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.
Patrizia Violi proposes to consider a specific form of the arts du faire: the art du dire. According to her, semiotics has long neglected this form of meaning production: its textualist tradition has led it to privilege the analysis of already textualized products rather than the practices that generate meaning. The discipline, in other words, has focused…
This article explores how Paolo Fabbri contrasts the semiology of Roland Barthes with the semiotics of Umberto Eco, identifying two paradigms that define much of contemporary semiotic thought: one rooted in ideological critique, the other in inferential processes of meaning-making. In outlining the two main directions of contemporary semiotics, Paolo Fabbri identifies two distinct yet…
After the publication of Il nome della rosa, Umberto Eco replied to a journalist who asked where the author’s subjectivity could be found in the novel by saying that “the subject is in the adverbs.” What might have sounded like a witty remark was later interpreted by Patrizia Violi as an effective synthesis of an entire…
To narrate means to construct a world. Eco affirms this, and adds that such a world must be “so concrete that one can imagine stepping into it.” A world that stands “before our eyes,” where even the smallest details can be perceived, and that becomes populated with words almost spontaneously, as soon as we visualize…
In his 1976 essay, Umberto Eco retraces the long and fragmented history of reflections on signs, highlighting how semiotics—despite its ancient roots—was persistently marginalized by the scientific establishment. The idea of a science dedicated to the production, exchange, and interpretation of signs is far from new: even pre-Socratic poetry and philosophy had shown an interest…
In Semiotics in Ethics and Caring, Susan Petrilli affirms that an ethical dimension is implicit in every form of human semiosis. Yet only recently has it become a consistent object of semiotic inquiry. Drawing on Thomas A. Sebeok’s notion of global semiotics, she argues that reconnecting semiotics with the life sciences allows the discipline to extend beyond…
In their essay Social Innovation as Rehabiting, Kaie Kotov and Rasmus Pedanik examine the conceptual and theoretical grounds of what has become an increasingly popular research topic across the social sciences. Social innovation, they note, has acquired growing importance in both academic and political discourse, yet it still lacks a stable and coherent theoretical definition. The expression…
According to Per Aage Brandt, a sign is an act or artifact performed by an agent—human or animal—addressed to other agents with the purpose of showing, telling, or signifying something. This very article, he notes, qualifies as a sign. As such, every sign is inherently deictic: it contains an enunciative component, meaning that it points—through its…
Cognitive semiotics addresses a fundamental question: How can we come to know the world through signs and languages? This question lies at the heart of several debates in semiotics, philosophy, and cognitive science, especially those concerning subjectivity, representation, belief, perception, imagination, social cognition, mind, and language. The term “cognitive” is not intended to contrast with emotion or…
Roman Jakobson once observed that “for all human beings, and only for human beings, language is the vehicle of mental life and communication.” Richard L. Lanigan takes this statement as the starting point for exploring how communication theory and semiotics converge as two faces of the same human comportment. His goal is not merely to…