Founding of the French Zoosemiotics Society

A report on the symposium “Juri Lotman and sociosemiotics” (Elva, Estonia, 19–20 May 2017).

The paper sheds light on the concept of model in ordinary language and in scientific discourse from the perspective of C. S. Peirce’s semiotics. It proposes a general Peircean framework for the definition of models of all kinds, including mental models. A survey of definitions of scientific models that have been influential in the philosophy of science and of the typologies proposed in this context is given. The author criticizes the heterogeneity of the criteria applied in these typologies and the lack of a semiotic foundation in typological distinctions between formal, symbolic, theoretical, metaphorical, and iconic models, among others. The paper argues that the application of Peirce’s subdivision of signs into the trichotomies of the sign itself, its object, and its interpretant can offer a deeper understanding of the nature of models. Semiotic topics in the focus of the paper are (1) the distinction between models as signs and (mental) models as the interpretants of signs; (2) models considered as a type (or legisign) and models considered as tokens (or replicas) of a type; (3) the iconicity of models, including diagrammatic and metaphorical icons; (4) the contribution of indices and symbols to the informativity of models; and (5) the rhetorical qualities of models in scientific discourse. The paper argues in conclusion that informative models are hybrid signs in which a diagram incorporates indices and symbols in a rhetorically efficient way.

Why was Greimas’ theoretical proposal so divisive? Why did his disciples worship the new analytical method, while his detractors harshly rejected it? The article claims that the strength, as well as the weakness, of Greimassian semiotics consists in positing a rational way to determine the range of meanings of a text. Semiotic interpretive methods that are more aware of the diachronic dimension, such as Eco’s interpretive semiotics or Lotman’s semiotics of culture, inflect this view by anchoring the rationality of interpretation to the reasonableness of a community of interpreters that is, by definition, changing over time. The article claims that, on the one hand, Greimas’ theoretical stance is in line with the predominant ‘culture of meaning’ distilled by the Western civilization from the Greeks until the Enlightenment, stressing the value of truth as correspondence between textual evidence and its hermeneutics. On the other hand, the article also suggests that Eco’s and Lotman’s insistence on the dynamic character of hermeneutic communities entails a politics of meaning meant to preserve the core of the Western ‘semiotic civilization’ against threats that aim at deeply subverting it from both the inside or the outside of the semiosphere.

This article aims at proposing a way to identify humour by means of Greimassian semiotics and to single humour out as a unique object of semiotic analysis. Firstly, the article discusses the fundamental epistemological premises of semiotic text analysis through the analysis of texts by Greimas which were meant to further and legitimize his project of semiotics. Also, the already existing attempts at providing a semiotic definition of humour are critically evaluated while relating their problematic aspects with the implicitly defined field of semiotic interest. Finally, it is demonstrated that a productive semiotic description of a comic text is possible when the status quo epistemological views are revised and the traditional field of semiotic analyses is expanded accordingly.

The article’s aim is to present plastic semiotics, one of the most recent branches of the Greimassian School. In his Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method (1966) Algirdas Julius Greimas stated that sensorial perception was the dimension in which the grasping of meaning takes place, but explicit principles of the analysis of this nonlinguistic dimension were published only years later, in his article “Figurative semiotics and plastic semiotics” (1984). Since then, plastic semiotics has been leading independent existence, focused on the effects of sense generated by the form and the substance of expression. Plastic analysis has turned out to be a fruitful approach not only in the field of visual studies, but also in the research into other sensorial expressions.

What kind of evolutionary biology suits cultural research?

Lotman and Barthes created two different critically oriented semiotic traditions. Both of them wen t through an evolution in their thought, moving from systematic organization to living transformations in cultural systems. This allowed them to carry out a bilateral critique of codes and identities in favour of either anonymous hybridity (Lotman) or neutrality (Barthes), where heterogeneity becomes a principle of creative “disorder”. Though quite different as regards their theoretical production, both scholars meet in their refusal to turn descriptive practices (studium) into a model of any other form of behaviour, considering that the determination of textual or institutional perimetres is not always clear. In short, Barthes and Lotman anticipated current research trends on the semiotics of practices; Barthes because of a sort of self-reflexion on the behaviour of the interpreter in front of an object, and Lotman through his analytic interest in attitudes and ways of living.Barthes’s view on writing essentially reaches Lotman’s conception of culture as a “collective person”: we are looking for traces of breathing in the life of signs. More precisely, we can assert that, in the view of both scholars, inscribing speech events in history problematizes the dynamic and asynchronous relation between the structural frame of a culture and its textual heritage. The rhythm of fashion is not a side topic in their research, but, rather, it is the clearest exemplification of a dialectic between structural projection from the outside and local introjection of forms, depending on the conditions that make a difference.

Alexandr Levich (1945–2016) and the Tartu–Moscow Biosemiotic Nexus.