation. The triadic irreducibility that characterizes semiosis (à la Peirce) is the main property applied to photograph-poetry coupling in Quarenta Clics em Curitiba.

Silent Book and Sí por Cuba are paradigmatic examples of photobooks. Those two works are analyzed in this article based on intermedial studies and on C. S. Peirce’s semiotic. As a result, we observe properties and material components of the book working as iconic processes of the photos and of the relationship between them. It constrains interpretive semiotic behavior and reveals certain characteristics of those photographic images. In addition to identifying and presenting examples of it, we demonstrate how the pairing of two or more photos enables semiosis in which the referenced object is developed by the relations between photographs.

Philosophers and social scientists of diverse orientations have suggested that the pragmatics of semiosis is germane to a dynamic account of meaning as process. Semiosis, the central focus of C. S. Peirce’s pragmatic philosophy, may hold a key to perennial problems regarding meaning. Indeed, Peirce’s thought should be deemed seminal when placed within the cognitive sciences, especially with respect to his concept of the sign. According to Peirce’s pragmatic model, semiosis is a triadic, time-bound, context-sensitive, interpreter-dependent, materially extended dynamic process. Semiosis involves inter-relatedness and inter-action between signs, their objects, acts and events in the world, and the semiotic agents who are in the process of making and taking them.

The main purpose of this work is to provide a semiotic ontology for redescription of active cognitive externalism, recently developed by the paradigm 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended cognition). In our approach, distributed cognitive systems (DCSs) are described as semiosis, signs in action. We explored the relationship between semiosis and cognition, as conceived by C. S. Peirce, in association with the notion of distributed cognitive system (DCS). We introduce Peircean externalist approach with an emphasis on the notion of temporal distribution of semiosis, and describe DCSs, and their elements, as “sign in action”. To develop this argument, we describe an example of DCS -- verbal-musical improvisation of repente, repentismo, or viola singing. It is a phenomenon of verbal-musical improvisation that takes the form of a challenge in versified oral poetry. We describe the phenomenon as the embodiment of the formal structure of a cognitive task and an inferential process. This embodiment corresponds to a semiotization of the repente performances as DCSs. The temporally distributed tendency of repentismo organizes the DCS as a system that performs metasemiotic experiments on the action of signs.

A Semiotic Theory of Translation, de Kobus Marais, 2019, é o mais importante livro publicado sobre a relação entre os Estudos da Tradução e a Semiótica pragmatista de C.S.Peirce, desde Semio-translation, de Dinda Gorlée, de 2004. Pode-se afirmar que a obra de Gorlée representou uma etapa inicial de ajustes na agenda dos Estudos de Tradução, inspirada na filosofia de Peirce. É um trabalho preliminar, cujo maior mérito foi estabelecer uma vinculação mais sistêmica entre as “áreas”. O livro de Kobus Marais é a mais audaciosa tentativa de desenvolver este projeto. Ele explora diversas consequências da aplicação de muitas entidades e termos teóricos da filosofia de Peirce, especialmente em sua fase madura. Ao fazer isso, Marais abre uma frente inédita de investigação cuja importância não deve ser subestimada. Ele associa muitos aparatos, que incluem rudimentos de uma filosofia de processo de inspiração pragmatista, com forte propensão pluralista; classificações sígnicas desenvolvidas por Peirce, após 1903, período que se estabeleceu como “teoria madura do signo”, inexplorada nos estudos sobre tradução, e ainda pouco explorada pelo próprio scholarship Peirceano; e uma versão emergentista associada a um tratamento baseado na teoria de sistemas complexos. Sobre este último tópico, especialmente influenciado por Terrence Deacon e Floyd Merrell, Marais extrai muitas implicações, relacionadas a uma definição de tradução como negentropia, em sistemas complexos, e generaliza o fenômeno para casos de emergência de fenômenos sócio-culturais. Dividi esta resenha em asserções. Elas se referem às teses que considero mais importantes do livro de Kobus Marais. Embora outras tantas possam ser formuladas, considero aquelas que podem ter maiores implicações.

Cualquier descripción de la emergencia de significado en sistemas biológicos y artificiales debe apoyarse en un marco teórico que haga posible entender la naturaleza y la dinámica de tales procesos. En este artículo se toma la filosofía pragmática del signo de Charles S. Peirce, que asociamos aquí con el estructuralismo jerárquico de Stanley Salthe, como la base correcta para desarrollar ese marco conceptual. Se formulan algunas preguntas que consideramos fundamentales para asegurar una aplicación precisa de la noción de emergencia en el contexto de las investigaciones acerca de sistemas semióticos

Cualquier descripción de la emergencia de significado en sistemas biológicos y artificiales debe apoyarse en un marco teórico que haga posible entender la naturaleza y la dinámica de tales procesos. En este artículo se toma la filosofía pragmática del signo de Charles S. Peirce, que asociamos aquí con el estructuralismo jerárquico de Stanley Salthe, como la base correcta para desarrollar ese marco conceptual. Se formulan algunas preguntas que consideramos fundamentales para asegurar una aplicación precisa de la noción de emergencia en el contexto de las investigaciones acerca de sistemas semióticos.Palabras llave: Sistemas semióticos; Semiótica; Peirce; Salthe.Any description of the emergence of meaning in biological and artificial systems should be grounded on a framework that can make it possible to grasp the nature and dynamics of such processes. Here we take Peirce’s pragmatic philosophy of sign, in association with Salthe’s hierarchical structuralism, as a heuristically powerful basis for developing this conceptual framework. We formulate some questions which we regard as fundamental to a precise application of the notion of emergence in the context of investigations about semiotic systems.Palabras llave: Semiotics systems; Semiotic; Peirce; Salthe

The problem of downward causation – i.e., the problem of the nature of the influence of a system or whole over its components – is highly debated in the literature on property emergence. Nevertheless, most treatments of downward causation do not really refer to causation at all, but rather to explanation and/or determination, as Menno Hulswit recently argued. In this context, it is quite important to search for an understanding of how the roles usually ascribed to systems relatively to their components, such as those of ‘constraining’, ‘selecting’, ‘organizing’, ‘structuring’, ‘determining’, can be connected with the idea of causation. In our view, the important relation here is that in all these cases we are dealing with some kind of ‘determination’. But it is required, then, to clarify what we mean by ‘determination’. For this purpose, we can take as a starting point a difference between the ideas of ‘determining’ and ‘causing’ which seems central to us, and was also highlighted by Hulswit: while ‘determining’ primarily involves the idea of ‘necessitation’ , ‘causing’ primarily refers – since the advent of Western modern science – to the idea of ‘bringing about’ some event. In this work, we propose that discussions about the influence of systems or wholes over their components can benefit from a move from the idea of downward ‘causation’ to that of downward ‘determination’. Downward determination can be understood in terms of constraints that the condition of belonging to a system-token of a given kind imposes on the behavior of the components. Thus, we move from an understanding of the influence of wholes over parts based on a neo-Aristotelian perspective, which introduces other causal modes than just efficient causes, to an understanding in terms of modes of determination other than causal determination. This immediately poses a number of questions, which should be faced in order to make this idea more precise. In this paper, we will only discuss two of them. First, we will strive for explaining in further detail what we mean by ‘determination’. We will address this problem here by exploring Peirce’s distinction between ‘causal’ and ‘logic’ determination. Second, we will establish in a clear manner the nature of the relata in downward determination. In the model we put forward here, the determiner, at the level of the system as a whole, is a general principle of organization, a universal, which is characteristic of the kind of structure observed in a type of system, and the determined, at the level of the parts, are particulars, namely, concrete processes involving the system’s components