Cover of The American Journal of Semiotics
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Displaying: 1-17 of 17 documents


1. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 25 > Issue: 3/4
Maria Giulia Dondero The Semiotics of Scientific Image: from Production to Manipulation
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This study will mainly investigate a semiotic theory of the production and functions of visualisation and image in scientific literature, especially concerningobservational astrophysics, as well as theoretical physics, and will also mention the physiology of movement dealing with chronophotography.
2. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 25 > Issue: 3/4
A. Hénault On the French Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson
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This article proceeds to describe in detail the expression forms (“Formes de l’expression”) particular to two photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson. The investigation of the specificities of the plastic dimension of these photographs leads us to discover some of the formal features liable to raise photographic language to the level of artistic composition. We thereby demonstrate how Photography may take on astonishingly deep and complex sensations and significations.
3. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 25 > Issue: 3/4
Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos, Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou Signification and Referent in Non-communication Systems
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The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical, methodological, and technical framework for the semiotic delimitation and analysis of those systems ofmaterial objects and practices which do not belong primarily to the sphere of signification. For the purposes of this paper, we will call such systems (for example economic, urban, or demographic systems) non-communication systems. By their very nature, the study of such systems does not fall wholly within the domain of semiotics, if we consider this domain as coextensive with the study of cultural attitudes and practices. Thus, these systems differ structurally from communication systems, such as language, literature, and the arts, whose primary function is to be used for communication between members of a society and whose structure is primarily semiotic.
4. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 25 > Issue: 3/4
Julio Pinto Can Semiotic Be the Lingua Franca for the Epistemological Hybrids of Contemporary Times?
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Based on the observations of Brazilian theorists of Communication, this article purports to give an overview of the contemporary experience in terms of communicational phenomena and their relationship with art, technology, science and language from the broad standpoint of a Charles S. Peirce-based view of semiotic.
5. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 25 > Issue: 3/4
John Deely Editor’s Preamble to the Powell Essay
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6. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 25 > Issue: 3/4
Ralph Austin Powell The Problem of Identifying More or Less Unitary Beings in Our World
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This essay concerns the original use of signs that is species-specifically human, namely, the awareness that results from the difference between animal estimation of objects in terms of what is to be sought (+), avoided (–), or safe to ignore (ø), and what human understanding species-specifically adds to animal awareness of objects as involving “things” existing in their own right as not wholly or simply reducible to their relations to us as objects.Powell calls the species-specfically human awareness of objects the “transcendental realm”; and the ‘line of demarcation’ separating the semiosic awareness common to all animals as making use of signs from the semiotic consciousness of human animals as able to become aware of insensible relations as such triadically “considered as constituting the mode of being of a sign” (Peirce 1904: CP 8.332), Powell terms “ens primum cognitum”.Thus, Powell’s “transcendental realm” is the soil and ground common to all science, cenoscopic and ideoscopic alike, and hence the preconscious realm of metasemiosis wherein that species-specifically unique process is able to extend its roots and transform the “rational animal” of Greek and Latin thought into the “semiotic animal” of postmodern intellectual culture. “Humanesque analogy” is Powell’s term for the fact that the species-specifically human understanding is an awareness inescapably grounded in and having as its constant background and surrounding, as it were, the generically animal awareness of a world of perceptual objects related to ourselves as (+), (–), (ø).
7. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 25 > Issue: 3/4
About the Authors
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8. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1/2
Susan J. Rasmussen Critically Re-Thinking “Islamic Dress”: Deconstructing Disputed Meanings in Tuareg (Kel Tamajaq) Women’s Clothing and Covering
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This essay examines the connections between dress, religion, and gender, specifically, contextual practices and underlying beliefs concerning dress among women in Tuareg communities of Niger and Mali, West Africa, who speak a Berber language, Tamajaq, predominantly adhere to Islam, are semi-nomadic, socially stratified, and display influences from pre- and popular Islamic, nation-state, and global forces. The Tuareg data reveals both common themes and inter- and intra-cultural variations in Muslim women’s dress, thereby challenging monolithic interpretations of women’s dress in Islamic communities.More broadly, the essay calls for attention to the contested meanings of dress in terms of its special semiotic qualities: it is portable, can be disassembled and reassembled, and can be subtly re-arranged to convey ambiguous but powerful meanings that are neither unitary or stable.
9. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1/2
Hamada Hassanein A Semiotic Analysis of Moses and Pharaoh Narrative in the Qur’an
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This paper conducts a semiotic analysis of the Moses and Pharaoh narrative in the Qur’an by examining descriptive, narrative and argumentative propositions, enunciation, and discourse.1 The methodology tests the narrative against an analytical model based on theories of structural and cognitive semiotics and developed by Grambye and Sonne (2003a). A bit-by-bit application of the model to the narrative yields crucial results in the propositional analysis in which descriptive, narrative, and argumentative propositions are tested against the 3-D, transport, and thematic models; the enunciational analysis in which point of view and style are examined with specific focus on frequency; and the discursive analysis in which intertextual and ethical implementations underlie the core values borne by the narrative. The merit of this methodological approach is not limited to the analysis of these two narrative texts, but can reverberate to other Qur’anic narrative texts.
10. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1/2
Keith Dickson Mythic Objects & Some Objects of Myth
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The views of myth advanced by Eliade, Jung, and Campbell are as flawed as they have been influential. Despite differences, all three concur in granting myth the status of a product of natural signification. The result is an obscurantist representation of myth, which in fact abets myth’s aim to represent itself as timeless, noncontingent, apolitical fact. Barthian analysis of myth exposes this aim by identifying its semiotic structure. This study applies that analysis to the myth of Pandora as an instance of how myth insinuates itself into ordinary signs in order to pass as elementary and also elemental truth.
11. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1/2
Elvira K. Katić The Living Canvas: Bodies that Serve and Simulate Art
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This study analyzes artworks by a professional fine-art bodypainter. This artist used his models’ bodies as both inspiration and canvas. The bodies/artworks were then photographed and the resulting images were hung as finished pieces in his gallery. Through semiotic analysis of the artworks and discourse analysis of interviews with the artist, relationships between the human body and artistic conventions were explored and fine-art bodypainting was discussed as an art form. The painted images are copies of natural forms that have been reinterpreted in new “living” forms, as they are painted onto and in relation to a living body. These living canvases change the contextual interpretations of the original painted images in integral ways. The completed photographs resist categorization as mere simulacra because their intentionally questioning construction asks us to rethink the relationships between artist, subject, and observer.
12. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1/2
Torkild Thellefsen, Bent Sørensen Pragmatic Semeiotic and Knowledge Management: Introducing the Knowledge Profile as a Pragmatic Tool for Knowledge Managing the Meaning of Scientific Concepts
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The aim of the article is to present and discuss the concept of semeiotic constructivism, which is a pragmaticistic inspired method. Semeiotic constructivism has nothing to do with social constructivism but is a method that can construct meaning of concepts by implanting a telos in the concept or a certain quality in the artifact, in order to develop the object in a certain direction. The article touches on different elements in Charles Peirce’s philosophy e.g. hyperbolic philosophy and pragmaticism and combines these elements with thoughts about how scientific concepts and brands become meaningful.
13. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1/2
Igor Hanzel The Development of Carnap’s Semantics
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The paper reconstructs the three main stages in the development of Carnap’s semantics in the years 1935–1947. It starts with Carnap’s approach to metalogic in his Zirkelprotokolle (1931) and his Logische Syntax der Sprache (1934) from the point of view of one-level approach to the relation between metalanguage and its object-language. It then analyzes Tarski’s turn to semantics in his paper presented at the Paris conference in September 1935, as well as the implications of his view for Carnap’s approach to semantics from 1935 until 1943. Finally, it analyzes Church’s rediscovery of Frege and its impact on Carnap’s shift to the extension/intension distinction in his semantics in the years 1943–1947.
14. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1/2
Marc Champagne A Note on M. Barbieri’s “Scientific Biosemiotics”
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15. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1/2
Marcello Barbieri Remarks in Response to “A Note on Barbieri’s Scientific Biosemiotics”
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16. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1/2
John Deely Pars Pro Toto from Culture to Nature: An Overview of Semiotics as a Postmodern Development, with an Anticipation of Developments to Come
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17. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1/2
About the Authors
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