Right for the wrong reason; wrong for the right reason: Gibson and Arnheim on picture perception

Although J J Gibson’s theory of picture perception was often crude and biased toward naturalism, its fundamental division between the visual world and the visual field made it a semiotic theory. Contrariwise, although Arnheim wrote sensitively on pictures, he never seemed to admit that they were signs. This paper reviews both Gibson’s and Arnheim’s theories of picture perception, and explains where Arnheim’s biases caused him to lose the possibility of framing his approach in the most basic semiotic terms. Nevertheless, using the phenomenological semiotics of Sonesson and his theory of the Lifeworld Hierarchy, I demonstrate latent semiotic elements in Arnheim’s theory, due perhaps to Alfred Schutz’s influence. Hoping to argue against the brute theory of denotation, Arnheim instead sought to delay invocation of (conventional) signs as long as possible, and his idea of iconic pictorialization assumes but does not name signification. Nevertheless, I propose that Arnheim has a kind of theory of the Lifeworld Hierarchy inside the picture. Thus, he (wrongly) does not see the picture as overtly signifying but interestingly gives hints about how to treat the objects of the virtual world of the picture based on their relationship to the overall style of the work.

Representation as repression: A First Peoples context

Visual images of a marginalised minority group from southern Africa are analysed against a series of colonialist representations to demonstrate tangible evidence of the role of representation in both disenfranchisement and an increasing autonomy in the case of the San, who are The First Peoples of the Kalahari, commonly known outside Africa as ‘Bushmen’ and in the dominant language of Botswana as Basarwa. This particular group is represented by government and its corporate affiliates as primordial for tourist consumption, yet systemically denied their language, ethnicity and ancestral land. Analysis is supported by critical tourism literature, showing the attitudes, power dynamics and practices evident in the produced imagery. An overview of the theoretical enframing and methodology is followed by analysis of a range of visual representations of the San. Analysis herein is based on a blend of application of post-colonial theory and post-tourism critique, along with some concepts from semiotics. Most of these visual and linguistic materials have been produced by government and industry for tourist consumption, while others include my own photography and ostensibly impartial museum exhibits.

Revisiting the life of things: A cognitive semiotic study of the agency of artefacts in Amazonia

Many contemporary scholars have recently defended the idea that the agency of things is symmetrical and equivalent to human agency. We propose an alternative approach to artefacts’ agency based on a field study concerned with contextually situated observations of the process of design of artefacts in Amazonia. By means of participant observation and interviews, we address the role of artefacts in relation to human agency. In so doing, we focus on the human-unique capacity for design as it is related to cognitive resources such as intentionality, decision-making, planning, and volitional adaptations of the material world to human purposes. We argue that such cognitive resources are ultimate manifestations of human agency. The findings allow us to conclude that artefacts possess a special form of agency, which operates in different ways from the agency of true agents. This agency is derived: it depends on the actions of true agents, with either function as remote intentions or are required for the artefact to work at the moment of use. Thus, the relation between artefacts and agents is asymmetrical. Given that the derived agency of artefacts allows people to expand their own agency, we propose the notion of enhanced agency for the prosthetic incorporation of artefacts into the agentive capabilities of human agents.

Michelangelo, the Duck and the Rabbit

The concept of modes of existence of semiotic entities underlies (post)Greimasian semiotics, yet it seems to have received little attention. Modes of existence can be used in different senses. For Greimas, from the perspective of narrative semiotics, when Michelangelo first receives a block of marble and decides to sculpt the David, his intention is in a virtual mode; as Michelangelo progresses he ends up bringing the David into existence, and his intention comes to the realized mode. In Fontanille’s tensive semiotics, however, modes of existence can have to do with how one can narrow or broaden the scope of our apprehension of the David as our eyes look at it in order to produce a meaningful experience. In this work, the perspectives of narrative and tensive semiotics are contrasted both theoretically and practically applying both to a number of examples. In order to identify all possible modes of existence and all the possibilities of transitioning from one to the other in the examples presented, we resort to the method of finite-state automata from computer science. In the end, we propose a robust narrative account of modes of existence that relies on narrative semiotics for its definition, but into which intent and apprehension from tensive semiotics can be integrated. This work calls for the need of establishing a syntax of modes of existence, since both Greimas and Fontanille construe them as being necessary to account for the production of signification.

Interpreting the concept of sedimentation in Husserl’s Origin of Geometry

In the influential text Origin of Geometry, Edmund Husserl argues that even the invariant meaning found in theoretical disciplines like geometry has a historical becoming: through gradual abstraction and stabilization, ending in a completely rational discipline. This is a process which Husserl proposes is due to language and other symbolic systems. In the absence of a system allowing for stable communication of meaning, geometry or any other tradition would constantly have to begin anew. At the same time Husserl also sees the historical process of meaning stabilization in linguistic form as detrimental. It allows for a reception of an established meaning, which simultaneously entails the forgetfulness of the experiential basis and intuitive knowledge that made ideality possible in the first place. Husserl calls this Janus-faced dialectical process between discovery and forgetfulness sedimentation. This paper analyzes this concept in Origin of Geometry and places it in the context of Husserl’s thought more generally. In contrast to Husserl’s negative view of the effects that sedimentation has for an authentic meaning, I discuss four interpretations of sedimentation that provide more constructive perspectives on the concept. These interpretations also differ considerably from one another, a fact which speaks both to the richness and the tensions in Origin of Geometry.

Interpreting the concept of sedimentation in Husserl’s Origin of Geometry

In the influential text Origin of Geometry, Edmund Husserl argues that even the invariant meaning found in theoretical disciplines like geometry has a historical becoming: through gradual abstraction and stabilization, ending in a completely rational discipline. This is a process which Husserl proposes is due to language and other symbolic systems. In the absence of a system allowing for stable communication of meaning, geometry or any other tradition would constantly have to begin anew. At the same time Husserl also sees the historical process of meaning stabilization in linguistic form as detrimental. It allows for a reception of an established meaning, which simultaneously entails the forgetfulness of the experiential basis and intuitive knowledge that made ideality possible in the first place. Husserl calls this Janus-faced dialectical process between discovery and forgetfulness sedimentation. This paper analyzes this concept in Origin of Geometry and places it in the context of Husserl’s thought more generally. In contrast to Husserl’s negative view of the effects that sedimentation has for an authentic meaning, I discuss four interpretations of sedimentation that provide more constructive perspectives on the concept. These interpretations also differ considerably from one another, a fact which speaks both to the richness and the tensions in Origin of Geometry. Author Biography Johan Blomberg has a PhD in General Linguistics from 2014, for the dissertation Motion in Language and Experience. He has since then worked in the Division for Cognitive Semiotics at Lund University, to which he continues to be affiliated. His main interests include motion semantics and the relations between language and thought, on which he has published extensively in journals like Cognitive Linguistics, Frontiers of Psychology and Language and Communication.

Referential iconicity in music and speech

Musical meaning is multifaceted. It is highly sensory and yet often abstract; able to cross cultural boundaries and yet embedded in specific traditions. For the most part music as a semiotic system is characterized by non-referential meaning (Monelle, 1991). Nevertheless, in so-called programmatic music, musical themes are intended to refer to worldly objects and events on the basis of iconic (and indexical) grounds. Such non-arbitrariness has been extensively documented in the case of speech as well (Ahlner and Zlatev, 2010; Sonesson 2013; Imai and Kita, 2014). In an experimental study, I investigated how referential iconicity in speech operates in comparison to music, considering the factors (a) primary/secondary iconicity and (b) linguistic/cultural background. In the experiment 21 Swedish and 21 Chinese native speakers had to match musical fragments from Prokofief’s Peter and the Wolf and spoken word-forms to objects, represented by schematic pictures. The experiment was designed to have two conditions to operationalize higher degree of primary and secondary iconicity, respectively. The results showed that there was no significant difference between the overall results for music and linguistic tasks, indicating that the cognitive-semiotic processes involved are not limited to a single cognitive domain or semiotic system. Both groups performed significantly above chance in both conditions, which serves as a clear indicator that interpreting referential music in music and speech sounds is not purely a case of secondary iconicity. Author Biography Verónica Giraldo’s academic background is in music and linguistics. She holds an MA in Language and Linguistics with specialization in Cognitive Semiotics from Lund University. The work presented derives from her master’s thesis project. One of her main interest is exploration of the possible correlations between language and music from the perspective of cognitive semiotics. She is currently researching on how to make visual art and museums more accessible to the blind and visually impaired community.

Choice awareness and manipulation blindness: A cognitive semiotic exploration of choice-making

Within cognitive science, “blindness” to choice is commonly treated as typical of human cognition, implying unreliable agents who essentially lack any awareness of their own choices (e.g. Johansson et al., 2005, 2008; Hall et al., 2010, 2013). Within cognitive semiotics, however, choice awareness is seen as a continuous phenomenon, which is susceptible to the influence of a variety of factors. Manipulation blindness is proposed as a more adequate term for what is known in the literature as “choice blindness”, referring to participants’ tendency to accept a choice as if it were their own. This suggests that “blindness” is strictly limited to the level of detection (of the switch of the preferred choice to a non-chosen one), and not to the level of choice. Using a cognitive-semiotic framework, I examine manipulation blindness as an “indicator” of choice awareness by employing the factors of memory, consequence, and affectivity, and introduce a two-level hierarchy of choice-making. 43 participants were assigned two tasks combining choices with a) two degrees of consequence (more/less) – based on task instructions, and b) two degrees of affectivity (high/low) – based on stimuli with different degrees of abstractness. Participants were first asked to state their preference for one of two alternatives (choice) . After that they were shown chosen as well as non-chosen pictures and asked to confirm whether the picture presented was the one of their choice (memory). Lastly, they were asked to justify their choice, although some of the trials had been manipulated (i.e. the chosen card was switched with the non-chosen one) (manipulation) . Half of the manipulations were detected, and 75% of these detections occurred for the choices participants remembered correctly. While the consequential impact of the choice did not seem to influence detection, affectivity did. Unlike other experiments that investigate “choice blindness”, the results indicate that manipulation blindness is subject to memory and affectivity, suggesting that we are aware of our choices and that we have, to various degrees, access to our intentional acts.

The Central Role of Imagination in Linguistics, Philosophy and Logic

Imagination is often accused of being “vulnerable”, or even downright unrealizable as a source of knowledge. I argue that this is mistaken, at least for some kinds of systematic imagination. First, imagination is shown to be key for the notion of entailment, which is central in philosophical and linguistic semantics, and in logic. Further, I show how such a non-psychological notion of imagination vindicates so-called “Objectivism”, attacked in cognitive linguistics. There are indeed limits to imagination, related to contradiction and ontological puzzles, but once handled with care, such limits do not invalidate it either. In sum, despite scepticism about imagination from Aristotle to the present, I show that it is if fact inevitable, intimately linked with normativity and rationality.

Stories of resistance in Greek street Art: A cognitive-semiotic approach

In line with cognitive semiotics, this paper suggests a synthetic account of the important but controversial notion of narrative (in street art, and more generally): one that distinguishes between three levels: (a) narration, (b) underlying story, and (c) frame-setting. The narrative potential of street art has not yet been considerably studied in order to offer insights into how underlying stories may be reconstructed from the audience and how different semiotic systems contribute to this. The analysis is mainly based on three contemporary street artworks and two political cartoons from the 1940s, involving the same frame-setting, which may be labeled as “Greece vs. Powerful Enemy.” The study is built on fieldwork research that was carried out during several periods in central Athens since 2014. The qualitative analyses with the help of insights from phenomenology show that single static images do not narrate stories themselves (primary narrativity), but rather presuppose such stories, which they can prompt or trigger (secondary narrativity). Notably, the significance of sedimented socio-cultural experience, collective memory and contextual knowledge that the audience must recruit in order to reconstruct the narrative potential through the process of secondary narrativity is stressed. Author BiographyGeorgios Stampoulidis, Centre for Language and Literature, Division for Cognitive Semiotics, Lund University, Sweden Georgios Stampoulidis is a PhD candidate at the Division for Cognitive Semiotics at Lund University. His research interests are in the fields of polysemiotic communication and multimodality, narrative and metaphor, and urban creativity. His work focuses on street art as a cross-cultural medium of meaning-making, cultural production and political intervention in urban space, and thus, he has previously conducted fieldwork in Athens, Greece. His most recent publications are “A Cognitive Semiotic Exploration of Metaphors in Greek Street Art” (Cognitive Semiotics, 2019) and “Urban Creativity in Abandoned Places. Xenia Hotels Project, Greece” (Nuart Journal, 2019). Currently, he is research fellow at Urban Creativity Lund and Scandinavian Metaphor networks.