Pragmatism from Peirce to Wittgenstein, and Further （实用主义）
Dinda L. Gorlée, The Netherlands (gorlee@xs4all.nl)
Ivan Mladenov, Bulgaria (mladenovivan@hotmail.com)
Pragmatism was and will stay as the American method of philosophy serving as a socially engaged theory of meaning to lead to the distinctive, reasonable, and assertible theory of truth. The history of pragmatism was first developed by semiotician Peirce in the pragmatic maxim of 1878 and following manuscripts. Universal pragmatism was made concrete in the semiotic (or semioticized) work of different American thinkers of science, art, law, and religion: Oliver Holmes Jr., William James, John Dewey, and others. Peirce’s general version of pragmaticism was grounded on the interactive meaning(s) of the three categories, while Wittgenstein’s pragmatism widens the American outlook into the new analysis of philosophy of language in the European tradition. While Peirce concentrated on meaning, Wittgenstein focused on truth. Both studied the development of logical with the non-logical elements. Wittgenstein’s work started with certainty and ended with uncertainty. Is postmodern (un)certainty the emblem for the future of philosophy?
From Translation to Semio-Translation: Origins, Evolution, and Metamorphoses （翻译学）
Susan Petrilli, Italy (susan.petrilli@gmail.com)
Dinda L. Gorlée, The Netherlands/Norway (gorlee@xs4all.nl)
Translation is a speculative hypothesis across languages, reproducing not the accurate description but some elusive explanation and understanding. The evolutionary character of translation starts at formal language, developed historically and creatively into informal "language" with speculative accessories in vocalization and gestures.
The dual attraction of sign and object in Saussure's cliché of interpreted signs in translation has grown into the interpreted signs of Peirce's semiosis of sign, object and the further sign, the interpretant. Semiotranslation is a progressive thinking method, discussing "good" and "bad" interpretations of the previous language, transplanted into alien soil. Equivalence between source and target is questioned but not always answered for a variety of reasons. The argument of semiotranslation can be troublesome and chaotic with arguments about all kinds of technical versions and ornamental patterns. In the semiotic approach to translation, the translator is not a mental process or even a machine, but an instinctive mediator across languages and cultures.
"Before" and "after" semiotranslation, this session suggests answers of an evolutionary and skeptical nature about the possibility (or impossibility) of translatability and untranslatability; equivalence and fidelity and infidelity; the function and role of the intelligence, will, and emotion of the translator’s fallabilistic mind; translation and retranslation; the fate of the source text; the destiny of the target text; and many other semiotic questions.
Edusemiotics （教育符号学）
Inna Semetsky (irs5@caa.columbia.edu)
Columbia University
https://columbia.academia.edu/InnaSemetsky
A new branch of theoretical semiotics --EDUSEMIOTICS --will be formally launched at the 12th World congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS) in Sofia, 16-20 September 2014, New Bulgarian University. Please join the discussion on edusemiotics following the links on the IASS website: http://semio2014.org/en/homeEdusemiotics is a new direction in educational philosophy and theory. As a novel concept, it first appeared in the book Semiotics Education Experience (2010) followed by The Edusemiotics of Images: Essays on the Art~Science of Tarot (2013); as well as in a number of book chapters, journal articles and conference presentations. Edusemiotics is currently a subject of research of the International Semiosis & Education network:https://wwwedu.oulu.fi/semed/ This collegial research will be reflected in the books-in-contract "Edusemiotics" (Routledge) and "Pedagogy and Edusemiotics" (Sense Publishers); as well as in the special issue of the IASS journal SEMIOTICA.
The roots of semanalysis; Julia Kristeva’s masters in semiotics （克里斯蒂娃与符号心理分析）
Marga van Mechelen (m.k.vanmechelen@uva.nl)
Julia Kristeva was born in 1941 in Bulgaria and migrated to France in the mid-sixties. She is now considered as one of the most important French ‘thinkers’, an umbrella for her disciplinary relations to philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary and cultural theory, and semiotics. She is also called a revolutionary thinker, because she was able to break down the boundaries between these and other disciplines. Accordingly the prefix ‘re’ played a major role in her life and work. In this roundtable we will return to her roots in semiotics, to maybe the masters of semiotics (Mikhael Bakhtin, Émile Benveniste, Roland Barthes, Louis Hjelmslev etc.), to her development of (psycho)semiotic concepts out of the concepts of ‘these masters’, as for example the concepts of intertextuality and discourse, and to semiotic topics and questions that dominated her work in general. We know her also from her rereading of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Georges Bataille, and her interest in the complexity of signifying processes. A return to these heritages and traditions formed the bases for the renewal of semiotics and psychoanalysis, in a field of research that for ever will be associated with her name: semanalysis.
Semiotics, significs, semioethics （符号学，表意学，符号伦理学）
Susan Petrilli, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy (susan.petrilli@gmail.com)
Augusto Ponzio, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy (augustoponzio@libero.it)
From semiotics, to significs to semioethics describes a line of research intent on developing the inevitable conjunction between signs and values in a global semiotic framework. Though such a focus has been a constant characteristic of twentieth century sign studies as represented by such scholars as Peirce, Welby, Bakhtin, Morris, it has not been a mainstream interest. But today, in a globalized world, the focus on signs and values is ever more urgent. Semioethics is not intended as a discipline in its own right, but as an orientation in the study of signs. By 'semioethics' is understood the propensity in semiotics to recover its ancient vocation as 'semeiotics' (or symptomatology) with its interest in symptoms. A major issue for semioethics is 'care for life' in global perspective according to which semiosis and life converge as postulated by Thomas A. Sebeok. A global perspective is ever more necessary in the present day and age in the face of growing interference in planetary communication between the historical-social sphere and biological sphere, the cultural sphere and natural sphere, between the semiosphere and the biosphere.
Semiotics between Peirce and Bakhtin （皮尔斯与巴赫金）
Augusto Ponzio, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy (augustoponzio@libero.it)
Susan Petrilli, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy (susan.petrilli@gmail.com)
By reading together Charles S. Peirce and Mikhail Bakhtin it is possible to construct a semiotic model able to explain signs and semiosis in all their complexity. This sign model is distant from oversimplifying approaches that put the signifiant at the service of a signifié already given outside the interpretation/communication process. Peirce places the sign in the complex context of semiosis and in the relation with the interpretant. Bakhtin evidences the fact that the sign can only flourish in the context of dialogism. The implication is that the logic of otherness is structural to the sign, that otherness is at the very heart of identity. The sign is not possible without an interpretant which means that the interpretant is not secondary, an accessory. On the contrary, the interpretant is constitutive of the sign. This means to say that meaning is not in the sign, but in the relation among signs. Bakhtin thematizes the dialogic nature of the word, including of interior discourse. Both Bakhtin and Peirce evidence the dialogical nature of the sign. In fact, to be this sign here the sign must be at once identical to itself and different.
Semiotics and Marxism （马克思主义符号学）
Zhang Bi (china_zhangbi@163.com) （张碧）
Giorgio Borrelli (giorgioborrelli83@yahoo.it)
One of the main points advanced by the Marxian critique of political economy concerns what Marx called the "fetishism of merchandise": exchange does not occur among commodities but among human beings. Only by studying human communication relations is it possibile to understand the "language" of commodies. Therefore, the Marxian orientation is a specifically semiotic orientation. This is the orientation that needs to be developed today when focusing on the problem of the relation between "semiotics and Marxism".
If we accept the premise that Marx may be considered a "cryptosemiotician," to evoke a term introduced by Thomas A. Sebeok, what then are the characteristics of Marx's semiotics and what have been its developments on the historical and theoretical levels in the world? Marxian semiotics is not a question of applying Marxism to semiotics, but rather of determining methods, fields and objects of scientific research as indicated by scholars like Adam Schaff, André Gorz, Jeff Bernard, Augusto Ponzio, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, and Georg Klaus. The latter two in particular developed their approach to the study of signs with reference to the semiotics of Charles Morris, author of Signification and Significance(1964).
Biosemiotic ethics （生物符号学）
Morten Tønnessen, University of Stavanger, Norway (mortentoennessen@gmail.com)
A dozen to 20 years ago, two of the most central biosemioticians, first Jesper Hoffmeyer and then Kalevi Kull, addressed connections between biosemiotics and ethics. The last ten years a new generation of scholars have started working out a biosemiotic ethics. The foundational idea is that if all living systems are semiotic, then biosemiosis can serve as basis for justifying attribution of moral status to human and non-human individuals and to various ecological entities. Most of the scholars involved in this endeavor have taken Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory as their starting point. Recent relevant publications include a translation of Uexküll’s 1917 article “Darwin and the English Morality”, with a framing essay entitled ““Darwin und die englische Moral”: The Moral Consequences of Uexküll’s Umwelt Theory”.
Relevant questions for discussion include but are not limited to the following: In what ways does a biosemiotic ethics potentially take us beyond sentience-centered approaches? Does biosemiotic ethics represent a new form of consequentialism, or should it be placed within some other tradition? What ramifications do different views on the semiotic threshold have within the context of normative ethics? Is there (something akin to) normativity in the very constitution of the Umwelt? Does the semiosphere at large (qua biosphere) have intrinsic value? And what, in terms of biosemiosis, is the origin of value?
Chinese-Western Semiotic Dialogue （中西符号学对话）
Organizer: China Semiotics Forum (CSF) & NNU
Organizing Chair: Zhang jie
Contacts: Yongxiang Wang (nshdyxwang@163.com) ,Haihong Ji (jhhforever@hotmail.com)
Advisers: Youzheng Li, Zhuanglin Hu, Yiheng Zhao, Pengcheng Gong
Greimas International （格雷马斯的国际影响）
Anne Henault (anne.henault@beaurecueil.org)
Massimo Leone (massimo.leone@unito.it)
Existential semiotics （存在符号学）
Eero Tarasti (eero.tarasti@helsinki.fi)
Zdzisław Wąsik (zdzis.wasik@gmail.com)
Musical Semiotics （音乐符号学）
Eero Tarasti (eero.tarasti@helsinki.fi)
Marta Grabocz
Ethnosemiotics: Approaches to Tradition and Culture （民族符号学）
Prof. emeritus Vilmos Voigt (voigtbudapest@gmail.com)
