Winfried Nöth

This paper examines how far the model of the trajectory as a path that a moving object follows from a source to a goal is an adequate model of the sign and of semiotic processes. Just like intentions, meanings, and messages, also signs have sources and goals. A study of the terms by which the Ancient Greeks referred to signs (sema, semeion, and tekmerion) reveals that the idea of goal-directedness is inherent in several respects in this early semiotic vocabulary. The paper studies Charles S. Peirce’s model of the sign as a trajectory by which Peirce describes the “agency of the sign”. Peirce’s semiotic trajectories are without beginnings and ends. Guided by final causality towards a semiotic goal, the sign can reach its goal only by asymptotic approximation. The final section of the paper presents brief notes on the trajectories characteristic of sign processes in semiotic models outlined by Algirdas Greimas and Juri Lotman. Greimas distinguishes a plurality of semiotic trajectories, such as the generative, the thematic, and the figurative one, but the prototype of all trajectories is the narrative one. Bifurcations resulting from conflicting tensions interrupt the unilinearity of the goal-directed trajectories. Besides disjunctions, the model foresees conjunctions in which trajectories merge. The dynamic forces that propel the agents (subjects and objects, agents and patients, senders and receivers, heroes and villains) along such trajectories are polar tensions and conflicts as well as phases of desire and fulfilment. Lotman proposes a dynamic model of human culture as a semiotic space where sign processes occur like “rushing torrents” or even take the form of “explosions”, suggesting trajectories whose characteristics are nonlinearity, bifurcation, sudden interruption, and unpredictable reorientation. Concomitant with such trajectories are the bidirectional trajectories that describe the dynamic relations between the centre and the periphery of a cultural semiosphere.

The paper sheds light on the concept of model in ordinary language and in scientific discourse from the perspective of C. S. Peirce’s semiotics. It proposes a general Peircean framework for the definition of models of all kinds, including mental models. A survey of definitions of scientific models that have been influential in the philosophy of science and of the typologies proposed in this context is given. The author criticizes the heterogeneity of the criteria applied in these typologies and the lack of a semiotic foundation in typological distinctions between formal, symbolic, theoretical, metaphorical, and iconic models, among others. The paper argues that the application of Peirce’s subdivision of signs into the trichotomies of the sign itself, its object, and its interpretant can offer a deeper understanding of the nature of models. Semiotic topics in the focus of the paper are (1) the distinction between models as signs and (mental) models as the interpretants of signs; (2) models considered as a type (or legisign) and models considered as tokens (or replicas) of a type; (3) the iconicity of models, including diagrammatic and metaphorical icons; (4) the contribution of indices and symbols to the informativity of models; and (5) the rhetorical qualities of models in scientific discourse. The paper argues in conclusion that informative models are hybrid signs in which a diagram incorporates indices and symbols in a rhetorically efficient way.

The paper discusses the theory of semiosis in the context of Peirce’s philosophy of evolution. Focussing on the thesis that symbols grow by incorporating indices and icons, it proposes answers to the following questions: What does Peirce mean by the “self-development of signs” in nature and culture and by symbols as livingthings? How do signs grow? Do all signs grow, or do only symbols grow? Does the growth of signs presuppose semiotic agency, and if so, who are the agents in semiosis when signs and sign systems grow? The paper discusses objections raised by culturalists and historical linguists against the assumption that signs can still grow and are still growing in complex cultures, and it draws parallels and points out differences between Peirce’s theory of semiotic growth and the theories of memetics and teleosemiotics.

The paper examines questions discussed by Andrew Stables in J Philos Edu 48(4):591–603, 2014 and presents reasons why Peirce founded his philosophical edifice on semiotic principles to which several traditional dichotomies are not applicable. Peirce was neither a rationalist nor an empiricist, although, in a way, he may have been both. Other dichotomies that cannot be applied to his semiotic philosophy are the ones of idealism vs. realism and the one of the rational vs. the emotional. The paper then discusses Peirce’s objections against the rationalists and asks why Peirce considered himself, and has been defined by others, an “objective idealist”. With respect to the question whether it can be doubted that Peirce was a fully semiotic philosopher, the paper argues that semioticians of the twenty-first century should recognize that semiotics is a pluralist endeavor but should not try to adopt principles from divergent or even incompatible schools of semiotics. Semiotics should not be conceived as a “unified science”, as which Charles W. Morris envisioned it in 1937.

Peirce’s “law of habit” extends the ordinary and scholarly concept of habit from human to nonhuman habits and to habits in the animate and the inanimate nature. It predicts that habits change by the habit of habit change and distinguished between habits, laws, rules, and norms. Human habits as habits of thought, action, and feeling and perception are phenomena of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. With human habits, the habits of nature share the feature of plasticity. Peirce attributes the plasticity of habits also to the laws of cosmic and biological evolution and distinguishes laws as habits of nature from rigid laws that do not change. The paper also examines good habits in their contrast to bad ones and concludes with remarks on habit and habit change in semiosis.

O artigo discute os aspectos mais que humanos ou extra-humanos da filosofia semiótica de Charles S. Peirce, contextualiza-a na história das ideias (Aristóteles, os medievais, Montaigne, Descartes), examina seus fundamentos, suas sintonias e diferenças em relação às tendências do século XXI nos estudos culturais e filosóficos, no contexto das dicotomias e do antropocentrismo herdados da cultura ocidental, atualmente denunciados pelo pós-humanismo, estudos não-humanos, Ontologia Orientada a Objetos e pelo paradigma mais que humano.

This review article of Frederik Stjernfelt’s Sheets, Diagrams, and Realism (2022) argues that Peirce’s theory of iconicity with its subdivision into the image-diagram-metaphor triad must not be reduced to diagrammatic iconicity. The foundation of the triadic subdivision of the icon is not in Peirce’s diagrammatic logic but in Peirce’s cenopythagorean categories. A focus is on misinterpretations of Peirce’s concept of thirdness in the firstness of the icon. The paper argues that not only metaphors, but also comparisons, analogies, analogic arguments, and examples belong to the third class of icons.

The nature of representation has been a central but controversial issue of cognitive philosophy. After 2,500 years of reflection (cf. Rolf 2006), opinions are still divided. On the one hand, there are those who are convinced that we have reached a crisis of representation in the arts, the media, and cultural theory; on the other hand, representation has remained right at the top of the agenda of cognitive science and Artificial Intelligence research (cf. Nöth & Ljungberg, eds. 2003; Nöth 1997). The words in which Daniel Dennett, in 1978, postulates the necessity for a new theory of representation as a foundation of cognitive science are symptomatic of a certain unease about the state of the art: "What is needed is..

The chapter outlines cybersemiotics in relation to the research fields of systems theory and semiotics in general. It introduces and defines the key concepts of the first, second, and third generations of systems theory and gives a survey of systems theoretical approaches to general and cultural semiotics. The author argues that the notions of system, communication, self-reference, information, meaning, form, autopoiesis, and self-control are of equal topical interest to semiotics and systems theory. In particular, the paper inquires into the way in which N. Luhmann, Maturana/Varela, and C.S. Peirce define and use these concepts and how these authors differ with respect to them.

The paper argues that contemporary consciousness studies can profit from Charles S. Peirce’s philosophy of consciousness. It confronts mainstream tendencies in contemporary consciousness studies, including those which consider consciousness as an unsolvable mystery, with Peirce’s phenomenological approach to consciousness. Peirce’s answers to the following contemporary issues are presented: phenomenological consciousness and the qualia, consciousness as self-controlled agency of humans, self-control and self-reflection, consciousness and language, self-consciousness and introspection, consciousness and the other, consciousness of nonhuman animals, and the question of a quasi-consciousness of the physical universe. A detailed account of Peirce’s three modes of consciousness is presented: (1) primisense, qualisense or feeling-consciousness, (2) altersense (consciousness of the other), and (3) medisense, the consciousness of cognition, thought, and reasoning. In contrast to consciousness studies that establish a rather sharp dividing line between conscious and unconscious states of mind, Peirce adopts the principle of synechism, the theory of continuity. For him, consciousness is a matter of degree. An important difference between Peirce’s concept of qualia and current theories of qualia in human consciousness is discussed. The paper shows how consciousness, according to Peirce, emerges from unconscious qualia and vanishes into equally unconscious habits. It concludes with a study of the roles of qualia, habit, and self-control in Peirce’s theory of signs, in particular in qualisigns and symbols, and the question of signs as quasi-conscious agents in semiosis.

Semiotic Theory of Learning asks what learning is and what brings it about, challenging the hegemony of psychological and sociological constructions of learning in order to develop a burgeoning literature in semiotics as an educational foundation. 　Drawing on theoretical research and its application in empirical studies, the book attempts to avoid the problematization of the distinction between theory and practice in semiotics. It covers topics such as signs, significance and semiosis; the ontology of learning; the limits of learning; ecosemiotics; ecology and sexuality. The book is written by five of the key figures in the semiotics field, each committed to the belief that living is a process of interaction through acts of signification with a signifying environment. While the authors are agreed on the value of semiotic frameworks, the book aims not to present an entirely coherent line in every respect, but rather to reflect ongoing scholarship and debates in the area. In light of this, the book offers a range of possible interpretations of major semiotic theorists, unsettling assumptions while offering a fresh, and still developing, series of perspectives on learning from academics grounded in semiotics. Semiotic Theory of Learning is a timely and valuable text that will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduates working in the fields of educational studies, semiotics, psychology, philosophy, applied linguistics and media studies.

The paper is a study of how graphic narratives (graphic novels and the comics) represent time in external visual space as well as in inner (mental) representations. Peirce’s semiotics is the main tool of research. After a survey of various approaches to the study of time in narratives in general and in graphic narratives in particular, an outline of the various aspects of the embodiment of time in space in general is given before the forms of the embodiment of time in the space of graphic narratives is examined in detail. Signs of time are signs that represent time as their object and create mental representations of time as their interpretant. On this semiotic premise, the paper proposes a reinterpretation of Genette’s theory of time in narratives. A comparison with narratives in prose reveals that narrative time in graphic narratives evinces marked discontinuities in their spatial representation. The paper distinguishes between time as continuity, time as age, and points in time. It concludes that time as continuity is typically embodied in the form of spatial diagrams whereas time as age and points in time are mainly of the nature of indexical signs. The insights into the forms of embodiment of time in space derived from these premises are applied to examples from recent graphic novels and some traditional comics.

Charles Sanders Peirce was a polymath who made significant contributions to many fields of study, from phenomenology to astronomy and from physics to metaphysics. In his writings of some 12,000 pages published, and some 90,000 manuscript pages still unpublished during his lifetime, language and linguistics are among the recurrent topics. In fact, the second paper in the chronology of Peirce’s professional writings was on the pronunciation of Shakespearean English. However, Peirce’s papers on language as well as his other linguistic insights have remained mostly unexplored until today, although there has been a growing influence of Peirce’s general semiotics in contemporary linguistics.

According to the logical positivists, signs (words and pictures) of imaginary beings have no referent (Goodman). The semiotic theory behind this assumption is dualistic and Cartesian: signs vs. nonsigns as well as the mental vs. the material world are in fundamental opposition. Peirce’s semiotics is based on the premise of the sign as a mediator between such opposites: signs do not refer to referents, they represent objects to a mind, but the object of a sign can be existent or nonexistent, a feeling or an idea, something merely imaginary or even something false. The paper examines the nature of imaginary, nonexistent, and nonfigurative objects, such as unicorns, phoenixes, or nonrepresentative paintings, and shows why verbal or visual representations of imaginary beings and even nonfigurative paintings, which seem to represent nothing, are fully developed signs with a variety of objects determining their representation.

Yuri Lotman describes metaphors and culture as semiospheres or ‘semiotic spaces.’ This account of metaphors is self-referential insofar as it is itself expressed in the form of a metaphor. Moreover, according to Lotman, cultures in general are self-referential systems insofar as they tend to define themselves and evince isomorphic semiotic spaces at mutually inclusive levels and metalevels. Lotman describes semiospheres on the basis of dualisms, levels, stratifications, and spatial opposites that exemplify the Tartu semiotician's theory of the duality of the discreteness of semiotic spaces and their verbal representations versus the continuity of physical space and of pictorial representation.

In several of his papers, Charles S. Peirce illustrates processes of interpreting and understanding signs by examples from second language vocabulary teaching and learning. The insights conveyed by means of these little pedagogical scenarios are not meant as contributions to the psychology of second language learning, but they aim at elucidating fundamental semiotic implications of knowledge acquisition in general. Peirce's semiotic premise that a well-understood sign is one that represents an object and creates an interpretant is essential to the understanding of how new words and signs in general can be taught and learned. The article argues that Peirce's theory of the object of the sign, especially of the necessity of collateral experience of the object of a sign, can help to understand the riddle posed by of the Meno paradox of the impossibility of learning what we do not yet know. It examines the semiotic implications of the didactic methods of teaching and learning through translation, ostension, mental and real images, as well as metacognition, and it shows how icons, indices, and symbols are essential to learning new words

Ecosemiotics is the study of sign processes (semioses) in relation to the natural environment in which they occur. The paper examines the cultural, biological, and evolutionary dimensions of ecosemioses on the basis of C. S. Peirce's theory of continuity between matter and mind and investigates the ecosemiotic dimensions of natural signs. Ecosemiotics and the semiotics of nature are distinguished from pansemiotism, and the coevolution of sign processes with their natural enviromnent is discussed as a determining factor of ecosemiosis.

Protosemiotics is the study of the rudiments of semiosis, primarily in nature. The extension of the semiotic field from culture to nature is both necessary and possible in the framework of Peirce's semiotic theory. Against this extension, the critique of pansemiotism has been raised. However, Peirce's semiotics is not pansemiotic since it is based on the criterion of thirdness, which is not ubiquitous in nature. The paper examines the criteria of protosemiosis in the domain of physical and mechanical processes.

Contrary to the early media semioticians' claim that semiotics is a metalanguage of the media and the media are a metalanguage of reality, the present paper gives evidence of how the media represent a world that is itself highly mediated. It is argued that media representations involve self-referential loops in which communication turns out to be communication about communication, reports are reports about reports, and mediations are mediations of mediations. Self-reference in the media is interpreted as a symptom of postmodernity with its tendency towards historical self-reflection in scenarios in which even catastrophic current events are being interpreted as mere media events or even déjà-vu scenarios in a culture in which everything seems to have been said and shown before.