Göran Sonesson

Lund University | LU · Centre for Cogniitive Semiotics

The aim of this chapter is to suggest that the method which Husserl and Peirce both called phenomenology is, in important respects, the same, and that the differences are found not where they were claimed to be. Certain exponents of both kinds of phenomenologies, on the Peircean side, Joseph Ransdell, and on the side of Husserl, Herbert Spiegelberg...

Kognityvinė semiotika, pastaruoju metu įvairiose terpėse pristatoma kaip nauja humanitarinių ir socialinių mokslų paradigma, siekia sujungti kognityvinius mokslus su semiotika. Išplėsdami kognicijos sąvoką taip, kad ji aprėptų didžiąją dalį psichinio gyvenimo (o kartais – ir daugelį „subasmeninių“ [subpersonal] aspektų), kognityviniai mokslai ne ka...

When putting semiotics and phenomenology in juxtaposition, the first task necessarily is to find out what a study of meaning, conceiving of itself as an empirical science, has to do with a philosophical school, the business of which it is to secure the epistemological foundations of all the sciences (broadly understood). Our answer, in short (but w...

With a Call for Essays, the special issue Multimodality sought contributions that accept not only the material but also the body-bound dependence of media perception and understanding. To this end, contributions were included that shed light on both the structural and signifying potential of artistic works through multimodal analysis. Particular at...

In the sense of phenomenology, actions are special cases of acts of consciousness. Within semiotics, first Jan Mukařovský and then A. J. Greimas have established, in different terms, a distinction between instrumental actions and actions which carry their meaning in themselves. But this is insufficient to account for the variety of actions which co...

Many contemporary scholars have recently defended the idea that the agency of things is symmetrical and equivalent to human agency. We propose an alternative approach to artefacts’ agency based on a field study concerned with contextually situated observations of the process of design of artefacts in Amazonia. By means of participant observation an...

Within a broader definition of design, as the conception and planning of everything that is artificial, the place of tools is central. With the help of cognitive semiotics in general and Donald’s theory of the evolution of the human mind in particular, we propose a stage model for the evolution of design, consisting of four stages: Proto-design, Si...

The present study looked at the extent to which 2-year-old children benefited from information conveyed by viewing a hiding event through an opening in a cardboard screen, seeing it as live video, as pre-recorded video, or by way of a mirror. Being encouraged to find the hidden object by selecting one out of two cups, the children successfully pick...

Reflecting the multiple ambiguities of its ordinary language use, the current scholarly use of the term(s) “medium”/“media” is fraught with contradictions. Starting out from the insight that the nucleus of any kind of communication is an act, in which an addresser presents an artefact and a task of interpretation to an addressee, which the latter i...

Many items of culture which are conveyed from one culture to another may take verbal form, and then constitute what Jakobson called “translation proper.” If such diffusions involve a co-occurrent change of semiotic systems, they are of such a different nature, that we better reserve another term for it: transposition. Whether or not accompanied by...

In this paper we summarize observations bridging the declared aspirations of pictorial semiotics and its real achievements. Pictorial semiotics is here understood as the general study of pictures as signs and it constituted a fundamental step beyond the art historical captivation with individual images. In the first part of our contribution we pres...

It is often claimed as a matter of course, even in widely different intellectual currents, that there can be no pictorial or, more generally, no visual statements. The Greimas School, and French structuralism in general, use such terms, but without inquiring into what is meant. The psychologist Rudolf Arnheim makes a plea for visual thinking, and e...

Starting out from classical metaphor theory, I consider two models, the Overlap model and the Tension model — the difference between which may not have been spelled out in that tradition. Although the latter has an Aristotelian pedigree, it may be less generally valid than the Overlap model, at least if the requirement for tension is placed very hi...

In an earlier paper, I set out to apply to animal mimicry the definition of the sign, and, more specifically, of the iconic sign, which I originally elaborated in the study of pictures, and which was then extended by myself and others to language, gesture, and music. The present contribution, however, while summarizing some of the results of those...

En la primera parte de este trabajo concluimos que la traducción es un doble acto de significación, tomando en cuenta los casos de emisión y recepción de ambos actos involucrados, el primero en el nivel de la cognición, y el segundo en el nivel de la comunicación. Dada esta definición, se muestra que la “traducción intralingüística” de Jakobson es,...

It is curious facts that Peirce scholars tends to take the three Peircean categories for granted, whereas Peirce himself claimed they must be derived by means of phenomenology, later rebaptized phaneroscopy. As I have suggested elsewhere, this is the essential difference between Peircean and Husserlean phenomenology, which are in other respects ide...

What makes human beings, and their way of thinking, unique in the biosphere of the earth is not just the biological-genetic evolution of human cognitive capacities, but also the interaction in historical time with the environment, the socio-cultural Lifeworld, and particularly human semiotic skills; that is, the ability to learn from other thinking...

Thanks to Bruno Galantucci, “experimental semiotics” is usually nowadays taken to mean the study of “novel forms of communication which people develop when they cannot use pre-established communication systems”. In spite of Galantucci’s claim to have picked the label because it was free, it has actually been used in different ways at least twice be...

“Relevance” is an ordinary language word, which has been put to sundry scholarly uses. Nowadays, the term most commonly evokes the work, along the lines of speech act theory, of Paul Grice and, more in particular, of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. Starting out from these theories, Jean-Louis Dessalles has suggested that relevance may account for t...

Si la traducción es un acto de transacción de sentidos, la semiótica debeser capaz de definir su especificidad en relación con otros actos semióticos. En lugar de eso, siguiendo a las sugerencias de Roman Jakobson, de la escuela de Tartú y, de forma implícita, de Charles Sanders Peirce, la noción de traducción ha sido generalizada para cubrir más o...

From the point of view of semiotics, the essential contribution of John Deely consists in having made us all aware of the richness of the Scholastic heritage, and to have explained it to us latter-day semioticians. Even for those, who, like the present author, think that semiotics was alive and well between the dawn of the Latin Age, and the redisc...

Marketing is always a kind of inter-cultural communication, in the sense defined by the semiotics of culture: a message from someone in a group who says “I” to a group he sees as “You” or “Them”. But marketing is also an inter-cultural message in a narrower sense: it often emanates from a global company, which needs to sell a product on a local mar...

The specificity of a semiotic approach to translation is often taken to reside in two dictums, separately, or more commonly compounded, one of then due to Roman Jakobson, and the other to Charles Sanders Peirce. The first shibboleth consists in Jakobson’s (1959: 233) extension of the term “translation”, beyond what he still terms “translation prope...

Both Peirce and Husserl suggested that a community of scholars were needed to bring to fruition the work that they had initiated, and both (initially) termed their approach phenomenology, defining it in almost identical terms. The fact that Peirce imposed more constraints on the free variation in imagination, which is one of the principal operation...

Résumé En dépit des apparences, la véritable rencontre entre la phénoménologie husserlienne et la sémiotique de l’École de Paris n’a pas encore eu lieu. Dans cet article, je suggère qu’en adoptant des idées de la phénoménologie, dont beaucoup ont obtenuune nouvelle actualité grâce aux sciences cognitives contemporaines, on peut retenir la formalité...

Spelling out the more or less implicit phenomenology found in Peirce's categories and in the “Basisphänomene” suggested by the late Cassirer, this paper attempts to extend Cassirer's own suggestion for the grounding of the human, or, as we prefer to say, semiotic, sciences, by means of an elucidation of the components of the basic situation of comm...

In order to study the notion of habit as an instance of Thirdness in Peirce’s work, it is necessary to go back to the intuitions at the basis of Peirce’s categories, trying to spell out concretely, as I think this has not been done before, the meaning of the three categories. This involves entangling the notions of fallibilism and of the collaborat...

This book, which presents a cognitive-semiotic theory of cultural evolution, including that taking place in historical time, analyses various cognitive-semiotic artefacts and abilities. It claims that what makes human beings human is fundamentally the semiotic and cultural skills by means of which they endow their Lifeworld with meaning. The proper...

Instead of rejecting the notion of iconicity, as has often been the case in semiotics, we should inquire deeper into its specific nature, and also into the peculiar way in which it is manifested by pictures. In order to show why Umberto Eco, Nelson Goodman, and others were fundamentally wrong in their classical critique of iconicity, we will pursue...

Uma breve caracterização da semiótica visual do Groupe μ é apresentada juntamente com seus desdobramentos mais marcantes. Em seguida, seis artigos e uma entrevista são comentados, todos integrantes do evento em homenagem ao Groupe “O Groupe μ. Quarenta anos de retórica — Trinta e três anos de semiótica visual”. São eles: “Retórica do ponto de vista...

Apesar de colocações anteriores, o casamento entre retórica e semiótica foi consumado pelo Groupe μ, que o tornou produtivo também para a semiótica visual. Há, no entanto, diversos problemas com a abordagem do Groupe, sendo o primeiro sua redução da retórica à elocutio, isto é, o sentido produzido por meio de transgressões, enquanto o antigo sentid...

Peirce’s best idea, and the one least implemented by himself and his followers, is that of an ethics of terminology. Using this ethics as a tool, we suggest that many Peircean terms are in fact misleading, or, as he said himself at the end of his life, “injurious.” From the point of view of cognitive semiotics, there is no reason to abide by Peirce...

The study of photography has been a fundamental testing case for pictorial semiotics, in part because, being in a sense machine made, photographs would seem to resist the critique of iconicity, and in part because they could be said to involve all the three semiotic grounds, iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity, but in different proportions. Th...

The claim of cognitive semiotics to offer something new to semiotics rests on the ambition to bring together the research traditions of semiotics and cognitive science. Our focus has been on using the empirical approach of cognitive science in investigating semiotic issues. At the same time, however, phenomenological description plays a major part...

Cognitive semiotics is a term increasingly being used for a field combining some of the insights, theories, findings and methods of classical semiotics and of cognitive science. The notion of memory plays an important part in at least one of the theories of classical semiotics, that of Lotman, which can be connected both to earlier philosophical (n...

If translation is an act of meaning transaction, semiotics should be able to define its specificity in relation to other semiotic acts. Instead, following upon suggestions by Roman Jakobson, the Tartu school, and, more implicitly, Charles Sanders Peirce, the notion of translation has been generalized to cover more or less everything that can be don...

The best way to conceive semiotical spaces that are not identical to single buildings, such as a cityscape, is to define the place in terms of the activities occurring there. This conception originated in the proxemics of E. T. Hall and was later generalized in the spatial semiotics of Manar Hammad. It can be given a more secure grounding in terms...

Many studies of children and apes realized in psychology address is-sues that are highly relevant to semiotics, but they often do so indirectly, or they use a terminology that is confusing and/or too vague from a semiotical point of view. The studies reported here, however, follow the paradigm of these psycho-logical studies, but they are couched i...

Figurativity, roughly paraphrased as that which is not accounted for by the system, is a residue concept of both Piaget's theory of cognitive development and of Greimasean semiotics. In the latter case, however, figurativity has been related to the second, so-called plastic layer of the picture, which is opposed to the pictorial layer, by means of...

Contagious yawning has been reported for humans, dogs and several non-human primate species, and associated with empathy in humans and other primates. Still, the function, development and underlying mechanisms of contagious yawning remain unclear. Humans and dogs show a developmental increase in susceptibility to yawn contagion, with children showi...

In the present essay the author sets out to reflect on the notions of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, pursuing the research beyond what is directly given in Peirce’s writings. For the purpose, Peircean phenomenology is considered to be a special variety of the Husserlian kind, because it restricts possible phenomena to threesomes and also att...

Cognitive semiotics is the name of a project that aims at putting together the knowledge base of cognitive science and semiotics. We will here consider the mental image, which has been an important subject in cognitive science, by contrast to the picture sign, and the sign generally, which has been a basic theme in semiotics. However, both cognitiv...

There are two interpretations of rhetoric that are backed by a long tradition: as the theory of argumentation and persuasion, which is how it was born in Antiquity, and as the taxonomy of rhetorical figures, which is the form in which it reigned supreme from the 16th century onwards. In both of these senses, advertising discourse today is the favou...

Human beings are special in mastering, apart from sign, a number of semiotic resources embedded already in perception, which is not differentiated, but which may still be iconic, indexical, or symbolic. The sign is no doubt one of the missing links between human beings and other animals. An even earlier break- ing point between (some) animals and h...

Cognitive semiotics, recently proposed in different quarters as a new paradigm for the human and the social sciences, aims to wed cognitive science with semiotics. While generalizing the notion of cognition to make it cover most of mental life (as well as, sometimes, many “ subpersonal” aspects), cognitive science has hardly left any specific place...

It is difficult to make sense of the notion of postmodernity, because "modernity" is clearly a shifter, in the sense of Jespersen and Jakobson: a term dependent for its meaning on its moment of enunciation. It is true that, from the Middle Ages onwards, several meanings of modernity have received an objectified reference. But in the arts, particula...

Practically all theories of iconicity are denunciations of its subject matter (for example, those of Goodman, Bierman and the early Eco). My own theory of iconicity was developed in order to save a particular kind of iconicity, pictoriality, from such criticism. In this interest, I distinguished pure iconicity, iconic ground, and iconic sign, on on...

While the conceptual history of the sign, as recounted by John Deely in Four ages of understanding, is immensely enlightening, history is never enough. If, before Augustine, it had occurred to no one that such diverse phenomena as are covered by this term had something in common, and if, in the time of Aquinas, Fonseca, and Poinsot, different usage...

We aim to add some clarity to the ongoing debate between gesture-primacy and speech-primacy theories of language evolution by addressing the questions: (1) What is meant by "gestural primacy"? (2) What kind of evidence can be adduced for (or against) it? With respect to (1), we must distinguish between theories of (1a) an evolutionary stage of gest...

La rhétorique du point de vue du monde de la vie La rhétorique de l’image dont parlait Barthes, reprise d’une manière beaucoup plus systématique dans les travaux du Groupe µ, n’est qu’une partie de la rhétorique classique, l’elocutio, mais c’est aussi celle qui a dominé dans l’Occident pendant ces derniers 500 ans. À l’extérieur de la sémiotique, c...

The aim of this paper is to consider in what way semiotics, cognitive science, and phenomenology, which stem from different traditions that have only rarely been known to intermingle, can enter harmoniously into a common research paradigm, phenomenological cognitive semiotics, to which each one of them has a specific contribution to make, In the fi...

In order to differentiate the semiotic capacities of animals and human beings we need to understand more exactly what these properties are. Instead of identifying all vehicles of meaning with signs, we certainly have to specify the notion of sign, but it will also be necessary to provide an inventory of other kinds of meaning, starting out from per...

O presente ensaio é uma tentativa de apresentar o posicionamento da semiótica bem como suas conseqÁências, para a taxionomia da interpretação. Meu objetivo é mostrar que os artigos que opõem a semiótica a um tipo de teoria de interpretação defendida pelos paí­ses dominados por pensamento anglo-saxão não são aquilos que eles presumem ser. Na seqÁênc...

Unlike much of the contemporary discussion of embodiment, phenomenology is really involved with the body as a kind of meaning appearing to consciousness; and it does not only attend to the body of the biological organism, but also to the kind of organism-independent artefacts which are required by some sign systems. Because it is concerned with mea...

Too often the word "iconicity" is used simply as a scientifically sounding term for similarity. In order to develop a real theory of iconicity, it is not enough, but perhaps a good start, to return to Peirce. In this paper, I use the reconstruction of the notion of iconicity inspired by my work in pictorial semiotics to throw some light on iconicit...

The present essay aims at integrating different concepts of meaning developed in semiotics, biology, and cognitive science, in a way that permits the formulation of issues involving evolution and development. The concept of sign in semiotics, just like the notion of representation in cognitive science, have either been used too broadly, or outright...

Résumé Si l'allégorie est une métaphore filée, comme disent les classiques, il faut commencer par étudier cette dernière. Le système du Groupe µ, dont nous avons donné ailleurs une version revue et corrigée, esquive cette terminologie traditionnelle, mais si l'on veut appliquer un tel système à la rhétorique langagière, il est nécessaire d'en trouv...

Globalization, as it is known to the common man (as opposed to ‘global semiotics’, which is not my concern here) is certainly a meeting of cultures, and as such it is comparable to a number of other enterprises of human history, from imperialism to charter trips. Unlike the latter, however, is undoubtedly first and foremost a stereotype — or, to ex...

Resumen: La tarea de la semiótica de la imagen no consiste solamente en determinar la especificidad de la imagen como signo, sino también en describir las particularidades de diferentes imágenes, como son, por ejemplo, el dibujo, la fotografía y la imagen de computadora. El presente texto describe, primero, el desarrollo del signo del tipo de la im...

In his recent work, Eco abandons his conventionalist theory of pictures, which was heavily censored by, among others, the present author. In so doing, however, Eco now goes to the other extreme, claiming that television images are like mirrors, which are no signs. It is my contention that Eco fails to come up with a more acceptable theory of iconic...

Proceeding from the assumption that metaphors as well as pictures are iconic signs, the present contribution studies what happens when metaphors occur in figurative pictures. The author distinguishes between primary iconicity, the recognition of which is a condition for the categorization of an object as a sign, and secondary iconicity, which is pe...

If modernism, particularly in the visual arts, is characterised by the ever recurring transgression of the norms set up by earlier periods (cf. Sonesson 1998a), then, of course, the most radical way to abolish the art object, is to turn it into something which is no longer even an object : that is, an action. In the process, creation may or may not...

The life of signs in society — and out of it: Critique of the communication critique

In this article, I will be concerned with interpreting a concept — or rather, several concepts masquerading under one single label — of a particular system of interpretation, Semiotics of culture, as introduced by the Tartu school, and later developed by, among others, Roland Posner. Since my goal is, in the last analysis, to understand something a...

Le but de l'auteur est ici de fournir un certain nombre de bases utiles aux archeologues pour l'etude des images prehistoriques. Il presente donc un certain nombre de notions preliminaires a une analyse semiotique de ces images, telles que les pictogrammes ou les petroglyphes, qu'il met en relation avec d'autres signes et types iconiques modernes,...

ed., Signs of Humanity L Homme et ses signes. Proceedings of the Fourth congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, Barcelona/ Perpignan, Mars-April 1989.. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter 1992; Volume I, ss. 149-156. Aujourd hui encore, l avenir de la sémiotique visuelle paraît largement hypothéqué par le modèle linguistique. S il est...