Semiotix XN-9 (2012)

Editorial

Occupy Semiotics

The production of knowledge should not be confused with the production of discourse. Contemporary semiotics unfortunately tends to be a set of text-producing algorithms which run on their own steam like mad machines with little concern for empirical constraints.

Today’s students of semiotics are confronted by a grand multi-stream narrative which articulates a catalogue of categories which portends to describe the whole of natural and cultural processes. These axiomatic propositions are marketed as a doctrine grounded on self-evident epistemological truths which are irrefutable, that is, unfalsifiable. Like any set of very general categories it is bound to apply to a vast sample of objects. But does it explain anything? Does it allow us to predict and to control the phenomena which initially prompted this early quest for fundamental knowledge? […]

Featured

The Swiss Center for Affective Sciences

Emotion has long been considered a central aspect of human functioning but its importance as a research subject has only recently been recognized by the scientific community. The modern study of emotion can be said […]

Semiotix XN-9 (2012)

Experimental semiotics: a review

This review first appeared in Frontiers in Human Neurosciences. It is republished in this issue of SemiotiX with the kind permission of the authors. Bruno Galantucci and Simon Garrod also edited a volume entitled Experimental Semiotics: Studies on […]

Semiotic Profile

A Semiotic Profile: Lubomír Doležel

Lubomír Doležel (1922) is Emeritus Professor of Comparative literature at the University of Toronto. In his theoretical approach to literary artworks he combines the structuralist heritage of the Prague School with semiotics, logics, linguistics, narratology […]

Guest column

Semiotics and Copy-writing

Studying advertising: why and how It is hard not to notice that advertising functions as one of the most proliferated narrative generators, producing dozens of narratives that our environment becomes enveloped in. Admittedly, creativity is […]

Semiotix XN-9 (2012)

A Graduate Seminar in Educational Semiotics

Applied Semiotics for Deep Education at the University of Wisconsin – Madison Graduate Seminar in Educational Semiotics. François Victor Tochon is Professor at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. He works in Curriculum & Instruction in the School of […]

Semiotix XN-9 (2012)

Tartu and the MA in Semiotics: four years after

Started in the fall of 2009, the International Master’s Programme in Semiotics taught at the University of Tartu, has now turned four. As Anti Randviir (senior researcher of sociosemiotics) pointed out during the last graduation […]

Semiotix XN-9 (2012)

The Front Shelf

The Language of Life: How Communication Drives Human Evolution. By James Lull and Eduardo Neiva. New York: Prometheus Books, 2012 (272 pages). This book deserves a wide exposure among the various semiotic communities at a […]