Semeiotika

Deadline Extension for SSA Call

2006-05-03T06:08:00.000-05:00

The deadline for submissions to for the 2006 Semiotic Society of America annual meeting at Purdue is MAY 31. The meeting will be held from September 28 through October 1. The program is taking shape now, but there is still time to have a paper or organized session included. For full information see the call at: http://www.uwf.edu/tprewitt/SSA.htm

Call for Papers 2006

2006-02-23T14:12:00.000-06:00

The Call for Papers for the 2006 SSA meeting at Purdue is available on line at http://www.uwf.edu/tprewitt/ through the Semiotic Society of America link.

Planning to expand participation

2006-02-23T14:10:00.000-06:00

This has been a closed blog, and the initial participants have only used it a little. We've had a request to open it up more. We will work out the details and email instructions to the membership to open the page to everyone who is a paid-up member of SSA. The idea is to keep the discussion open, but also not constantly have to renegotiate basic issues.

Of Signs and Solipsism

2006-01-10T16:24:00.000-06:00

Terry,

That's a great idea. I'm going to do my paper for the SAS meeting on it. Since you're here and Dr Deely's not, I may as well argue for his side of it. A title and very rough abstract:

Of Signs and Solipsism:
Deely and Prewitt on the Structure of Discourse

Terry Prewitt (1991) criticized John Deely’s (198?) adaptation of Jørgen Johansen’s (19??) semiotic pyramid for its unwieldy, “four-dimensional” structure and suggested a three-dimensional alternative. He then proffered a similar model intended to show a congruity between the putatively distinct Peircean and Saussurean notions of the sign. However, the solomonic segmentation included in both models but especially the latter and the inclusion of the “idea” as an element of the latter drew riposte. Deely (1994) suggests that Prewitt’s models are “solipsistic” insofar as they suggest the typical problems of idealism. I contend that Prewitt’s initial model constitutes an improvement on Deely’s 198? model, but—drawing from such disparate thinkers as Peirce, Merleau-Ponty (1945, 1964), and Simon Blackburn (1984)—that Deely’s allegation of “solipsism” may hold of the second.

Semeiotika

2005-12-02T17:12:00.000-06:00

Nice sorting through of some first issues with Saussure and Peirce. What I'm hoping to see also--since I think I agree substantially with you (though there are many degrees of freedom in even such precise language)--is a filtering through my arguments (and Deely's responses) in several paragraphs of Deely's "The Human Use of Signs" concerning the "semiotic pyramid". Also, Shea Zellweger (since I know you are lurking)--what about the relationship of the pre-Socratic philosophers and the geometric forms of semeiotic inherent in Peirce, and your expansions to the geometry and symmetry of logic?

The Objects of Signification

2005-11-16T14:40:00.000-06:00

(In response to the topic raised by Terry in the Nov 02 post)

I'll offset my lack of expertise with a foolhardy assertion, for the sake of discussion:

Saussure is a phenomenalist and a nominalist. Conversely, Peirce is a phenomenologist and at least a semi-realist. (*In making this claim I differ from Lanigan in Speaking and Semiology.)

Accordingly, Saussureans can be content to deal with all objects as "constructions", as you have called them: wholly linguistic objects. One is reminded of the early Wittgenstein: "The facts in logical space are the world." Phenomenalism commits the modern mistake in pursuing the Way of the Idea. Signified objects are ideas. Because the Saussurean sign is a dyad, it does not demand a particular ground for interpretation. This leaves the meaning of a sign wide open; the sign can signify just whatever you want. Hence the so-called postmodernists' emphasis on the will to power as the determiner of meaning. The meaning of a sign depends on a context, but the context is not given with the sign.

To the contrary, the Peircean sign, owing to the Latins its definition as a pure, ontological relation, allows for the objectification of physical entities. This breaks dramatically from a phenomenalist perspective (which reduces all objects to "appearances" or "ideas of the world") by recognizing that physical, "mind-independent" being (to use Deely's term) can present itself to knowers. (This is not to say that all objects are physical things.) It removes the notion of Idea as mediative between knowers and their world, which results in what Merleau-Ponty calls the "classical impasses": the problems of interaction, of the external world, of other minds, of solipsism. While avoiding the quagmires of idealism, the Peircean sign also recognizes the irreducible triadicity of the sign: the ground of interpretation is built into the very sign relation. Meanings don't depend entirely on what the knower brings to the signifier.

Intersubjectivity, in a word, means the mutual recognition of the appropriate ground for interpretation or explanation.

Semeiotika

2005-11-15T17:13:00.000-06:00

The Proceedings "call" is posted at the SSA web site. We are in the process of linking and adjusting a number of old web addresses that come up when you Google "Semiotic Society of America". Remember, the current address is:

http;//www.uwf.edu/tprewitt/SSA.htm

I'm hoping others will also start posting here. To jump in, click on the "BlogThis" link above and put in your username and password. I will try to keep some basic posts going, and I know some are lurking. I got a great package in snail mail from Shea Zellweger, in response to my substantive foray into Saussure and Peirce. I'm preparing more in that regard to put here. For the moment, let us all congratulate Shea on his 80th birthday! Perhaps we can get him to come to Purdue for next year's meeting.

Semeiotika

2005-11-03T21:06:00.000-06:00

We are completing the initial pages for the new Semiotic Society of America website, which should be available in the next day or so at

http://www.uwf.edu/tprewitt/SSA.htm

The site will have information on current SSA activities and membership, links to the SSA stylesheet, journal information, and annual meeting activities including the Proceedings.

Semeiotika

2005-11-02T08:58:00.000-06:00

For those who may join in here, I would like to initiate some discussion on the relationships between Saussure and Peirce in the definition and theoretical use of the sign, especially with respect to the "object", but also encompassing the "representamen" as a counterpart of the Saussurean "signifier". We may start with the opening of what should become a metalogical exchange:

It seems to me that while the Peircean and Saussurean sign vehicles are closely parallel (at least as far as we consider Saussures linguistic signs as a subset of "possible" signifiers in the larger field of communication), the "object" definitions are far apart. I have typically resolved this by reference to a Peircean "sign plane" as a projection of the umwelt, viewed as coordinated personal constructions that may in the larger context of communicative process reflect sharing or difference along any of the dimensions of sign structure. This model of intersubjectivity seeks coordination of the "object" constructions in the communication process (especially in all that constrains the interpretant in the moment of semiosis), rather than presuming coordination on the basis of common use of a representamen.

Semeiotika

2005-10-27T13:49:00.000-05:00

Hey, just coming up for air after the meeting. People who need proceedings forms, be patient and one will arrive by email. Otherwise, you can go to my UWF web page and go to the SSA links.

Yeah, well, I'm here too

2005-10-24T17:36:00.000-05:00

Bill has done a great thing setting this up for us. Or, perhaps, as this develops we may decide too much discussion about what semiotics really is (or what semiotic really is, but never what semiotics really ARE--and that is part of the definitional problem) is actually, well, too much. Given my experience with SSA that is not likely to happen. As background, let me say that I began as a "vulgar" structuralist in the tradition of Levi-Strauss, and have come to understand that he was much brighter than he was given credit for being by Americanist anthropologists; but I got there only through a healthy reading in several other systems. I'm also a devotee of the ideas of Kenneth Pike and Morris Opler (in anthropology), and have spent much of the past 10 years working with what Saussure could have said had he visioned the sign more like Peirce. My view is that he made it part way, but not all the way. On the other hand, there are a few people (most notably, Shea Zellweger) who can honestly claim to have gone beyond C. S. Peirce in the representation of logic (and that is saying something). I believe I know most of the people who have been in SSA over the past 25 years, have read, experienced directly, or edited some of their work, and appreciate semiotic studies for the diversity and power of what I have come to regard as the "doctrine of signs"...which, I suppose, makes me a Peircean today, though I actually know not nearly enough to claim any real expertise there. And I'm very interested in where this blog will take us.

And what is a blog and who cleans it up?

2005-10-23T10:48:00.000-05:00

You probably have seen blog reports on CNN and realize blogs are web means of simply posting to the prublic information and interest on some topic. They are simple to read, and thanks to some free sites are not difficult to maintain. Usually there are for one person speaking to the eworld about whatever they want. Blogs generally invite relatively short postings and comments, but when and if there is desire to have a place where articles or propositions for discussion need to be posted and discussed, we can consider going to another free format called a Plone -- which would allow security, enclosed groupings, resource files, discussion forums, etc. For now, I suggest we try this group blog and see how it works and whether there is enough interest to keep it going. In the meantime, anyone can view this at www.semeiotika.blogspot.com

This semeiotika blog is, of course, an experiment -- maybe even an existential graph or a basal temperature of the SSA. I am not sure how the idea of a Society Blog will work (part of me would prefer doing something like a Plone -- {yeah, real name and real open source program -- try www.objectis.net if you haven’t seen one}), but the SSA needs a better way to communicate and grow. So I will be inviting folk (mostly paid members to join this blog), but exactly how that will work I don’t know yet….whether I will have to make everybody an administrator or just a member, just how you will log on (with a username and password and some kind of approval process for postings), or whether this will simply be transparent. We simply will have to learn as we go. I know some of you would rather have amputation than learn new software, but this blog business is away to get your message out to a larger (even universal) audience.

Yours…..Hermes not-so trismigestus

What the Hell is Semiotics?

2005-10-22T15:12:00.000-05:00

Anyone who declares that she is a semiotician or that he is a student of semiotics invariably gets the question: well, what exactly is semiotics, and despite the time constraints or social limitations, the initial answer that semiotics is the study of signs is not always helpful. The conversation will often trail off into “ahhhh, I guess so” or “do you really study traffic signs?” Maybe, if there is time, someone will ask, “what do you mean by 'study of signs'” and most us reply something about “meaning” or “patterns of communication” -- knowing full well that the answer to what semiotics is, is really a life-time quest for most of us, and the conversation will often turn to something about politics, sports, or academic gossip.

Part of the purpose of this blog is to begin, what we hope will be, a long and productive conversation about what semiotics really. I have, of course, confused things right off, by naming this blog Semeiotika in the first place, but that odd spelling is on purpose -- I wanted to go to John Locke and the Greek as a kind of neutral starting ground; so hopefully the discussion of thet topic can go as unimpeded as possible.

If you wish to join the group, please send email to raven’s mud and you can be added to the dialog!