Signs Conveying Information

This chapter introduces Peirce's notion of proposition, “Dicisign.” It goes through its main characteristics and argues that its strengths have been overlooked. It does not fall prey to some of the problems in the received notion of propositions (their dependence upon language, upon compositionality, upon human intention). This implies that the extension of Peircean Dicisigns is wider in two respects: they comprise 1) propositions not or only partially linguistic, using in addition gesture, picture, diagrams, etc.; 2) non-human propositions in biology studied by biosemiotics.

Framing in News Discourse

By presenting the case study of the Charlie Hebdo attack in news discourse, this chapter combines a semantic analysis of the most frequent frame-activating words through text linguistics tools with frame analysis, developed according to the model proposed by Entman in the news making context. The linguistic perspective adopted in this chapter combines the works by Fillmore and Congruity Theory. As shown in the present work, both linguistics and news framing benefit from such integration.

The Reincarnation of the Aura

In 1935, Walter Benjamin introduced the aura as the abstract conceptualization of uniqueness, authenticity, and singularity that encompasses an original art object. With the advent of technological reproducibility, Benjamin posits that the aura of an object deteriorates when the original is reproduced through the manufacture of copies. Employing this concept of the aura, the author outlines the proliferation of plaster casts of sculptures in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, placing contextual emphasis on the cultural and prestige value of originals and copies. Theories of authenticity in both art history and material culture are used to examine the nature of the aura and to consider how the aura transforms when an original object is lost from the material record. Through an object biography of a fifteenth-century sculpture by Francesco Laurana, the author proposes that the aura does not disappear upon the loss of the original, but is reincarnated in the authentic reproduction.

Neologisms

While people use language to let others know how and what it is that we think, language is also the means by, and also the substrate within which, humans think. This chapter explores the use of language as the basis for cognition, based on both a chosen word's denotative meaning and also its rhetorical (metaphorical) connotative meanings. The artificial dichotomy between language and speech is deconstructed. Peircean semiotics is used to argue that language is indexical in its primary referential functions, including sociolinguistic functions. Three new words, all of which were coined in the twenty-first century, are examined from a sociolinguistic and a semiotic point of view.

Syntactic Semantics and the Proper Treatment of Computationalism

Computationalism should not be the view that (human) cognition is computation; it should be the view that cognition (simpliciter) is computable. It follows that computationalism can be true even if (human) cognition is not the result of computations in the brain. If semiotic systems are systems that interpret signs, then both humans and computers are semiotic systems. Finally, minds can be considered as virtual machines implemented in certain semiotic systems, primarily the brain, but also AI computers.

Exploring Discourse and Creativity in Facebook Creative Writing by Non-Native Speakers

Facebook and other social media sites have been used by young Arabs for many purposes such as exchanging ideas and information, reporting breaking news, posting special events, launching political campaigns, announcing family gatherings, and sending seasons' greetings. Another emerging type of timeline posts is creative writing in English. Some Arab Facebook users post lines of verse, short anecdotes or points of view, express emotions, personal experiences, and/or inspirational stories or sayings written in literary style. A sample of Facebook creative writing pages/clubs and creative timeline posts was collected and analyzed to find out the forms and themes of creative writing texts. A sample of Facebook Arab creative writers was also surveyed to find out the reasons for their creative writing activities in English. This chapter describes the data collection and analysis procedures and reports results quantitatively and qualitatively. Implications for developing creative writing skills in foreign/second language learners using Facebook and other social media are given.

Orders of Experience

Does art tend towards immersion? Positing James Turrell's Roden Crater (2015) as the modern epitome of the landscape art-object, the evolution of the medium is traced through prominent examples its transformations: Titian's Venus and the Organist with Dog (1550), De Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon (1781), and Barker's Panorama (1792). Discussion regarding Roden Crater's predecessors serve to illustrate distinct innovations that greatly influenced its construction of sensory experience, spanning the use of dialogue to the integration of physicality. This chronology is used to demonstrate an overarching tendency of media towards immersion, and to reflect how the development of contemporary culture evolves towards progressively psychological experiences.

Math Talk as Discourse Strategy

Mathematical understanding goes beyond grasping numerical values and problem solving. By incorporating visual representation, students can be able to grasp how math can be understood in terms of geometry, which is essentially a visual device. It is important that students be able to incorporate visual representations alongside numerical values to gain meaning from their own knowledge. However, it is also vital that students understand mathematical terminology, via a dialogical-rhetorical pedagogy that now comes under the rubric of “Math Talk,” which in turn is part of a system of teaching known as knowledge building, both of which aim to recapture, in a new way, the Socratic method of dialogical interaction. This chapter explores how knowledge building, as a methodology, can assist in furthering student understanding and how math talk leads to a deeper understanding of mathematical principles.

Riddle of the Sphinx Revisited

Myth is a universal conveyor of culture whose stories capture the human heart and whose embodied set of guidelines serve to conduct everyday life. When Freud added the Oedipus myth to his theory of psychosexual development, his method of psychoanalysis subsequently launched worldwide. Whereas Freud viewed the myth of Oedipus quite literally as a prohibition against infanticide, patricide, and incest, this chapter views the myth more metaphorically to examine how the riddle of the Sphinx informs self-referential thinking as a collective stage of human consciousness. Two contemporary theoretical lenses are adopted: 1) interpersonal neurobiology, which proposes that mind, brain, and body develop from relational origins, and 2) second-order cybernetics, which examines how observers become entangled in their very processes under observation. From within these perspectives, the Sphinx's riddle appears as a paradox of self-reference whose solution requires humankind to leap from concrete to metaphorical thinking. Only upon retaining recursive loops in consciousness can humans attain full self-reflection as a beacon towards full actualization.

Not Just a Pretty Face

The primary focus of the studies on adult beauty pageants involves their creation, negotiation, and implication vis-à-vis national and/or political identity within the pageant industry; or else they examine national pageants which are primarily scholarship-based. The present chapter is an attempt to understand the many psychological costs that come from practicing beauty within the realm of pageantry, and the rationale behind entering into an expensive venture for which there is little to gain, but much to lose emotionally. It will address two main questions: What are the physical and emotional (or metaphysical) costs of entering into and, later, winning, a beauty pageant? Who enters into beauty pageants and why? The objective is to examine the incentive to publicly parade oneself against dozens of other women, at the risk of simply being dismissed at the hands of quasi-objective opinion.