Narratives and the semiotic freedom of children

Both adults’ habits-of-thought and their understanding of children’s stories shape how adults interpret children’s participation in conversations. In the light of the requests on children’s rights that follow from the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) this paper stresses the relevance of authorities having semiotically informed knowledge on children’s meaning-making within conversations with adults. In Article 12, the CRC stipulates the right of children to participate in and to be heard about decisions that affect their everyday lives. According to the same Article, however, these rights can be restrained, based on the authority’s judgements of the child’s age and maturity. Sociological studies have highlighted the importance of adopting the child’s perspective in judging matters that concern her. The present paper further suggests that narrow conceptualization of the sign can help one to observe different levels of meaning in adults’ and children’s conversations better. Although Paul Ricoeur did not investigate children’s narratives per se, his theory of narratives and narrativity offers a phenomenological approach to development that allows for better theoretical discriminations of narrative as a semiotic resource, and can thus assist adults in truly listening to children.

A biosemiotic conversation: Between physics and semiotics

In this dialogue, we discuss the contrast between inexorable physical laws and the semiotic freedom of life. We agree that material and symbolic structures require complementary descriptions, as do the many hierarchical levels of their organizations. We try to clarify our concepts of laws, constraints, rules, symbols, memory, interpreters, and semiotic control. We briefly describe our different personal backgrounds that led us to a biosemiotic approach, and we speculate on the future directions of biosemiotics.

Toward a concept of pluralistic, inter-relational semiosis

Brief consideration of (1) Peirce’s ‘logic of vagueness’, (2) his categories, and (3) the concepts of overdetermination and underdetermination, vagueness and generality, and inconsistency and incompleteness, along with (4) the abrogation of classical Aristotelian principles of logic, bear out the complexity of all relatively rich sign systems. Given this complexity, there is semiotic indeterminacy, which suggests sign limitations, and at the same time it promises semiotic freedom, giving rise to sign proliferation the yield of which is pluralistic, inter-relational semiosis. This proliferation of signs owes its perpetual flowing change in time to the inapplicability of classical logical principles, namely Non-Contradiction and Excluded-Middle, with respect to elements of vagueness and generality in all signs. Hempel’s ‘Inductivity Paradox’ and Goodman’s ‘New Riddle of Induction’ bear out the limitation and freedom of sign making and sign taking. A concrete cultural example, the Spaniards’ world including the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Aztecs world including their Goddess, Tonantzín, are given a Hempel-Goodman interpretation to reveal the ambiguous, vague, and complex nature of intercultural sign systems, further suggesting pluralism. In fact, when taking the ‘limitative theorems’ of Gödel, Turing, and Chaitin into account, pluralism becomes undeniable, in view of the inconsistency-incompleteness of complex systems. A model for embracing and coping with pluralism suggests itself in the form of contextualized novelty seeking relativism. This form of pluralism takes overdetermination, largely characteristic of Peirce’s Firstness, and underdetermination largely characteristic of Peirce’s Thirdness, into its embrace to reveal a global context capable of elucidating local contexts the collection of which is considerably less than that global view. The entirety of this global context is impossible to encompass, given our inevitable finitude and fallibilism. Yet, we usually manage to cope with processual pluralism, within the play of semiosis.

Liberalism in Lockean Linguistics

Summary In the Essay concerning human understanding (1690) John Locke (1632–1704) suggests that man misunderstands the relationship between ideas, words, and things, assuming that there exists a ‘double conformity’. This assumption is at the core of our misunderstanding of our epistemological status, the misunderstanding from which Locke must free his readers if they are to grasp the foundations of human knowledge. To this extent Locke is a communicational sceptic. He believes that the linguistic communication of ideas is ‘imperfect’. Left to our natural powers to form ideas and signify them by words, we will too often fail to convey our thoughts to our hearers. The remedy to this ‘imperfection’ is for us to constrain the exercise of our linguistic powers. There is thus an interesting parallel between the structure of Locke’s discussion of language in the Essay and his discussion of political power in the Second Treatise on Government (1689). In the latter Locke then traces the roots of political norms to the individual’s sacrifice of a share of their own natural freedoms and powers to political authority, so that social anarchy can be avoided. In the same way the normative prescriptions offered in the Essay, by restricting the individual’s basic linguistic freedom, are designed to avoid the communicational anarchy that would result if all individuals exercised their linguistic freedom to express themselves as they choose. Locke thus takes communication to occur, not as a result of chance or of a pre-existing conformity between words and ideas, but rather as a result of the linguistic agent’s voluntary constraint of his/her semiotic freedom.