View in EDS HTML Full Text PDF Full Text

Semiotics, Edusemiotics and the Culture of Education

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Title: Semiotics, Edusemiotics and the Culture of Education
Language: English
Authors: Deely, John, Semetsky, Inna
Source: Educational Philosophy and Theory. 2017 49(3):207-219.
Availability: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 13
Publication Date: 2017
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Higher Education
Postsecondary Education
Descriptors: Semiotics, Metalinguistics, Educational Philosophy, Educational Theories, Higher Education, Intellectual Disciplines, Interdisciplinary Approach, Learning Processes
DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2016.1190265
ISSN: 0013-1857
Abstract: Semiotics is the study of signs addressing their action, usage, communication and signification (meaning). Edusemiotics--educational semiotics--is a recently developed direction in educational theory that takes semiotics as its foundational philosophy and explores the philosophical specifics of semiotics in educational contexts. As a novel theoretical field of inquiry, it is complemented by research known under the banner "semiotics in education", which is largely an applied enterprise. In this respect edusemiotics is a new conceptual framework for both theoretical and empirical studies. Edusemiotics has also been given the status of being a new branch of theoretical semiotics and it was launched as such at the 12th World Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in September 2014 at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia. The article presents "semiosis" as the action of signs across culture AND nature and posits "learning" in terms of developing semiotic consciousness and semiotic competence. Semiosis is a process and as such it defies the Cartesian philosophy of substance-dualism that still informs the culture of education. The paper focuses specifically on university education permeated by disciplinary boundaries and the fragmentation of knowledge grounded in objective science inherited from modernity. Where is semiotics as the science of signs (or relations) in the context of academic culture? The authors conclude by affirming the transdisciplinary character of semiotics and edusemiotics and specify the distinctive focal points of transdisciplinary knowledge afforded by edusemiotics.
Abstractor: As Provided
Number of References: 30
Entry Date: 2017
Accession Number: EJ1130037
Database: ERIC
Full text is not displayed to guests.
FullText Links:
  – Type: pdflink
    Url: https://content.ebscohost.com/cds/retrieve?content=AQICAHj0k_4E0hTGH8RJwT4gCJyBsGNe_WN95AvKlDbXJGqwxwHkkmLIWRVfpbwPWjVLAH_XAAAA4jCB3wYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIHRMIHOAgEAMIHIBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwHgYJYIZIAWUDBAEuMBEEDKhXyVwE6xphOOpL6gIBEICBmrg-1Iynr5WtUK_gv-3DQvdDxzExiorpNQ44vd5Z9WfxNrZwhKDJhtLnzT6P3vff4nryI_wFKeuP9rlk5nOC4R0OAMF15QOkBurzqLAfyeu85MVVCY2X5ks6Tzmxk8qjomhDqFutzflCkXKCa1FE__Xg4e7RvXX2RPUtWS_I-RDuyzFy2IhbPI2fNzoJO_59xBbKpc_T-r8XID8=
Text:
  Availability: 1
  Value: <anid>AN0121255558;54l01mar.17;2019Feb13.17:11;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0121255558-1">Semiotics, edusemiotics and the culture of education. </title> <p>Semiotics is the study of signs addressing their action, usage, communication and signification (meaning). Edusemiotics—educational semiotics—is a recently developed direction in educational theory that takes semiotics as its foundational philosophy and explores the philosophical specifics of semiotics in educational contexts. As a novel theoretical field of inquiry, it is complemented by research known under the banner 'semiotics in education', which is largely an applied enterprise. In this respect edusemiotics is a new conceptual framework for both theoretical and empirical studies. Edusemiotics has also been given the status of being a new branch of theoretical semiotics and it was launched as such at the 12th World Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in September 2014 at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia. The article presents 'semiosis' as the action of signs across culture AND nature and posits 'learning' in terms of developing semiotic consciousness and semiotic competence. Semiosis is a process and as such it defies the Cartesian philosophy of substance-dualism that still informs the culture of education. The paper focuses specifically on university education permeated by disciplinary boundaries and the fragmentation of knowledge grounded in objective science inherited from modernity. Where is semiotics as the science of signs (or relations) in the context of academic culture? The authors conclude by affirming the transdisciplinary character of semiotics and edusemiotics and specify the distinctive focal points of transdisciplinary knowledge afforded by edusemiotics.</p> <p>Keywords: Science; Peirce's semiotics; antidualism; process philosophy; culture; nature</p> <hd id="AN0121255558-2">Introduction</hd> <p>Semiotics today traces back to two contemporaneous pioneers, one in the field of linguistics and one in the field of philosophy. The first, Ferdinand de Saussure, envisioned the possible developments under the label of semiology, a term fashioned from the Greek <emph>semeion</emph> for the words 'sign' and 'signal'. The second, Charles Sanders Peirce, chose the name semiotics that, while also fashioned from the Greek, was not his own coining. Peirce derived his vision from the text with which John Locke concludes his <emph>Essay Concerning Human Understanding</emph> of 1690. While Saussure's structuralist perspective addressed largely linguistic signs, Peirce's philosophy did not limit signs to verbal utterances. Peirce's perspective was pansemiotic and naturalistic: for him, the universe per se is perfused with signs. Peirce emphasized the process of signs' growth and change called <emph>semiosis</emph>, and representing the action, transformation and evolution of signs acting across nature, culture and the human mind. In contrast to isolated substances, such as body and mind in the philosophy of Descartes, a Peircean genuine sign is a tri-relative entity, referring to something that it is not, that is, its object via a third category called <emph>interpretant</emph>—this term being a unique and important notion, the key to understanding the action of genuine signs as a process or form of <emph>becoming</emph> as well as a kind of <emph>being</emph>, over and above the essential structure that nevertheless makes signification (as the production of meaning or sense) possible in the first place. The action of signs cuts across the duality of Cartesian substances of body and mind, matter and spirit.</p> <p>For Saussure, the science of signs was to be a branch of social psychology and linguistics as a subspecies within that branch. Of this 'possible science' Saussure himself did not say a great deal; however he influenced a stream of future linguists and critical theorists centred exclusively on literary texts and other artefacts of culture, which were always treated on the patterns of language. Within this tradition, the possibilities of semiotic understanding have been largely restricted to glottocentrism or logocentrism: that is, focusing on verbal communication and the stable structure based on the word-object (signifier-signified) correspondence. From the philosophical viewpoint, such perspective was entangled in the Kantian critique, according to which there is no world known or knowable beyond the phenomena constructed by our own structures of understanding. As Terence Hawkes ([<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref1">8</reflink>]) reminds us '</p> <p>It follows that the ultimate quarry of structuralist thinking will be the permanent structures into which individual human acts, perceptions, stances fit, and from which they derive their final nature. This will finally involve what Fredric Jameson has described as ... "an explicit search for the permanent structures of the mind itself, the organizational categories and forms through which the mind is able to experience the world, or to organize a meaning in what is in itself essentially meaningless' (p. 18).</p> <p>Sure, at the heart of semiotics is the realization that the whole of human experience, without exception, is an interpretive structure mediated and sustained by signs (Deely, [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref2">2</reflink>]). Human experience is always marked by signs, and all thinking and living proceeds in signs: a notion invaluable for edusemiotics that posits life itself as an informal school enabling us—as signs among other signs—to enter the process of semiosis and step on the path of growth, evolution (albeit surpassing the Darwinian principle of natural selection) and development. Still, much of the original semiotic development has taken place along the tracks and lines of a classical idealism in the modern sense, an environment and climate of thought within which the structuralist analysis of texts and narratives is particularly comfortable. However, the tradition of semiology has been superseded by the other semiotic tradition of Poinsot–Locke–Peirce.</p> <p>This development of semiotics as the science of signs, unlike that of Saussure, does not take its principal and almost exclusive inspiration from verbal language and speech. It sees in semiosis a broader and much more fundamental process, involving the physical universe itself in human semiosis, and making of semiosis in our species a part of semiosis in nature. The science of signs, as Peirce described it, is the 'science of the necessary laws of thought, or, still better (thought always taking place by means of signs), it is a general semeiotic, treating not merely of truth, but also of the general conditions of signs being signs' (Peirce, [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref3">13</reflink>] 1. 444). We have here two paradigms, which have to a certain extent handicapped the contemporary development by existing within it under sociological conditions of opposition, an opposition not only uncalled for logically, but one which depends on a perverse synecdoche where a part is mistaken for the whole. Semiotics forms in fact a unified whole of which semiology is but a part. According to Thomas Sebeok, semiosis as the process of the evolution of signs must be recognized as a pervasive fact of <emph>both</emph> nature <emph>and</emph> culture. This is the perspective adopted by, and emphatically argued for, edusemiotics that as such elicits far-reaching implications for educational theory, practice, and policy.</p> <hd id="AN0121255558-3">Edusemiotics, in brief</hd> <p>The early seeds of edusemiotics, even if not yet under this name, can be traced back to several special issues of <emph>Educational Philosophy and Theory</emph> (in 2004 and 2005) and <emph>Studies in Philosophy of Education</emph> (in 2007). Preceding the birth of edusemiotics, in 2008 a group of mostly European researchers in education formed an informal online community under the name Network for Semiotics and Education. The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain funded two international research seminars conducted by this group: in the University of Cergy in Paris in 2011 and in the University of Bath in 2012. Papers arising from these seminars appeared in two special issues of the <emph>Journal of Philosophy of Education</emph>. As a novel term, 'edusemiotics' was coined by Marcel Danesi (the Editor-in-Chief of the journal <emph>Semiotica</emph>) as a subtitle of his Foreword to the comprehensive volume <emph>Semiotics Education Experience</emph> (Semetsky, [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref4">19</reflink>])<emph>.</emph> In October 2013, a panel titled <emph>Edusemiotics: Research on Transformative Education</emph> took place at the Annual conference of the Semiotic Society of America (SSA) <emph>in</emph> Dayton, Ohio. In November 2014, a symposium on edusemiotics took place at the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA) Annual Meeting in Hamilton, New Zealand. A special issue of the journal <emph>Semiotica</emph> titled 'On Edusemiotics' is currently in production. And a comprehensive volume <emph>Edusemiotics</emph>—<emph>A Handbook</emph> is forthcoming with Springer Publishers.</p> <p>Danesi ([<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref5">1</reflink>]) noticed that research in education 'has traditionally turned to psychology to help it transform teaching into a more "learning compatible" and "performance-oriented" activity' (p. x). The shift to philosophy enabled by edusemiotics brings into sharp focus the dimensions of epistemology, ontology and ethics (that are more often than not missing in educational research) together with the existential questions of meaning—positing those as especially valuable for education and in urgent need of exploration. Recent research summarized in <emph>Edusemiotics: Semiotic philosophy as educational foundation</emph> (Stables & Semetsky, [<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref6">29</reflink>]) and <emph>Pedagogy and Edusemiotics: Theoretical challenges/practical opportunities</emph> (Semetsky & Stables, [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref7">27</reflink>]) develops this critical and creative impulse, which has recently been recognized by colleagues: in December 2015 at the PESA Annual conference held in Melbourne, Australia the coauthored volume <emph>Edusemiotics: Semiotic philosophy as educational foundation</emph> received the PESA Book Award.</p> <p>Edusemiotics challenges the present status of education that continues to be haunted by the ghosts of the past: Cartesian substance dualism, analytic philosophy of language, and the scientific, objective method of modernity as the sole ground for educational research that tends to ignore human subjectivity with its gamut of experiences and purposes. Edusemiotics intends to explore alternative research methodologies in education, including but not limited to phenomenology and hermeneutics with a future-oriented task of presenting recommendations derived from its foundational principles. As an educational philosophy, edusemiotics is marked by several characteristics, the first being the priority of process over product as especially important for the discipline of education traditionally focused on finite measurable outcomes. Another important feature of edusemiotics as a distinctive conceptual framework is its ability to overcome the principle of non-contradiction and the logic of the excluded middle not only in theory (as a subbranch of semiotics proper) but, ideally, in practice as well (e.g. Semetsky, [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref8">24</reflink>]).</p> <p>Edusemiotics thus defies the classical <emph>tertium non datur</emph> principle as the basis of Aristotle's syllogistic reason. In modern analytic philosophy of language the same principle is confirmed, even if in the slightly different, semantic, terms as the so-called paradox of analysis: either the <emph>analysans</emph> has the same meaning as the <emph>analysandum</emph>, in which case the analysis is trivial; or it does not, in which case it is false. In epistemic terms, the same paradox—the paradox of inquiry or learning paradox as it came to be known in educational theory—can be traced to Plato's <emph>Meno</emph> dialog that describes Socrates as having engaged in a conversation regarding education of a slave boy. The holistic perspective taken by edusemiotics entails several distinctive characteristics including the relational ethics; the role of experience as exceeding its 'private' dimension; emphasis on interpretations surpassing factual 'evidence'; a conception of language understood broadly in terms of <emph>dynamic</emph> structures related to the regimes of signs exceeding linguistic representations; embodied cognition; and the importance of self-formation as a lifelong process, thus having implications for education throughout the lifespan, inclusive of children and adults.</p> <hd id="AN0121255558-4">Semiosis: the subject matter of semiotic inquiry</hd> <p>Semiotic studies, that now include edusemiotic studies as one of their main theoretical branches, investigate the action of signs. It was Peirce who saw that the full development of semiotics as a distinct body of knowledge required a <emph>dynamic</emph> view of signification as a process—semiosis. Semiosis as a type of activity is distinctive in that it always involves three elements, as John Poinsot, a major figure in late scholastic philosophy, was the first to demonstrate; but it is even more distinctive in that one of these three elements need not be an actual existent thing. In all other types of action, the actors are correlative; hence, the action between them, however many there may be, is essentially dyadic. Peirce calls the action as such between existent things 'brute force' or 'dynamical interaction' that may be physical or psychological. In either case, the action takes place between two subjects of physical existence and is, in a terminology we shall be obliged to both clarify and insist upon, always and irreducibly a subjective interaction. Subjective interactions, whether psychical or physical, are duly involved in the action of signs, however they surround the semiosis as its context and condition, while always falling short of the action of signs proper. In other words, while the action of signs always involves dynamical interactions, dynamical interactions need not always involve the action of signs.</p> <p>Peirce presents the example of the rise of the mercury in a thermometer, which is brought about 'in a purely brute and dyadic way' by the increase of ambient warmth. Yet for someone who happens to have a collateral knowledge of thermometers, this 'brute fact' will also produces the <emph>idea</emph> of such increasing warmth in the environment. This idea as a <emph>mental</emph> event nonetheless belongs to the order of <emph>physical</emph> existence, no more and no less than does the rising mercury and the ambient temperature in the environment. It is, as Peirce says, the 'immediate object' of the thermometer being a sign that indicates an environmental condition. The object of the thermometer as a sign is the relative warmth of the surroundings. The object of the <emph>idea</emph> of the thermometer as a sign is no different. The thermometer has produced a certain effect, the meaning of itself as the <emph>interpretant</emph>—or the always already included, <emph>third</emph>, component of genuine signs whose presence ensures the dynamics of semiosis. What gives the action of signs its curiously detached and ethereal quality is what Peirce characterized as its <emph>irreducible triadicity</emph>.</p> <p>Dynamic processes exhibit motion according to the classic definition of brute force that the Scholastics called 'transitive action', that is, action that passes from one thing to another through the production of change. In Aristotle's categories of physical being, action and passion (say, punching and being punched) are dyadic and correlative, the one as initiating and the other as terminating. The resultant change is the action of the agent transpiring in the patient, that is, in the one undergoing the action, and its traces endure as part of the physical order itself (principally in the patient as outcome; but in the agent, too, as vestiges and clues). The action of <emph>signs</emph> is however entirely different. It is not productive of change <emph>directly</emph>. It is always <emph>mediated</emph>. It lacks the directness of punching and being punched. Even when the semiosis is involved with dyadic dynamicity, as it always is in varying degrees, the action of genuine signs is characterized by 'indirection' or mediation. The sign not only stands for something other than itself, but it does so for some third; and even when these two relations—sign to signified (object), sign to interpretant—are taken separately, there is no longer a question of sign as a triadic entity but of direct cause to effect on one hand and of knowing subject to the object of knowledge on the other. The reference to the <emph>future</emph> (or past) in a third element, the interpretant, is essential. Both points are recognized in edusemiotics that interrogates the very notion of the knowing subject and affirms the future-directed orientation as crucial for education and, even if somewhat utopian, educational futures (cf. Peters & Freeman-Moir, [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref9">14</reflink>]).</p> <p>A sign always represents, but not every representation is a sign. Things can represent themselves within experience. To the extent that 'things' represent themselves within experience, they remain merely objects; even though in their becoming objects, signs and semiosis are already imperceptibly at work. To reiterate, in order to be a sign, it is necessary to represent <emph>something other than itself</emph>. Being a sign is a form of irrevocable bondage to another, to the object that the sign is <emph>not</emph> but that the sign nevertheless stands for, thus represents. This is the most important fact about the sign, because it is what is most decisive for it: the quality of <emph>relativity</emph>. Signs are relational, Janus-faced, entities. There are signs that are also objects in their own right, just as there are objects that are also things. But there are no signs that are not relative to some object <emph>other than themselves,</emph> and that object or those objects to which the sign relates we call the signified or significate, the essential content of the sign insofar as it is a sign. Because the essential content or being of the sign is relative, the key to understanding what is proper to the sign is the notion of relativity, relation. Sign is perforce a <emph>relative being</emph> suprasubjectively as an <emph>other</emph> representation not a <emph>self</emph>-representation![<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref10">1</reflink>]</p> <p>The action of signs, which provides the general subject matter of semiotic inquiry, extends well beyond what we call language (i.e. what is limited to verbal signs) even though it is only through linguistic communication that this range can be brought to light for us as inquirers. Linguistic signs are only one subspecies of signs properly understood. Verbal language has come to be called in Eastern European semiotic circles the 'primary modelling system', while the rest of human culture and civilization is thus a series of 'secondary modelling systems'. Sebeok, however, showed that the primary modelling system is rather the human <emph>Innenwelt</emph> as biologically underdetermined (see 'Afterword' in Deely & Danesi, [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref11">5</reflink>]). There are many kinds of signs—for example: signs embodying connections that are physical before becoming also objective and social (such as the connections between clouds and rain or smoke and fire); or signs formed of connections that are objective associatively rather than physically (such as the connections between candlelight and lovers, napkins and meals); or of connections that are manipulative (such as pressing a lever and receiving a pellet of food) rather than stipulative; or social signs subsequent to language embodying connections which are only objective and cultural (such as the connection between flag and country).</p> <p>The ability to grasp the actual stipulation of linguistic signs, in contrast to making associations based on their perceptible aspects, is just what is meant by 'intelligence' in the species-specific sense of linguistic competence, which is only a subspecies of the full-fledged <emph>semiotic competence</emph> that edusemiotics is designed to elucidate in the field of educational philosophy and practice. This perspective is important to edusemiotics with its attention also to such 'languages' as images, diagrams, graphic symbols, hieroglyphs, as well as signs portending in the world. Such broad understanding of the semiotic systems makes it clear that the notion of 'text' is not limited to literary. They can be of any physical structure that <emph>embodies</emph> ideas as signs. The whole of culture, in such radical sense, is a text; but so is the 'book of nature'. In short, semiosis, as providing the subject matter of semiotic investigation, would establish nothing less than a new framework and foundation for the whole of human knowledge. This new framework and foundation would embrace not only the so-called human and social sciences (drawing mainly from Saussure) but also the so-called 'hard' or natural sciences because they too arise from within and depend in their development upon experience and the processes of anthroposemiosis that pertains to the human use of signs and represents (see Deely, [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref12">3</reflink>]) a new paradigm for anthropology. An analogous holistic perspective is also taken by the new empirical science of coordination dynamics grounded in the philosophy of complementary pairs (Kelso, [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref13">10</reflink>]; Kelso & Engstrøm, [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref14">11</reflink>])—of Peircean signs, we may say.</p> <hd id="AN0121255558-5">Semiotics as a matrix of all sciences</hd> <p>Semiotics was forced underground in the modern interval, called after Sebeok ([<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref15">16</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref16">17</reflink>]) the 'cryptosemiotic interlude', for the very 'epistemology' upon which the leading modern philosophers all agreed as the starting point of human knowledge already presupposed that the action of signs did not exist in its own right. The 'Way of Signs' is a path that 'leads everywhere in nature, including those domains where humans have never set foot' (Emmeche, [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref17">7</reflink>], p. 126), thereby categorically rejecting the view that only mental representations of whatever sort are the immediate final terminus of knowledge. That idea did not sit well within modern theories of knowledge united in the common assumption that subjective representation is somehow the heart and essence of human knowing. The problem with epistemology is not the existence of things in themselves. The problem rather is the theory which makes things 'unknowable'. That is a thesis the science of modernity never fully bought into. Semiotics as a philosophy pertains to a renewal of the foundations of our understanding of knowledge and experience and presupposes a transformation of the disciplinary superstructures culturally distributing that understanding (the traditional disciplines as currently founded). In this respect the present arrival of edusemiotics on the semiotic scene as a novel theoretical foundation for education is timely, even if still located at the very margins of its own discipline and as a result often perceived reductively in terms of semiotics in education as an applied area. However, being on the margins makes it 'easier' to transgress those very boundaries; and semiotics pertains to the renewal of any single currently established discipline by way of achieving a proper understanding of the semiosis upon which that discipline depends. By the same token, edusemiotics should contribute to the renewal of its discipline, education.</p> <p>Importantly, semiotics is <emph>not</emph> usurping all of science or philosophy. It is more a question of <emph>recovering from</emph> the imperialism of the natural sciences, classical physics in particular, as the distinct heritage of positivism, and of seeing the subsets of semiosis within anthroposemiosis for what they are in relation to the whole. Furthermore, the semiotic understanding of reality—the reality of signs—recognizes that the boundary between what is dependent upon and what is independent of human interpretive activity can never be finally fixed from within experience, because the boundary itself fluctuates—being the function of the development of understanding and the evolution of knowledge whether speculative or practical, scientific or literary. The object of semiotic inquiry is not just signs but the <emph>action</emph> of signs or semiosis. Semiotics, therefore, contrasts with semiosis as knowledge per se contrasts with that which is known. Semiotics is knowledge about semiosis; it is the theoretical accounting for signs and what they do.</p> <p>Going back in the history of ideas, no revolution had greater importance than the one that took place in the early seventeenth century, dramatically marked by the 1633 trial and condemnation of Galileo for teaching the twin heresies that the Earth is not the universe's center and that the Sun does not revolve around the Earth. It was a bad day—but not only for religious authorities, students of scripture, and theologians. Among the hardest hit victims of this fiasco was 'common sense', which still has not managed to regain a serious semblance of credibility in learned circles. The eighteenth century attempt by Thomas Reid to identify common sense as the test of the truth of knowledge and the morality of actions fell by the wayside, and the Enlightenment view that scientific knowledge based on systematic observation, experiment, and mathematization could ultimately replace all of pre-scientific opinions, became the accepted view.</p> <p>Yet, there remains at the heart of human knowledge an unresolved problem that the rise of modern science serves to underscore rather than resolve: the inescapable conundrum that unless human awareness as preceding all scientific training and refinement has some validity in its own right, then nothing even of science can truly be knowledge. Stjernfelt puts the matter in semiotic terms: in order for it to be true that the Way of Signs leads everywhere in nature, it must also be true that 'science is continuous with everyday knowledge which is, in turn, continuous with animal cognition and so on indefinitely down the scale of evolution' (Stjernfelt, [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref18">30</reflink>], p. 8). Among the early modern philosophers this problem never came to be recognized as such. Instead, they assumed that mental representation was the beginning of all awareness, an assumption that led to the famous 'problem of the external world'; for even though empiricists followed by preference Locke rather than Descartes, they failed to observe or comment upon the fatal assumption shared by Locke with Descartes: that the direct objects of our apprehension are mental representations formed by our own minds.</p> <p>The 'problem of the external world' arose in modernity from just this assumption: that the mind itself makes whatever is a direct and immediate object of awareness. Locke and Descartes identified this immediate object with ideas. Kant rejected this as too subjective, as 'subjectivism'; and in proposing his alternate solution of the senses as giving rise to phenomena distinct from the things provoking sensation, he thought to preserve the universality of scientific knowledge: it is to the phenomena that reason then by its a priori forms contributes objective necessary structure. Still, Kantian 'objectivism' proved no less idealistic than the criticized subjectivism of Descartes and Locke, inasmuch as Kant's own view was no less divorced from an awareness 'scientific' in the sense of giving us an actual knowledge of the 'way things are' in their subjective constitution and intersubjective relations obtaining independently of whether we are aware of them or not (Deely, [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref19">4</reflink>]). By way of epistemological warning of 'roadblock ahead', it followed that ontology and epistemology in modern parlance mean, in fact, the unknowable because unattainable (what was termed in Latin times <emph>ens reale</emph>) versus the knowable (termed in Latin times <emph>ens rationis</emph>).</p> <p>On this point, between Descartes and Kant there is only this difference: for Descartes <emph>ens rationis</emph> was conceived subjectively, whereas for Kant it was definitively objective, yet wholly determined in its knowability by human subjects. While modern philosophy began with the universal doubt whereby Descartes had made being a function of his thinking, Peirce's philosophy begins rather from a belief in the reality of what is more than thought. Then, it proceeds by continually putting to test the contrast between thought and what is more than thought, between merely objective being and objective being which reveals also something of the physical universe. Semiotic inquiry starts at the intersection where physical universe ceases to be merely physical because it is at this point that the realm of brute force and physical interaction as such becomes caught up in the semiotic web, and the universe, as Peirce noticed, becomes perfused with signs.</p> <hd id="AN0121255558-6">Learning as development of semiotic consciousness</hd> <p>Semiotic consciousness is the explicit awareness of the role of the sign. The actual field of semiotic investigations exists as a demand of the <emph>future</emph> put on present thought—that is, on the development of the semiotic consciousness of the community of inquirers. Since, however, the whole of experience is constituted by signs, it follows that the history of semiotics will be first of all a tracing of the lines which lead to that moment when role of the sign in the constituting of this very experience came to be realized. After that, the history of semiotics will be the working out of the implications of this realization both synchronically and diachronically. Diachrony, in this case, is not just a matter of retrospect, or of a sequence of discrete synchronic sections arranged as prior and posterior. The diachrony of semiotic consciousness, its historical dimension, is the formation of <emph>future</emph> thought as well as the transmission and comparison of <emph>past</emph> thought. It involves becoming aware of the demands the future makes on our present thinking. The axes of diachrony and synchrony in semiotic consciousness mark the labile intersection where the criticism of <emph>objectivity</emph> is exercised through human <emph>subjectivity</emph>. The future of thought, as well as its past, will be different as a result of the achievement of a semiotic consciousness, different in unpredictable ways because of the factor of chance present in semiosis in contrast to the determinism of classical mechanistic science with its concept of <emph>direct</emph> causality and subject-object dualism.</p> <p>Based on Aristotle's fourfold scheme, the Latins in the later times refined the concept of causality to account for the objective order of physical phenomena thus abolishing, in a sense, the dualism between cause and reason. The external, ideal, causality—a type of blueprint, or plan, or design—is introduced from without, in contrast to the natural Aristotelian formal cause that organizes its material from within. One more causal type, however, pertains to the role of observer who exercises a type of objective causality. On the subjective side, a thinker may try to turn attention toward or away from the object; but the measure of success lies not in the subjective effort but in the objective content surviving the effort. And since presenting objects is exactly the function of signs, the action of signs is a species of such extrinsic formal causality, called 'specificative', which is irreducible to either ideal or intrinsic formal cause but is retaining, as embedded in the total system of signs, the <emph>objective</emph> significance for the human <emph>subject.</emph></p> <p>Semiotics began with the general proposal by St. Augustine that the difference between nature and culture is irrelevant to the action of signs, for whenever one thing comes to make something other than itself present in our awareness, signs are already at work. Whether the one thing or the other has its origin inside or outside of our minds and bodies, from nature or from culture, is irrelevant to the action of signs. Material objects which are also themselves signs existing outside of us presuppose cognitive qualities inside of us which are themselves already signs as manifesting something other than themselves, something they themselves are not. There are objects external to our bodies which can be signs only when perceived in conjunction with concepts internal to us and which relate us to those very material objects recognized as this or that. But still we are not at the heart of the matter, given that sensation is a vehicle of semiosis prior to concept formation. For human beings are semiotic animals, and all animal awareness begins with sensations—not with ideas of sensations, à la Locke, but with <emph>sensations</emph> as that incipient experience of objectivity brought about by the action of some sensible thing upon an animal's organs of sense. Light reflects off different bodies differently, and when this differently reflected light strikes some animal's organ of sight, what the animal will 'see' depends not only upon the surface reflecting light but also upon the constitution of the animal's eye. The result will be some color. This color exists neither 'in the thing stimulating' (according to medieval philosophy) nor 'in the eye of the beholder' (as the early moderns postulated) but precisely <emph>between</emph> the two as a relation connecting one to the other, arising from the action of stimulation here and now.</p> <p>There is another angle, especially decisive from the semiotic point of view. The animal sensing color simultaneously senses a shape and a position or movement: shape is not color, but is revealed dependently upon it; so the relation of color to shape and position or movement, etc. is already a sign-relation—color is the vehicle on the basis of which shape and position are revealed in sensation. There is no moment of awareness in which this action of signs is not at work, for all objects are significates, and all concepts are vehicles supporting interpretive sign-relations: from the very beginning of sensation, prescissively (analytically and not experimentally) distinguished from perceptions and intellections, our awareness depends also upon signs that precede concept formation. Signs are triadic entities comprising percepts, affects (as sensations), and concepts (cf. Deleuze, [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref20">6</reflink>]). New concepts are created in experience that calls for being interpreted and as such learned from: human consciousness develops and grows. Such is the pedagogy of concepts: an important element of edusemiotics as a 'bodymind', holistic, philosophy of education (Semetsky, [<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref21">25</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref22">26</reflink>]).</p> <p>In parallel with the pedagogy of concepts edusemiotics demonstrates the pedagogy of values (Semetsky, [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref23">20</reflink>]). Semiotics presupposes the unity between knowledge and action, logic and ethics. Edusemiotics agrees that logic is the ethics of thinking and ethics is the logic of action (Deely, [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref24">4</reflink>]); furthermore, ethics recapitulates ontology—not in any modern sense but in terms of the nature of signs: a postulate that has important implications for moral education (Semetsky, [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref25">21</reflink>]). The semiosis of sensations (body) gives rise to awareness (mind); still all the relations comprising the action of signs are prior to any ontological or epistemic differentiation. Thus, semiotics takes us to the very heart of the problem of knowledge, namely, how it is that it is signs indeed that are able to lead us everywhere in nature, including into the depth of our own human nature (or, rather, natures). Human beings are signs among signs, and it is due to a developed 'synthetic consciousness [and] sense of learning' (Peirce, [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref26">13</reflink>] 1.377) that 'the man-sign...comes to mean more than he did before' ([<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref27">13</reflink>] 5. 313). Learning aims towards signification. Signs, via the dynamics of multiple interpretations and translations into other signs, evolve and grow. Learning is achieved not by an analytic, Cartesian, mind that observes the world from which it is detached, but by synthetic, or integral, semiotic consciousness that constructs an expanded field of meanings informed by lived experience.</p> <hd id="AN0121255558-7">Specialization and fragmentation of knowledge</hd> <p>Within the universities, in the seventeenth century when classical science began to take hold, specialization presented itself as a sine qua non, as a necessity for scientific advance in this modern—or ideoscopic—sense (contrasting with the principally cenoscopic medieval science) dependent upon the instrumental extensions of the environmental awareness. As specializations required for scientific advance grew, general opinions of previous philosophy fragmented. By the late nineteenth century, diversity of specializations threatened the very notion of any unity of knowledge, and the teachers and administrators within universities began to cast about for some ways of gaining an overview, some ways of restoring, or at least minimally preserving, the intellectual development of humankind as a common heritage in which each of us shares and has a stake.</p> <p>Twentieth-century interdisciplinary, or team-taught, programs were designed to put together two or more specialists in the same classroom, offering students the dialectic of professors making sense first to one another and then, hopefully, also to the students from within specialized perspectives, while also accommodating themselves to the other perspective of specialization represented by their colleague(s) in the given classroom. Thus, they proved invariably to be personalities-dependent, gerrymandered affairs, more or less valuable depending upon the talents of the professors involved, but 'interdisciplinary' in no more than a de facto fashion rather than intrinsically interdisciplinary. The other, 'great books', approach as a recrudescence of Scholasticism fared no better because learning was determined as based on opinions of 'authorities' back to the tradition of the Latin scholastic universities, even if a plurality of sources was replacing the centrality of Aristotle. Since the 'great books' which have shaped the modern world within which the university today exists, come from a variety of specialists, from Chaucer and Shakespeare among the humanists to Newton and Einstein among the scientists, such canon-based education indeed broadened students' minds and opened them to an understanding apparently beyond specialization. Yet, this approach in the end tended to feed into the split between what C. P. Snow characterized as 'the two cultures': sciences on one side, rooted in specializations aimed to interpret the book of nature, and humanities on the other side, rooted in broad reading interpreting the books written by men.</p> <p>This point of impasse is the entry point for the doctrine of signs, the 'one undivided science' (Peirce [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref28">13</reflink>] 8.342; [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref29">13</reflink>] 2.227) that does not depend upon new empirical observations, yet directly addresses that upon which all observations depend, namely, the action of signs, semiosis. STEM education—education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—contrasts with liberal arts education as yet a further extension of the two cultures. But an individual, student or faculty, who comes to understand the standpoint and perspective that semiotics engenders, can and should transcend precisely this very division. For example, at Indiana University, when Thomas A. Sebeok became Director of the Research Centre for Language Studies in the early 1970s, among his first official actions was to change the name to the Research Centre for Language and Semiotic Studies, and everyone expected him to launch an MA and PhD program in semiotics. He did not. Instead, he introduced a Certificate in Semiotics, which students could acquire only after, or in conjunction with, graduate study in an established discipline, be it linguistics, anthropology, biology, English, physics, sociology, or whatever. His argument was that semiotics is not so much a discipline in its own right as it is a field including all the disciplines, inasmuch as 'all thought is in signs'. As a consequence, Sebeok considered that semiotics as an area of study within the academy ought not to be treated as one more specialization but rather needs to be seen as that which makes specialization in the first place possible, because it establishes the experiential ground from which—first in sensation and then also in conception —the whole of human knowledge springs! Thus, someone on their way to mastering a given subject matter—physics, chemistry, literature, or sociology—would discover on turning to semiotics that their chosen specialization already depends upon (albeit is not reducible to) the action of signs as revealing and distinguishing the very subject matter which is the object studied by the specialization. Hence, students of semiotics are made to realize that in seeing signs at work within a given academic discipline, they are seeing something that is true of all specialized disciplines, because true of the whole of human knowledge, namely that underlying all else in awareness and in the background always is the action of signs, thanks to which it becomes possible to know objects in the first place, let alone know differences between objects which define different disciplines as still fragmented areas of specialization.</p> <p>In defiance of the fragmentation of knowledge still prevalent in education, edusemiotics construes a unifying, holistic paradigm that opens up a range of opportunities for human development and transformative education. Edusemiotics is an <emph>integrative</emph> conceptual framework. Integrative practices are largely absent from the Western educational system and relegated to Eastern traditions and philosophies such as Tao or Buddhism. In the West, philosophy and education alike continue to suffer from the great bifurcation between subject and object, between man and world, or—at the sociocultural level—between self and other. Overcoming such habitual dualisms both in theory and in practice is the ultimate purpose of edusemiotics. Edusemiotics continues and re-interprets the intellectual legacy of major philosophers and critical theorists, crossing over from American Pragmatism in general, to Peircean Pragmaticism, to Continental philosophy and also revisiting ancient philosophies, for example, Hermeticism. In contrast to analytic tradition, philosophy as semiotics reject a sharp dichotomy between subject and object, body and mind, as well as epistemology reduced to the spectator theory of knowledge. Keeping this rejection from being just a slogan is indeed a task pursued by edusemiotics. As a philosophy of education, edusemiotics aims towards ultimately organizing a sense of the relational self, in which a generic other would be integrated.</p> <p>In the semiotic universe perfused with signs, the human mind is not separate from the environing physical world but is engaged in a continual participation with it, thus forming a holistic <emph>process</emph>~<emph>structure</emph> as a network encompassing sociocultural <emph>and</emph> natural aspects. Everything is a sign—still, nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted. This statement sounds paradoxical, yet the presence of paradoxes is one of the distinguishing features of semiotics and edusemiotics: the triadic relation pertinent to genuine sign is paradoxical, if not illogical pure and simple, from the viewpoint of analytic reason. The modes of inference include, in addition to deduction and induction, also abduction functioning on the basis of the creative logic of discovery rather than just the logic of justification. Abduction, the process whereby new ideas are seized upon—ideas further to be developed deductively and tested inductively, beginning again the cycle, or, rather, an evolutionary spiral of semiosis—is first of all a phenomenon of nature. As Peirce pointed out, 'what is growth? Not mere increase' (Peirce, [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref30">13</reflink>] 1.174) in quantity: a semiotic growth presupposes novelty and creativity thus bringing the dimension of <emph>art</emph> into the <emph>science</emph> of signs. Abduction works with constructed signs, but not only with constructed signs, and not with constructed signs first of all. Thus, the cornerstone of this tradition, first articulated in 1632 (well before Locke) by John Poinsot in his <emph>Tractatus</emph> (Poinsot, [<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref31">15</reflink>]) and developed by Peirce, Maritain, Morris, and Sebeok, is the coming together of 'real being' (awareness-independent) and 'being of reason' (awareness-dependent), thereby defying their opposition. Edusemiotics interrogates anthropocentrism, positing an embodied mind connected to the greater, posthuman, environment. Education, in semiotic terms, is a process of growth and the evolution of consciousness as the function of engaging with, and learning from, signs situated in life, in experience, in ethical practice.</p> <hd id="AN0121255558-8">Some practical implications of edusemiotics</hd> <p>Experiential learning expands the walls of the traditional classroom and opens it to the greater social and natural world. Edusemiotics partakes of an open-ended practical inquiry that does not aim to attain finite and indubitable knowledge. It problematizes the prevalent role of formal instruction and elicits alternative teaching practices. Pedagogy in the spirit of edusemiotics is not reducible to teaching "true" facts, but aims to enrich experience with meaning and significance. The realization of meanings in lived experience enriches this very experience with its existential dimension. Edusemiotics creates a novel open-ended foundation for knowledge which is always already of the nature of a process; thus subject to evolution, development and the intrusion of signs that need to be interpreted anew in the unpredictable circumstances of lived experience for which our old habits of thought and action may be unfit or counterproductive. The process of semiosis that encompasses human beings functioning as signs elicits the transformation of habits especially important in the context of education. Edusemiotics demands a continual engagement with signs inclusive of our moral and intellectual growth as the very transformation of habits.</p> <p>The edusemiotic process of the evolution of signs intrinsically determines new opportunities for human development and transformative education and necessarily encompasses the future-oriented dimensions of becoming, novelty and creativity. As creative, edusemiotics rejects the model of teaching reduced to the unidirectional transmission of pre-given subject matter from a generic teacher to a generic student. Edusemiotics posits a teacher and a student as one unified, albeit double-sided, whole—a sign, a relation. They are interrelated and interdependent by virtue of being embedded in the common 'interpretant' comprising shared meanings. Edusemiotics re-conceptualizes education in terms of lifelong experiential learning and positions human subjectivity within a process that, as grounded in <emph>triadic</emph> relations, is necessarily characterized by self-reference or self-reflection. Thus teachers' self-knowledge becomes a must, because without knowing oneself one cannot know others—hence, one would be unable to establish a genuine self-other relation as foundational for the <emph>ethics of integration</emph> peculiar to edusemiotics (Semetsky, [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref32">22</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref33">23</reflink>]) in contrast to norms, binary codes, or individual moral judgments. Edusemiotics challenges the perception of standards as the established policy for testing, assessment and evaluating academic success versus failure. Failure, in accord with the process of signs being transformed into other signs, may turn into its own opposite, that is, carry a positive value by virtue of being a learning experience. Edusemiotics leads to reformulating the received notion of progress equated with quantitative measures and defies the model of educational research as exclusively evidence-based positing empirical 'facts' as subject to the string of interpretants. Signs permeating human experiences can be read and interpreted. By interpreting their indirect and thereby subtle messages that often, rather than being 'clear and distinct' Cartesian ideas, reach us at the unconscious or preconscious levels only, we ourselves become <emph>more developed signs</emph>.</p> <hd id="AN0121255558-9">Conclusion</hd> <p>Once it is understood that all dichotomies, including the subject-object dualism prevalent in classical science, are rendered nugatory within the perspective of a doctrine of signs, new possibilities of understanding are opened up that require a comprehensive theoretical foundation. That foundation can be provided only by an understanding of the being with its consequent causality and action proper to signs in their universal role. It is thus that the <emph>history</emph> of semiotics and the <emph>theory</emph> of semiotics are only virtually distinct, forming together the actual whole of human understanding as an achievement, a <emph>prise de conscience</emph>, in process and in community. For if the <emph>anthropos</emph> is an interpretant of semiosis in nature and culture alike, this can only be because the ideas of this <emph>subject</emph> that itself functions as a sign have the universe in its totality as the <emph>object</emph> of a semiotic inquiry.</p> <p>Semiotics thus is maximally postmodern in a double sense. It shows the way beyond the epistemology of modern philosophy and, at the same time, enables us to see the unity of human understanding beneath and within development of specializations essential to the establishment of modern science. Sebeok, in reference to the twentieth century achievements in semiotics, used to say that the movement towards the definition of semiotic thinking in the biological and anthropological framework of a theory of evolution represents the only genuinely novel and significantly holistic trend in the development in this field. The twenty-first century, hopefully, will bear this out, and we will see an end to the unfortunate and sad fact, referred to by Sebeok, that the contemporary teaching of semiotics is severely, perhaps cripplingly, impoverished by the utter, frightening innocence, to say the least, of most practitioners of semiotics about the natural order in which they and it are embedded.</p> <p>What edusemiotics intends to do is to bring the natural order as such to the attention of the global community of inquirers. Semiotics, as knowledge that results from the thematic study of the action of signs, is not only interdisciplinary but transdisciplinary (cf. Nicolescu, [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref34">12</reflink>]; Semetsky, [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref35">18</reflink>]). However we may also consider it predisciplinary because it lays down, within the biosphere, the common foundation for education in semiotics that becomes our ethical responsibility and is afforded by edusemiotics. The contrast between disciplinary and transdisciplinary paradigms can be coarsely presented as follows:</p> <p></p> <p> <ephtml> <table><tbody><tr valign="top"><td>Disciplinary</td><td>Transdisciplinary </td></tr><tr valign="top"><td>Structure. Linguistic signs</td><td>Process. Extralinguistic signs</td></tr><tr valign="top"><td>Scientific model; subject as spectator. Separation of culture and nature</td><td> Interpretive model; subject as <italic>anthropos</italic>. Integration of culture and nature</td></tr><tr valign="top"><td>Facts; exclusion of values</td><td>Meanings; inclusion of values</td></tr><tr valign="top"><td>Analysis; mind <italic>observing</italic> the world; disembodied cognition</td><td>Synthesis; mind <italic>participating</italic> in the world; embodied cognition</td></tr><tr valign="top"><td>Self and Other as independent; isolated</td><td>Self and Other as interdependent; reconciled</td></tr><tr valign="top"><td>Logic of the excluded middle</td><td>Logic of the included middle</td></tr><tr valign="top"><td>Individual ethics</td><td>Relational ethics</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <p>Edusemiotics demands that the science of signs becomes our new habit in life. However the old habits of thought and action appear to be resilient; indeed, we would not call them 'habits' otherwise. They usually 'reside' in the unconscious—what Peirce called 'unanalizable'—hence, they themselves need to become a subject of edusemiotic inquiry so as to be brought to the level of awareness. The task appears to be of the order of vicious circle; still it is edusemiotics that can break such circularity. The overall aim of edusemiotics is the creation of the open society (Simons, Olssen, & Peters, [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref36">28</reflink>]) as the transformation of the whole of knowledge economy. Continuing research in semiotics and edusemiotics is needed to eradicate old habits and investigate the effects of such a perspective on diverse sociocultural relations. Edusemiotics is educative as it leads us out of old habits. Indeed, the Latin <emph>educare</emph> means to lead out as well as to bring out something that is within, however not confined within the narrow rationality of <emph>Cogito</emph>. Edusemiotics displays radical, expansive reason constituted by signs. This reason should begin to inform education.</p> <hd id="AN0121255558-10">Notes on contributors</hd> <p> <bold> <emph>John Deely</emph> </bold> is Philosopher-in-Residence at St. Vincent College, PA, USA. He holds the Rudman Chair in Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas. Among his numerous volumes are Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-First Century; and Purely Objective Reality. He is the Editor of The American Journal of Semiotics. He served two terms as Vice-President of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS).</p> <p> <bold> <emph>Inna Semetsky</emph> </bold> serves as a chief consultant to the Institute for Edusemiotic Studies (IES) registered in Melbourne, Australia. She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Monash University and received the First Kevelson Memorial Award from the Semiotic Society of America. She has over 150 publications including nine books. Her latest book (with A. Stables) Edusemiotics: semiotic philosophy as educational foundation received a 2015 PESA Book Award.</p> <hd id="AN0121255558-11">Disclosure statement</hd> <p>No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.</p> <ref id="AN0121255558-12"> <title> Note </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref5" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Ultimately, a sign can become a sign of itself; but such relation can be established in the infinite future and for the infinite community extended in space and time or maybe even beyond, according to Peirce. Still we can posit an exception in terms of creating some special conditions within our ordinary experience -- but then wouldn't we qualify such experience as extraordinary (see Kauffman, [9]; Semetsky, [24])? And wouldn't such experience <emph>change</emph> the sign in question?</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <ref id="AN0121255558-13"> <title> References </title> <blist> <bibtext> Danesi, M. (2010). Foreword: Edusemiotics. In I. Semetsky(Ed.), Semiotics Education Experience (pp. vii–xi). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref2" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Deely, J. (1990). Basics of semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" idref="ref12" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext> Deely, J. (1994). The human use of signs: Or elements of anthroposemiosis. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib4" idref="ref19" type="bt">4</bibl> <bibtext> Deely, J. (2001). Four ages of understanding: The first postmodern survey of philosophy from ancient times to the turn of the twenty-first century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib5" idref="ref11" type="bt">5</bibl> <bibtext> Deely, J., & Danesi, M. (Eds.). (2012). Semiotic prologues. Ottawa: Legas.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib6" idref="ref20" type="bt">6</bibl> <bibtext> Deleuze, G. (1990). The logic of sense (M. Lester& C. J. Stivale, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib7" idref="ref17" type="bt">7</bibl> <bibtext> Emmeche, C. (1994). The garden in the machine: The emerging science of artificial life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib8" idref="ref1" type="bt">8</bibl> <bibtext> Hawkes, T. (1977). Structuralism and semiotics. Berkeley: University of California Press.10.4324/9780203443934</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib9" type="bt">9</bibl> <bibtext> Kauffman, L. H. (2010). Virtual logic—An introduction. In I. Semetsky (Ed.), Semiotics education experience (pp. 175–202). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Kelso, J. A. S. (1995). Dynamic patterns: The self-organization of brain and behavior. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Kelso, J. A. S., & Engstrøm, D. A. (2006). The complementary nature. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Nicolescu, B.. (2002). Manifesto of transdisciplinarity (K. -C. Voss, Trans.). Albany: SUNY Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Peirce, C. S. (1931–1935/1958). Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Vol. 1–6 ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss; Vol. 7 and 8 ed. A. Burks). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [cited as CP].</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Peters, M. A., & Freeman-Moir, J. (Eds.). (2006). Edutopias: New Utopian thinking in education (Vol. 5). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Poinsot, J. (1985). Tractatus de Signis: The semiotic of John Poinsot. Berkeley: University of California Press [Corrected 2nd Edition, 2013. South Bend: St. Augustine's Press].</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Sebeok, T. A. (1976/1985). Contributions to the doctrine of signs. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Sebeok, T. A. (1979/1989). Semiosis in nature and culture. In The sign & its masters (pp. 3–26). Lanham, MD: University Press of America.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Semetsky, I. (2009). Virtual ontology/real experiences. Transdisciplinarity in Science and Religion, 6, 169–200.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Semetsky, I. (Ed.). (2010). Semiotics Education Experience. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Semetsky, I. (2010a). The folds of experience, or: Constructing the pedagogy of values. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42, 476–488.10.1111/j.1469-5812.2008.00486.x</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Semetsky, I. (2010b). Moral stumbling: When ethics recapitulates ontology. In I. Semetsky (Ed.), Semiotics education experience (pp. 53–70). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Semetsky, I. (2010c). Towards an ethics of integration in education. In T. Lovat, R. Toomey, & N. Clement (Eds.), International research handbook on values education and student wellbeing (pp. 319–336). New York, NY: Springer.10.1007/978-90-481-8675-4</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Semetsky, I. (2012). Living, learning, loving: Constructing a new ethics of integration in education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 33, 47–59.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Semetsky, I. (2013a). The edusemiotics of images: Essays on the art~science of Tarot. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.10.1007/978-94-6209-055-2</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Semetsky, I. (2013b). Learning with bodymind: Constructing the cartographies of the unthought. In D. Masny (Ed.), Cartographies of becoming in education (pp. 77–91). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.10.1007/978-94-6209-170-2</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Semetsky, I. (2014). Taking the edusemiotic turn: A body∼mind approach to education. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 48, 490–506.10.1111/1467-9752.12082</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Semetsky, I., & Stables, A. (Eds.). (2014). Pedagogy and edusemiotics: Theoretical challenges/practical opportunities Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.10.1007/978-94-6209-857-2</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Simons, M., Olssen, M., & Peters, M. A. (Eds.). (2009). Re-reading education policies: A handbook studying the policy agenda of the 21st century. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Stables, A., & Semetsky, I. (2015). Edusemiotics: Semiotic philosophy as educational foundation. London: Routledge.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Stjernfelt, F. (2007). Diagrammatology: An investigation on the borderlines of phenomenology, ontology, and semiotics. Dordrecht: Springer.10.1007/978-1-4020-5652-9</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <aug> <p>By John Deely and Inna Semetsky</p> <p>Reported by Author; Author</p> </aug> <nolink nlid="nl1" bibid="bib13" firstref="ref3"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl2" bibid="bib19" firstref="ref4"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl3" bibid="bib29" firstref="ref6"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl4" bibid="bib27" firstref="ref7"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl5" bibid="bib24" firstref="ref8"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl6" bibid="bib14" firstref="ref9"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl7" bibid="bib10" firstref="ref13"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl8" bibid="bib11" firstref="ref14"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl9" bibid="bib16" firstref="ref15"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl10" bibid="bib17" firstref="ref16"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl11" bibid="bib30" firstref="ref18"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl12" bibid="bib25" firstref="ref21"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl13" bibid="bib26" firstref="ref22"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl14" bibid="bib20" firstref="ref23"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl15" bibid="bib21" firstref="ref25"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl16" bibid="bib15" firstref="ref31"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl17" bibid="bib22" firstref="ref32"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl18" bibid="bib23" firstref="ref33"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl19" bibid="bib12" firstref="ref34"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl20" bibid="bib18" firstref="ref35"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl21" bibid="bib28" firstref="ref36"></nolink>
Header DbId: eric
DbLabel: ERIC
An: EJ1130037
AccessLevel: 3
PubType: Academic Journal
PubTypeId: academicJournal
PreciseRelevancyScore: 0
IllustrationInfo
Items – Name: Title
  Label: Title
  Group: Ti
  Data: Semiotics, Edusemiotics and the Culture of Education
– Name: Language
  Label: Language
  Group: Lang
  Data: English
– Name: Author
  Label: Authors
  Group: Au
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Deely%2C+John%22">Deely, John</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Semetsky%2C+Inna%22">Semetsky, Inna</searchLink>
– Name: TitleSource
  Label: Source
  Group: Src
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Educational+Philosophy+and+Theory%22"><i>Educational Philosophy and Theory</i></searchLink>. 2017 49(3):207-219.
– Name: Avail
  Label: Availability
  Group: Avail
  Data: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
– Name: PeerReviewed
  Label: Peer Reviewed
  Group: SrcInfo
  Data: Y
– Name: Pages
  Label: Page Count
  Group: Src
  Data: 13
– Name: DatePubCY
  Label: Publication Date
  Group: Date
  Data: 2017
– Name: TypeDocument
  Label: Document Type
  Group: TypDoc
  Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Descriptive
– Name: Audience
  Label: Education Level
  Group: Audnce
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Higher+Education%22">Higher Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Postsecondary+Education%22">Postsecondary Education</searchLink>
– Name: Subject
  Label: Descriptors
  Group: Su
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Semiotics%22">Semiotics</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Metalinguistics%22">Metalinguistics</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+Philosophy%22">Educational Philosophy</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+Theories%22">Educational Theories</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Higher+Education%22">Higher Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Intellectual+Disciplines%22">Intellectual Disciplines</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Interdisciplinary+Approach%22">Interdisciplinary Approach</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Learning+Processes%22">Learning Processes</searchLink>
– Name: DOI
  Label: DOI
  Group: ID
  Data: 10.1080/00131857.2016.1190265
– Name: ISSN
  Label: ISSN
  Group: ISSN
  Data: 0013-1857
– Name: Abstract
  Label: Abstract
  Group: Ab
  Data: Semiotics is the study of signs addressing their action, usage, communication and signification (meaning). Edusemiotics--educational semiotics--is a recently developed direction in educational theory that takes semiotics as its foundational philosophy and explores the philosophical specifics of semiotics in educational contexts. As a novel theoretical field of inquiry, it is complemented by research known under the banner "semiotics in education", which is largely an applied enterprise. In this respect edusemiotics is a new conceptual framework for both theoretical and empirical studies. Edusemiotics has also been given the status of being a new branch of theoretical semiotics and it was launched as such at the 12th World Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in September 2014 at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia. The article presents "semiosis" as the action of signs across culture AND nature and posits "learning" in terms of developing semiotic consciousness and semiotic competence. Semiosis is a process and as such it defies the Cartesian philosophy of substance-dualism that still informs the culture of education. The paper focuses specifically on university education permeated by disciplinary boundaries and the fragmentation of knowledge grounded in objective science inherited from modernity. Where is semiotics as the science of signs (or relations) in the context of academic culture? The authors conclude by affirming the transdisciplinary character of semiotics and edusemiotics and specify the distinctive focal points of transdisciplinary knowledge afforded by edusemiotics.
– Name: AbstractInfo
  Label: Abstractor
  Group: Ab
  Data: As Provided
– Name: Ref
  Label: Number of References
  Group: RefInfo
  Data: 30
– Name: DateEntry
  Label: Entry Date
  Group: Date
  Data: 2017
– Name: AN
  Label: Accession Number
  Group: ID
  Data: EJ1130037
PLink https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=eric&AN=EJ1130037
RecordInfo BibRecord:
  BibEntity:
    Identifiers:
      – Type: doi
        Value: 10.1080/00131857.2016.1190265
    Languages:
      – Text: English
    PhysicalDescription:
      Pagination:
        PageCount: 13
        StartPage: 207
    Subjects:
      – SubjectFull: Semiotics
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Metalinguistics
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Educational Philosophy
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Educational Theories
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Higher Education
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Intellectual Disciplines
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Interdisciplinary Approach
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Learning Processes
        Type: general
    Titles:
      – TitleFull: Semiotics, Edusemiotics and the Culture of Education
        Type: main
  BibRelationships:
    HasContributorRelationships:
      – PersonEntity:
          Name:
            NameFull: Deely, John
      – PersonEntity:
          Name:
            NameFull: Semetsky, Inna
    IsPartOfRelationships:
      – BibEntity:
          Dates:
            – D: 01
              M: 01
              Type: published
              Y: 2017
          Identifiers:
            – Type: issn-print
              Value: 0013-1857
          Numbering:
            – Type: volume
              Value: 49
            – Type: issue
              Value: 3
          Titles:
            – TitleFull: Educational Philosophy and Theory
              Type: main
ResultId 1