Dalla scienza dei segni alla semiotica del testo. Il campo semiotico e le teorie della significazione
From the science of signs to the semiotics of the text. The semiotic field and the theories of signification.
The project announced by Umberto Eco is to explore “the theoretical possibility and the social function of a unified approach to every phenomenon of signification and/or communication.” The ambition concerns every case of sign-function, understood as the result of “underlying systems of elements mutually correlated by one or more codes.” What is at stake is the design…
In Semiotics in Ethics and Caring, Susan Petrilli introduces what she calls a detotalizing method as a necessary epistemological and ethical stance for contemporary semiotics. This method emerges from a critique of totalizing models of knowledge and communication, particularly those associated with globalization, technicism, and disciplinary separatism. Against these tendencies, Petrilli proposes a mode of inquiry capable of accounting for…
Susan Petrilli develops the notion of semioethics by grounding it in a specific conception of the human being: the human as semiotic animal. This expression, introduced in the volume Semiotic Animal co-authored with John Deely and Augusto Ponzio, designates a life form endowed not only with the capacity for semiosis, but with a distinctive aptitude for metasemiosis—the ability to reflect on…
Semiotics belongs to that intermediate area of knowledge that constitutes the field of the human sciences: disciplines that are not founded on theorems or experiments, but neither on subjective opinions. It is a science of meaning, which investigates the ways in which human beings produce, interpret, and share meanings. As Ugo Volli reminds us, from…
In existential semiotics, Eero Tarasti introduces the notion of the zemic world as the fundamental structure of empirical existence. This model articulates Dasein into four interconnected entities: body, person, praxis, and values, which Tarasti designates respectively as Moi1, Moi2, Soi2, and Soi1. The zemic world is not a static configuration but a dynamic field in which meaning…
In existential semiotics, the notion of transcendence emerges as one of the most challenging and innovative contributions to contemporary semiotic theory. Eero Tarasti presents transcendence as “perhaps the most provocative new issue which existential semiotics tries to launch for theoretical reflection,” and develops a framework in which transcendence assumes three distinct forms: empirical, existential, and…
Halliday describes how, for many years, writings on linguistic “behaviour” opened by criticizing linguists who limited themselves to the “code.” This limitation, he notes, had been “accepted as a fact of life,” even though it resulted from a specific historical phase in which code and behaviour were “rigorously held apart.” Only recently had the two…
Stefano Traini, in Le due vie della semiotica, revisits and comments on Umberto Eco’s thought, particularly in relation to Lector in Fabula. Traini emphasizes that the notion of inference already plays a central role in several areas of semiotic theory: choosing a topic, for instance, involves an inference — a risky choice that may turn out to…
Patrizia Magli shows how value is not limited to a taxonomic function or to an individual thymic projection, but can take shape as an axiological system within a text. Axiology is the deep value-structure that supports the narrative: a mode of organizing content derived from the investment of the thymic category into a semantic category….
Umberto Eco recognizes in Roman Jakobson a central role in clarifying and disseminating the notions of code and message, extending them from the field of information theory to the whole of semiotics. The adoption of these categories made it possible to unify the analysis of linguistic and non-linguistic systems, providing a coherent methodological framework for describing the…