Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language
Author: Umberto Eco
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1986-07-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780253203984

"Eco wittily and enchantingly develops themes often touched on in his previous works, but he delves deeper into their complex nature . . . this collection can be read with pleasure by those unversed in semiotic theory." —Times Literary Supplement

Umberto Eco in His Own Words

Umberto Eco in His Own Words
Author: Torkild Thellefsen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2017-08-21
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1501507141

Hitherto, there has been no book that attempted to sum up the breadth of Umberto Eco’s work and it importance for the study of semiotics, communication and cognition. There have been anthologies and overviews of Eco’s work within Eco Studies; sometimes, works in semiotics have used aspects of Eco’s work. Yet, thus far, there has been no overview of the work of Eco in the breadth of semiotics. This volume is a contribution to both semiotics and Eco studies. The 40 scholars who participate in the volume come from a variety of disciplines but have all chosen to work with a favorite quotation from Eco that they find particularly illustrative of the issues that his work raises. Some of the scholars have worked exegetically placing the quotation within a tradition, others have determined the (epistemic) value of the quotation and offered a critique, while still others have seen the quotation as a starting point for conceptual developments within a field of application. However, each article within this volume points toward the relevance of Eco -- for contemporary studies concerning semiotics, communication and cognition.

Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
Author: V. N. Voloshinov
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 1986
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780674550988

V. N. Volosinov's important work, first published in Russian in 1929, had to wait a generation for recognition. This first paperback edition of the English translation will be capital for literary theorists, philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and many others. Volosinov is out to undo the old disciplinary boundaries between linguistics, rhetoric, and poetics in order to construct a new kind of field: semiotics or textual theory. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik have provided a new preface to discuss Volosinov in relation to the great resurgence of interest in all the writing of the circle of Mikhail Bakhtin.

Victoria Welby and the Science of Signs

Victoria Welby and the Science of Signs
Author: Susan Petrilli
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2017-09-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1351295985

Victoria Welby (1837–1912) dedicated her research to the relationship between signs and values. She exchanged ideas with important exponents of the language and sign sciences, such as Charles S. Peirce and Charles S. Ogden. She examined themes she believed crucially important both in the use of signs and in reflection on signs. But Welby's research can also be understood in ideal dialogue with authors she could never have met in real life, such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Susanne Langer, and Genevieve Vaughan. Welby contends that signifying cannot be constrained to any one system, type of sign, language, field of discourse, or area of experience. On the contrary, it is ever more developed, enhanced, and rigorous, the more it develops across different fields, disciplines, and areas of experience. For example, to understand meaning, Welby evidences the advantage of translating it into another word even from the same language or resorting to metaphor to express what would otherwise be difficult to conceive. Welby aims for full awareness of the expressive potential of signifying resources. Her reflections make an important contribution to problems connected with communication, expression, interpretation, translation, and creativity.

The Philosophy of Umberto Eco

The Philosophy of Umberto Eco
Author: Sara G. Beardsworth
Publisher: Open Court Publishing
Total Pages: 758
Release: 2017-05-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0812699653

The Philosophy of Umberto Eco stands out in the Library of Living Philosophers series as the volume on the most interdisciplinary scholar hitherto and probably the most widely translated. The Italian philosopher’s name and works are well known in the humanities, both his philosophical and literary works being translated into fifteen or more languages. Eco is a founder of modern semiotics and widely known for his work in the philosophy of language and aesthetics. He is also a leading figure in the emergence of postmodern literature, and is associated with cultural and mass communication studies. His writings cover topics such as advertising, television, and children’s literature as well as philosophical questions bearing on truth, reality, cognition, language, and literature. The critical essays in this volume cover the full range of this output. This book has wide appeal not only because of its interdisciplinary nature but also because of Eco’s famous “high and low” approach, which is deeply scholarly in conception and very accessible in outcome. The short essay “Why Philosophy?” included in the volume is exemplary in this regard: it will appeal to scholars for its wit and to high school students for its intelligibility.

A Theory of Semiotics

A Theory of Semiotics
Author: Umberto Eco
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 1979
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780253202178

" . . . the greatest contribution to [semiotics] since the pioneering work of C. S. Peirce and Charles Morris." —Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism " . . . draws on philosophy, linguistics, sociology, anthropology and aesthetics and refers to a wide range of scholarship . . . raises many fascinating questions." —Language in Society " . . . a major contribution to the field of semiotic studies." —Robert Scholes, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism " . . . the most significant text on the subject published in the English language that I know of." —Arthur Asa Berger, Journal of Communication Eco's treatment demonstrates his mastery of the field of semiotics. It focuses on the twin problems of the doctrine of signs—communication and signification—and offers a highly original theory of sign production, including a carefully wrought typology of signs and modes of production.

Beyond Pure Reason

Beyond Pure Reason
Author: B. Gasparov
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2013
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0231157800

Conducting an analysis of Saussure's intellectual heritage, this book links Sassurean notions of cognition, language, and history to early Romantic theories of cognition and the transmission of cultural memory. In particular, several fundamental categories of Saussure's philosophy of language, such as the differential nature of language, the mutability and immutability of semiotic values, and the duality of the signifier and the signified, are rooted in early Romantic theories of 'progressive' cognition and child cognitive development.

Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco
Author: Michael Caesar
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2013-05-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0745665942

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the work and thought of Umberto Eco - one of the most important writers in Europe today.

The Pragmatics and Semiotics of Standard Languages

The Pragmatics and Semiotics of Standard Languages
Author: Albert Sweet
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 1990-10-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0271073535

Sweet describes the pragmatic foundations of standard logic and applies these foundations to the task of developing a theory of intended models as an extension of standard model theory in which the relevant "intending" is represented pragmatically. Methods of formal logic are used to investigate the structure of the relation between language and the world. The truism which holds that this relation includes the speaker as well as the object spoken about is formally explicated and applied to the problem of illuminating one of the deepest phenomena in standard model theory: the existence of non-isomorphic models of complete theories. To this end it is shown that standard logic admits pragmatic foundations upon which a theory of intended models can be built as an extension of standard model theory. The relevant "intending" is represented by the very forms of verbal behavior which determine the grammatical and logical structure of the sentences whose referential meaning is in question. The uniqueness properties of the class of intended models may then be described. The first section of the book states the immediate goal of standard pragmatics as that of recovering the algebraic structure first-order logic by means of a purely pragmatic construction. The second section, the major portion of the work, then provides the foundation for a semiotic theory of intended models and referential meaning. The theory is then applied to the problem of referential indeterminancy, which has been associated with the phenomenon of scientific revolutions. The theory is also applied to the problem of the apparent synonymy of observationally equivalent theories. Sweet concludes that such theories are not referentially synonymous in any natural sense which is analogous to the paradigm sense in which theories of alternative scales of measurement are referentially synonymous. A novel feature of this book is the formal explication of the idea that the factors, pragmatical in nature, which distinguish the actual meaning of a sentence from among its possible meanings, whose range is defined by the manner in which the sentence is parsed, determine that very parsing. Applicability to natural language of the model-theoretic semantics thereby obtained is made possible by another feature of the book: the development of a theory of locally standard grammar which provides the foundation for representing the structure of natural language as that of standard first-order logic, in a local, as distinguished from a global, sense. This book is intended for scholars in logic, semiotics, and the philosophies of language and of science. Those concerned specifically with such philosophers as Peirce, Martin, and Davidson will also find the study valuable.

Beyond the Symbol Model

Beyond the Symbol Model
Author: John Robert Stewart
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 1996-10-17
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780791430842

This interdisciplinary conversation discusses the nature of language.