Alin Olteanu

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at Shanghai International Studies University

This collected volume celebrates the life and work of the late Andrew Stables, a renowned scholar in semiotics and in educational philosophy and theory. He is known, in particular, for having pioneered the semiotic approach to education. This book celebrates his work with scholarly contributions by leading researchers in these areas of scholarship,...

This paper explores the ecological importance of Andrew Stables’ notion of learning as interpretative. The broadly encompassing framework for educational research that Stables enabled is nurtured by a specifically semiotic and hermeneutic notion of learning that upsets certain assumptions which are deeply rooted in the intellectual history of moder...

This chapter looks back at Andrew Stables’ essential contribution to semiotic approaches to education. Its aim is to show how Stables’ contribution to edusemiotics is situated in his own intellectual journey, and in a research tradition that mobilizes semiology and semiotics to understand educational processes. While Andrew Stables himself studied...

We discuss the concept of humanism in semioethics, as reflected in Petrilli's and Ponzio's recent paper, which clarifies how their approach is positioned vis-à-vis biosemiotics and global semiotics. To do so, we reflect on how Petrilli and Ponzio explicate the view on technology implicit to semioethics, opening new research avenues for semiotics. W...

I explicate the role of imagination in scientific inquiry in semiotic terms. The primary aim is to pave the way for a semiotic investigation of scientific work, which should, as a secondary aim, contribute to discussions in philosophy of science. The view I propose advocates for the importance of cognitive and sociotechnical positioning in scientif...

This paper proposes a novel approach to investigating modeling in chemistry through the notion of "computational tool." Drawing on media archaeology as a theory and historical method to reveal how past media objects bear on the present, we understand computational tools as situated and contingent on specific material cultures. Taking inspiration fr...

This special issue stems from the panel “Semiotic Approaches to Research Cultures” that took place at the 4th conference of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics (IACS), in 2022. Organized by Alin Olteanu, Phillip H. Roth, and Gabriele Gramelsberger, the panel aimed to investigate research cultures under semiotic and cognitive consi...

In this article, we contribute to literacy and education studies by proposing three overarching features (elements) of postdigital literacy events, informed by an ecological, relational, and sociomaterial framing of literacy. These features are: (1) entanglement, (2) digital materiality, and (3) spatiotemporality. Entanglement is about how learning...

Software is much more than just code. It is time to confront the complexity of licenses, uses, governance, infrastructure and other facets of software in science. Their influence is ubiquitous yet overlooked. Hocquet, A., Wieber, F., Gramelsberger, G. et al. 2024. Software in science is ubiquitous yet overlooked. Nature Computational Science. http...

This study develops a biosemiotic framework for a descriptive phenomenology. We incorporate the set utterance-genre-lifeworld in biosemiotic theory by paralleling it with the Peircean-Uexküllean notions of sign, habit, and Umwelt (respectively). This framework for empirical semiotic studies aims to complement the concepts of affordance and scaffold...

We propose a semiotic framework to underpin a posthumanist philosophy of education, as contrasted to technological determinism. A recent approach to educational processes as semiotic phenomena lends itself as a philosophy to understand the current interplay between education and technology. This view is aligned with the transhumanist movement to de...

We propose a semiotic framework to underpin a posthumanist philosophy of education, as contrasted to technological determinism. A recent approach to educational processes as semiotic phenomena lends itself as a philosophy to understand the current interplay between education and technology. This view is aligned with the transhumanist movement to de...

This paper examines the Great Kanon (also Great Canon; in the original Greek, Ὁ Μέγας Κανών) of St Andrew of Crete (ca. 660-740) as a case study in how religious ritual texts deploy autocommunicative processes. To study this complex liturgical hymn that occupies a key role in the ritual practice of Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic Christians...

Research in this journal has argued the importance of developing new understandings of literacy and education in the face of rapid and widespread (post)digital reconfigurations in how we learn, communicate, and even exist as embodied ecological beings. Alongside and predating interest in the postdigital, multimodality research developed significant...

Approaches to Biosemiotics is the first issue in the Biosocial World collection, and contains a series of articles on what biosemiotics does, how it does it and what its long-term objectives may be. As a more specialized discipline in the boundaries of linguistics, the biosociology, the philosophy of biology and the sciences, we hope to offer a poi...

This chapter explores the avenues that biosemiotics opens for cultural studies. While the most common use of semiotic theory consists in cultural criticism, what a biosemiotic approach to culture entails has been considered only seldomly. In this regard, Paul Cobley’s (2016) contribution stands out as explicitly addressing culture from a fully bios...

The postdigital condition is discussed from the perspective of Paul Cobley's biosemiotic approach to culture. While semiotics is often concerned with cultural criticism, there has been no explicit biosemiotic approach to culture, until only recently with Cobley unfurling such a research program. The key to this is the biosemiotic notion of modeling...

Bloomsbury Semiotics offers a state-of-the-art overview of the entire field of semiotics by revealing its influence on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. With four volumes spanning theory, method and practice across the disciplines, this definitive reference work emphasizes and strengthens common bonds shared across intellectual cultures, a...

Semiotics has inspired recent contributions to the philosophy and theory of education in a variety of ways. Proposals to overcome simple mind-body dualism, with an inert view of knowledge, via notions of sign, often implying an emphasis on process, have been prominent in redefining learning and the rationale of education. The earliest such attempts...

The prominent role of modelling activities in digital humanities (McCarty 2005), hereafter DH, was recently addressed from a semiotic perspective (Ciula and Eide 2017; Ciula and Marras 2019), as a way to foster a modelling theory fitted for this new and quickly developing area of research. This approach is not unexpected, as semiotic theories can j...

This commentary addresses the concept of learning stemming from Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg's theory of the emergence of consciousness. Jablonka and Ginsburg find strong support in biosemiotics for their argument that learning offers an evolutionary transition marker for the emergence of consciousness. Indeed, biosemiotics embraces a view on e...

The Annual Biosemiotic Achievement Award was established at the annual meeting of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies (ISBS) in 2014, in conjunction with Springer and Biosemiotics. It seeks to recognize papers published in the journal that present novel and potentially important contributions to biosemiotic research, its scientifc imp...

This special issue gathers five papers on the relation between semiotics and philosophy in Charles S. Peirce’s work. As Peirce’s philosophy is highly eclectic and his writings are not only great in volume but also scattered over several collections and still unorganized manuscripts, these contributions can only scratch the surface of the matter. Ho...

Festschrift in honour of Professor Dumitru Bortun

This paper sets the premises for a translation theory, in light of the contemporary circumstances of new media, based on a concept of mediation originating in Peirce’s semiotics, as recently developed, most of all, by Lars Elleström. This view allows for defining translation as the media effects of transferring cognitive import. The approach is jus...

This paper explores a semiotic notion of body as starting point for bridging biosemi-otic with social semiotic theory. The cornerstone of the argument is that the social semiotic criticism of the classic view of meaning as double articulation can support the criticism of language-centrism that lies at the foundation of biosemiotics. Besides the pra...

Cultural pluralism refers to conceptions of cultural heterogeneity, the term pluralism being understood in contrast to substance individualism. In general, pluralism denotes anti-monadism. Accounts of cultural pluralism stretch over a broad spectrum, from the atomistic view of plurality as a collection of autonomously coexisting and individually de...

This paper compares the coverage of the H1N1 and Covid-19 pandemics in ten prominent US daily newspapers. We selected articles that reference disease-specific keywords, published in the period between the declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization and the first peak in laboratory- confirmed ca...

This article outlines a “strong” theoretical approach to sustainability literacy, building on an earlier definition of strong and weak environmental literacy (Stables and Bishop 2001). The argument builds upon a specific semiotic approach to educational philosophy (sometimes called edusemiotics), to which these authors have been contributing. Here,...

The concept of Earth system science denotes a shift in the scientific discourse from disciplinary accounts of isolated components of the global environment towards the holistic and interdisciplinary treatment of their complex, functional interactions. We measure to what extent the environmental scientific literature of the past three decades reflec...

Taking influence from Peirce's phenomenological categories (Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness), a notion of what we call bottom-up modeling has become increasingly significant in research areas interested in learning, cognition, and development. Here, following a particular reading of Peircean semiotics (cf. Deacon, Terrence. 1997. The symbolic spec...

The advantages of a biosemiotic approach to the social effects of digitalization are explicated. Biosemiotics is a semiotic modeling theory that is inherent to a phenomenology of the body. Even though it offers an encompassing and comprehensive account of meaning as modeling, it has only recently been employed in analyzing cultural and social matte...

We propose a new relational direction in higher education that acknowledges external and internal images as integrated in thinking and learning. We expand educational theory and practice that commonly rely on discrete conceptual developments that exclude images. Our argument epistemologically relies on certain semiotic views that consider the role...

This paper reconsiders semiotic modelling in light of recent scholarship on Charles Peirce, particularly regarding his concept of proposition. Conceived in the vein of Peirce's phenomenological categories as well as of his taxonomy of signs, semiotic modelling has mostly been thought of as ascending from simple, basic sign types to complex ones. Th...

This paper explores the semiotics of Charles Peirce in relation to Colin Koopman’s advocacy for a new wave of pragmatism, which he terms transitionalism. Presenting both similarities and differences between these two, the main point is that Peirce’s semiotics fits the general idea of a transitionalist, as contrasted to substantialist, philosophy, e...

This interview/dialogue addresses an important issue of how educational semiotics is grounded in the history of ideas. The discussions concern the shared history of semiotics and liberal education; the modern university and its medieval antecedents; semiotic consciousness, the traces of which are found in both Christianity and Islam (and the hermen...

This chapter continues the arguments of Chap. 2, in greater detail. The consequences of an ideological, language-centered and relativist theory of culture are illustrated through examples. The chapter discusses policy-making based on culturalism, particularly for education and research. The cases discussed reveal the atomism (or monadism) of cultur...

This chapter discusses the arguments from semiotic theories that cultural studies have tended to draw on. In the atmosphere of the linguistic turn, the prevailing trends of semiotics supported a linguistic-centered epistemology, producing the extension of the philological concept of text to the study of culture and society. Valuable in its own righ...

This chapter focuses on the contribution to cultural theories of pragmatic philosophy. In its early forms, pragmatism developed its own concept of pluralism. While inspired from Charles Peirce’s idea of plurality in logic, starting with William James, the debates on pluralism in pragmatism have had culture as a main concern. Developing simultaneous...

This chapter offers an overview of multiculturalism theories and explains the main lines of criticism that this monograph develops. Most approaches to multiculturalism and intercultural communication are inherent of an ideological theory of culture, termed culturalism. This doctrine uncritically presumes that culture overwrites individual freedom a...

The main stake for a semiotic theory of multiculturalism consists in understanding communication in cross- and inter-cultural contexts. This chapter explains how the semiotic approach to multiculturalism, as developed in this book, questions the main lines of argumentation in intercultural communication theories. The first observation is that, in v...

The biosemiotic approach to multiculturalism, introduced in the previous chapter, is explained in more detail. The main argument is that a theory of multiculturalism can only be a theory of culture, as cultures are intrinsically plural and cannot be clearly distinguished one from the other. Furthermore, cultures are deemed as schematic scaffoldings...

This chapter integrates Charles Peirce’s doctrine of Dicisigns in the cognitive semiotics of film. It makes use of Peirce’s concept of proposition to develop a framework for the analysis of multimodal meaning construction. As such, this theoretical addition to the cognitive semiotic theory of film illustrates how information is conveyed and, also,...

If all knowing comes from semiosis, more concepts should be added to the semiotic toolbox. However, semiotic concepts must be defined via other semiotic concepts. We observe an opportunity to advance the state-of-the-art in semiotics by defining concepts of cognitive processes and phenomena via semiotic terms. In particular, we focus on concepts of...

This paper sets a framework for using semiotics as an analytical method for Earth system science. It illustrates the use of such a method by analysing a dataset consisting of 32,383 abstracts of research articles pertaining to Earth system science, modelled as semantic networks. The analysis allows us to explain the epistemological advantages of th...

This paper discusses the relation between learning and adaptation, arguing that the current state of the art in semiotics suggests a continuity between the two. An overview of the relevant theories in this regard, as considered in semiotics, reveals an embodied and environmental account of learning, where language plays an important but nevertheles...

This chapter integrates Charles Peirce’s doctrine of Dicisigns in the cognitive semiotics of film. It makes use of Peirce’s concept of proposition to develop a framework for the analysis of multimodal meaning construction. As such, this theoretical addition to the cognitive semiotic theory of film illustrates how information is conveyed and, also,...

This paper is concerned with two interrelated ideas: the first one is that the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce was actively engaged with questions of hermeneutics proper and modified his theory of inquiry so as to be able to accommodate objects of investigation that are generally treated within a hermeneutical framework. Nowhere else do...

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 t...

This article reviews and discusses some the main aspects of the growing edusemiotic research movement. The authors briefly explore the historical antecedents to educational semiotics in antiquity, before going on to discuss edusemiotic’s fundamental “triadic” (non-dualistic) orientation. They focus on the use of Peirce’s categorical semiotic philos...

This chapter explores the common history shared by semiotics and educational studies. An academic semiotic consciousness began in the early medieval age (the Patristic age), marked by St. Augustine who legitimized the educational tradition of the liberal arts at the dawn of the Christian age. Ever since, throughout the Medieval Age educational phil...

This unique book gathers articles from the numanistic perspective of multidisciplinarity and innovation, connected by three main theoretical interests or overarching themes: music, semiotics and translation. Offering an eclectic collection of innovative papers that address such topics as culture, musicology, art consumption, meaning, codes and nati...

This unique book gathers articles from the numanistic perspective of multidisciplinarity and innovation, connected by three main theoretical interests or overarching themes: music, semiotics and translation. Offering an eclectic collection of innovative papers that address such topics as culture, musicology, art consumption, meaning, codes and nati...

This chapter explores the common history shared by semiotics and educational theory . By looking at some of the major moments in the history of semiotics, the chapter elucidates the co-evolution of education and semiotics. The entanglement of education and semiotics, due to their common roots in the hermeneutics of medieval mystical theology, later...

This paper illustrates how semiotics and constructivism can cooperate and prove to be mutually beneficial, by bringing a new, holistic mind-body philosophical perspective on experience. To develop the argument the phenomenon of learning is examined, in the light of empirically collected data. Recent research in both semiotics and constructivism mak...

This paper aims to explain how semiotics and constructivism can collaborate in an educational epistemology by developing a joint approach to prescientific conceptions. Empirical data and findings of constructivist research are interpreted in the light of Peirce’s semiotics. Peirce’s semiotics is an anti-psychologistic logic (CP 2.252; CP 4.551; W 8...

In his divisions of science, Peirce placed pedagogy in the branch of practical sciences. This means that the profession of teaching can only be meliorated by experience, through practice. However, I argue that a holistic look at Peirce’s semiotics reveals an implicit philosophy of education. The key lies in understanding his account of experience i...

This book investigates the philosophy of education implicit in the semiotics of Charles Peirce. It is commonly accepted that the acts of learning and teaching imply affection of some sort, and Charles Peirce's evolutionary semiotics thoroughly explains learning as an act of love. According to Peirce, we evolved to learn and to love; learning from o...

The recent development of biosemiotics has revealed the achievement of knowledge and the development of science to be the results of the semiosis of all life forms, including those commonly regarded as cultural constructs. Education is thus a semiosic structure to which evolution itself has adapted, while learning is the semiotic phenomenon that de...