STUDY OF CONDITIONALITY AND IMMANENCE OF PROPER NAMES OF NEWLY BUILT HOUSING ESTATES IN THE LVIV URBAN ENVIRONMENT AT THE BEGINNING OF THE XXI CENTURY (based on the semiotic triangle method)

The study classifies proper names of housing estates (HE) in Lviv according to certain phenomena, images, symbols. The iconic, indexical, conventional relations of the architecture of HE are revealed as a sign-vehicle to its referent which is declared in its own name through the pyramidal structure of the semiotic triangle. The problem of conditionality and immanence of one's proper name concerning the architectural image of the HE is highlighted.

Rethinking semiotics: Toward a theory of intentional sign

Sign involves a relation between two correlatives established essentially by an act of mental associating. An adequate theory of sign should regard sign as a process based on such an act. A theory of intentional sign thus formed may serve as an example of the approach to such a theory. Every intentional sign process involves five basic factors and multiple stages, whose variation results in various types of processes. Processes of the same sign-vehicle form an autonomous system covering most basic topics of semiotics. Process systems of different sign-vehicles are interconnected via relation between the sign-vehicles, forming a system of systems generally called “sign system.” This theory may be further expanded into a fuller framework.

Życie znaków w sieci kodów – czyli o semiotycznie zorientowanych badaniach dyskursu i stylu (na przykładzie znaku „naród chorwacki”)

A life of signs in the network of codes. On semiotically-oriented studies of discourse and style (an analysis of the sign “Croatian nation”)In the article a semiotic theory of style and discourse is developed. According to some author’s previous research and theories by Bakhtin, Eco and Uspienski, the idea of overlapping of signs and codes is discussed. The sign-vehicle “Croatian nation” is taken into consideration in various contexts and various interlocutors (from Croatian literature, press and scholarly books). The result of such an investigation is aimed to empirically prove to what extent usual semantic interpretation deprives the whole meaning of texts.

Referring to the Qualitative Dimension of Consciousness: Iconicity instead of Indexicality

This paper suggests that reference to phenomenal qualities is best understood as involving iconicity, that is, a passage from sign-vehicle to object that exploits a similarity between the two. This contrasts with a version of the ‘phenomenal concept strategy’ that takes indexicality to be central. However, since it is doubtful that phenomenal qualities are capable of causally interacting with anything, indexical reference seems inappropriate. While a theorist like David Papineau is independently coming to something akin to iconicity, I think some of the awkwardness that plagues his account would be remedied by transitioning to a more inclusive philosophy of signs.

From semiosis to semioethics: The full vista of the action of signs

How anything acts depends upon what it is, both as a kind of thing and as a distinct individual of that kind: “agere sequitur esse” — action follows being. This is as true of signs as it is of lions or centipedes: therefore, in order to determine the range or extent of semiosis we need above all to determine the kind of being at stake under the name “sign”. Since Poinsot, in a thesis that the work of Peirce centuries later confirmed, the proper being of signs as signs lies in a relation, a relationship irreducibly unifying three distinct terms: a foreground term representing another than itself — the representamen or sign vehicle; the other represented — the significate or object signified; and the third term to or for whom the other-representation is made — the interpretant, which need not be a person and, indeed, need not even be mental. The action of signs then is the way signs influence the world, including the world of experience and knowledge, but extending even to the physical world of nature beyond the living. It is a question of what is the causality proper to signs in consequence of the being proper to them as signs, an indirect causality, just as relations are indirectly dependent upon the interactions of individuals making up the plurality of the universe; and a causality that models what could or might be in contrast to what is here and now. To associate this causality with final causality is correct insofar as signs are employed in shaping the interactions of individual things; but to equate this causality with “teleology” is a fundamental error into which the contemporary development of semiotics has been inclined to fall, largely through some published passages of Peirce from an essay within which he corrects this error but in passages so far left unpublished. By bringing these passages to light, in which Peirce points exactly in the direction earlier indicated by Poinsot, this essay attempts a kind of survey of the contemporary semiotic development in which the full vista of semiosis is laid out, and shown to be co-extensive with the boundaries of the universe itself, wherever they might fall. Precisely the indirect extrinsically specificative formal causality that signs exercise is what enables the “influence of the future” according to which semiosis changes the relevance of past to present in the interactions of Secondness. Understanding of this point (the causality proper to signs) also manifests the error of reducing the universe to signs, the error sometimes called “pansemiosis”.