In place of an abstract. Jeff Bernard was not afraid of complexity. The last essay of his that I read and published was ‘10 theses on perception in terms of work. A Rossi-Landian/Wittgensteinian point of view’, a title which promised thinking of some considerable sophistication — and delivered with dividends. It was accompanied by a figure in a pdf file that my co-editor and me struggled to understand until well after a few readings and close re-readings of the essay. Away from strictly intellectual ruminations, Jeff devoted considerable time to pondering human relations. Fuelled by cigarettes and alcohol, with me opting solely for the latter, he would regale friends late into the night with stories of communication and miscommunication, understandings and misunderstandings, feuds and reconciliations, cultural differences and affinities, conflicts and alliances, among the large number of members of our semiotic web. As far as I remember, these stories were always furnished with Jeff’s wry smirk, a communication acting to distance him from the sometimes unregistered pettiness of the protagonists’ doings and a self-extrication from the malice that their demands and arguments might have invited. Jeff always did his best; he often poured oil on troubled waters. I do not believe he ever let anyone down. He evinced a particular ability in observing and recognizing the interests and motivation of others — simpleissues, but requiring an analytic and sympatico mind. He kept his head while others lost theirs. He sometimes put their heads back on for them. Hence this short essay in the complex field of Jeff’s beloved sociosemiotics, dealing with the two apparently ‘uncomplex’ issues of my title, issues that are always close at hand. This essay is an attempt to ensure that he, likewise, is never far away.

This article describes the upbringing and education of the semiotician A. J. Greimas (1917–1992) and explores how they contributed to shaping his subsequent life of ideas. An initial narrative characterizes the linguistic and cultural context in which he grew up, relates his schooling in Lithuania, and details his university studies in 1930s France. This account highlights the individuals, methods, authors, and books of his youth which proved particularly significant for him. A longer second section then synthesizes the experiences recounted. Four cultural and intellectual traditions played a leading role in Greimass development: Lithuanian, Slavic, Germanic, and French. He took a particular interest in poetry, the Middle Ages, philosophy, history, modernism, and philology. The essay inquires into the ways in which these heritages, arts, and topics informed the ensuing evolution of his outlook, his ideas, and his career.

While the films Inception and Source Code both hinge on questions of the unconscious/subconscious psyche through dreams, three broader questions emerge: What do the dreams signify; whom do they signify; and how do they signify? Such signification is rooted in a Saussurean understanding of semiosis and semiology. In this sense, dreams are the Deleuzean network that mediate between “words and things, and from bodies to appellations,” insofar as the boundaries between the linguistic/textual and the embodied/corporeal are porous—the relationship between signifier and signified is broken. Using Borges’ short stories “The Library of Babel” and “Ragnarök” as framework, this paper will argue that these psychic phenomena are rooted in a fundamental play between textuality and corporeality, as well as questions of inter-character relationships, agency, and ultimately, how such comes together to define identity in the (post)modern moment.

The critical task of semioethics implies recognition of the common condition of dialogical interrelation and the capacity for listening, where dialogue does not imply a relation we choose to concede thanks to a sense of generosity towards the other, but on the contrary is no less than structural to life itself, a necessary condition for life to flourish, an inevitable imposition. With specific reference to anthroposemiosis, semioethics focuses on the concrete singularity of the human individual and the inevitability of intercorporeal interconnection with others. The singular uniqueness of each one of us implies otherness and dialogism. Semioethics assumes that whatever the object of study and however specialized the analysis, human individuals in their concrete singularity cannot ignore the inevitable condition of involvement in the destiny of others, that is, involvement without alibis. From this point of view, the symptoms studied from a semioethical perspective are not only specified in their singularity, on the basis of a unique relationship with the other, the world, self, but are above all social symptoms. Any idea, wish, sentiment, value, interest, need, evil or good examined by semioethics as a symptom is expressed in the word, the unique word, the embodied word, in the voice which arises in the dialectic and dialogical interrelation between singularity and sociality.

The paper argues for sufficient semiosis as a comprehensive set of constraints within which language functions. As a generalisation of Leibniz’s sufficient reason, sufficient semiosis replaces truth-conditional semantics. The paper opens with a series of ontological commitments about language, that sentence-types have only token potential, sentence-tokens have no more than meaning potential, and that only utterances can have meaning. This is so, the paper claims, because natural language always requires two fundamental ingredients to operate: aboutness and its modification by voice. Sufficient semiosis is then elaborated as a set of social constraints at all levels, phonetic, syntactic, lexical, and discursive, in both habitual and interpretive use. In contrast, truth-conditional semantics can be shown to be parasitic on meaning construction via hypoiconic, diagrammatical schematizations and so rests on a not so well-disguised petitio principii. Peirce’s hypoiconic interpretant is also employed in arguing that semantic identity and ideality are unwarranted imports into the analysis of language. Instead, the paper foregrounds intersubjective mentalism as an inevitable consequence of a Peircean approach to language. In conclusion, the paper rejects the popular idea that language is a symbolic system in favour of a heterosemiotic explanation.

Peirce nurtured a lifelong interest in the mathematics, metaphysics, and logic of time. For him, time was the primal form of continuum, and he studied it as such. That study is fundamentally connected to Peirce’s semiotic and metaphysical exploration of the continuum of consciousness. In this paper I will use two successive approaches to answer the question “To what extent does the flow of time regulate the flow of signs and the flow of signs influence or determine the flow of time?” I will first examine Peirce’s views concerning the connection between time, the flow of perception, and the emergence of perceptual judgments. I will then apply several resulting distinctions (between first- and second-intentional processes, between poneception and anteception, and between two distinct temporal directions) to show how they illuminate the mutual determination of time and semiosis in Peirce’s mature semiotic theory. I will finish with considerations about how Peirce ended up viewing the genealogy of both time and logic in relation to the birth of a semiotic universe.

The artist Wassily Kandinsky and the architect Jacob Chernikhov have similar theories and philosophies that they apply to the following elements in their work: point, line, plane, color, and form. They use these elements to create a systematic method of building complex symbols to form a new visual language. Kandinsky and Chernikov incorporated into their philosophies diagrammatic reasoning in order to build a logical program or scientific method for architecture and design. The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic, particularly his discussion of icon, index and symbol, will help to clarify how Kandinsky and Chernikov form emotional, dynamical architecture and art.

Trauma and Peircean abduction are topics that seem worlds apart, and yet it is my view that bringing them together potentially might pay dividends both for the study of trauma and for the study of abduction. A necessary point of departure for the critical articulation I have in mind is the positing of a common ground: in what sense, if any, does the making of abductive inferences intersect with psychological/cognitive processes underlying traumatization? The key to answering this question is the decision to focus on a hitherto unexamined subcategory of abductive inferences: trauma-driven abductions. In this essay, having briefly discussed materials from trauma studies and from abduction studies that help to contextualize the possibility of trauma-driven abductions, I will explore their pertinence to a perennial puzzle in abduction studies, Peirce’s insistence in his later writings that abduction is both inferential and instinctive. Developing the suggestiveness of an example provided by the Peirce scholar Christopher Hookway to illustrate how an abduction may inspire uncontrollable belief without ceasing to be reasonable, I will show how materials from trauma studies allow us to specify how instinct shapes the creation/selection of abductive speculations in special cases where the surprising facts initiating hypotheses are composed of environmental cues evocative of extreme fear. In this way my essay provides new support and clarification for Peirce’s insight that instinct and inference are both integral to the production of abductive hypotheses.

Understanding, empathizing, sympathizing, communicating, knowing, and changing, attained through reading literature, are all natural human needs for survival. Survival in its broadest meanings, in Sebeok’s sense, involves all kinds of activities for improving life. Taking reading literature as a special competence for surviving, a quality/competence specific to humans alone, necessitates two primary activities: awareness and modeling. Awareness refers to humans’ knowing the very fact that they are in a persistent state of needing. Modeling refers to the very need for semiotic strategies so that they can use any natural human activity, such as cognitive and emotional interaction, in any process of interpretation. If the reader treats her/his reading activity as naturally purposive and meaningful, s/he will be able to model this activity so as to maximize the benefits. Knowing the benefits implied in reading literature, the reader will consciously or unconsciously categorize all aspects of this activity in various forms and models. Modeling in this sense is organizing knowledge, but also concretizing knowing. Thus, reading literature improves the readers’ relations with their environment by knowing more about the way humans think, but also by generating new texts, namely, producing new ways of knowing. Knowing authors’ knowing is one of the major purposes of reading literature. Knowing of knowing is the naturalizing process of the culture, and as such it is a question of anthroposemiotics. The anthropsemiotic approach to reading literature is not concerned with understanding itself but the way we conduct understanding and the use of such an understanding. Producing new meanings and new ways of knowing from existing knowledge is undoubtedly an evolutional property specific to humans as verbally communicative organisms.

The logical structure of the categories may be seen in the three fundamental oppositional relations assumed by the traditional formal logic of Aristotelian syllogistic. These fundamental oppositional relations are currently preserved in Term Functor Logic (TFL) but not in Modern Predicate Logic (MPL). Derivations of the immediate inferences traditionally permitted on the Aristotelian square of opposition are made using the rules of TFL in order to contrast TFL’s logical capabilities with those of MPL. It is argued that logic does not need any existential assumptions for a proper interpretation of the square; rather, all that is required are the three oppositional assumptions preserved in TFL but not in MPL. After considering TFL in relation to Peirce’s existential graphs, three suggestions are made: Firstness is most fundamentally understood in logical terms as the contrary opposition of terms; secondness is most fundamentally understood in logical terms as the predicative opposition of predicates affirmed or denied; and thirdness is most fundamentally understood in logical terms as the quantitative opposition of subjects. A famous example from Socrates in Plato’s Apology is used to illustrate these claims.

This article looks at the medieval culture of reading, and suggests that medieval readership and modern reading strategies have significant points of contact including a tolerance for ambiguity, engagement with chains of intertextuality, and an embrace of the fragmentary nature of knowledge. It argues that the medieval reader was not a superstitious bumpkin, but rather a sophisticated interpreter within a complex system of signification. The medieval reader engaged in sophisticated coding, decoding, and recoding. While this article argues for similarity of strategic modes of reading between the medieval scholar and modern reader, similarities should not be mistaken for equivalencies. Where the modern reader embraces intertextuality for its own sake, the medieval reader’s assumption of divine truth served as an anchor to the chain of intertextuality. This article examines Umberto Eco’s reading of Dante’s theory of language to give us insight into medieval approaches to signification, and applies those insights to St. Augustine’s Confessions. As one of the “four doctors” of the Catholic Church, Augustine served as a model of readership for many theologians to follow. St. Augustine’s practices of readership and signification would establish a practice of reading as encoding and decoding sophisticated networks of signs.