For Plato, language was the way to cognize the universe. The philosophy of language, which was primarily initiated by Plato in the Cratylus, still has not received answers to the questions settled by this great Greek thinker. In fact, it just offered various solutions formed in different conceptions and approaches in the ancient, scholastic, modern and postmodern periods. The questions raised by Plato in his dialogue have been continued in various nativistic theories of language, especially in works of Noam Chomsky. Language—as it is seen by Plato, i.e., as uniting our inner world with the outer world, is a significant feature of humankind, is still underinvestigated.
The article discusses the issue of proper names defined as symptoms of culture. The first part is of a theoretical character and develops the theory of symptomatology of culture in the context of semiotics (Ch. Peirce), psychology and psychoanalysis (S. Freud and J. Lacan), and onomastics. Symptomatology of culture is a practice of interpreting a certain group of texts of culture and extracting common qualitative traits within them. This is especially in the case of those traits specific to them and often encountered, which could testify to particular serious and deeply-rooted social phenomena leading to their appearance. In the empirical part the author presents a way of using (onymic) symptomatology in practice to research modern culture. She uses the examples of popular psychological and auto-therapeutic guidebooks and treats them as linguistic symptomatic forms of the most significant linguistic and cultural phenomena along with their social causes and functions which are often dysfunctional or abnormal in character. The analysis comprises the most typical conceptual and syntactic constructions encountered in the group.
In this text the author reflects on the semiotic existence of culture discourses in connection with the rapid development of digital technology. The author analyzes selected texts of digital art as examples of the transformation in how works of literature, sculpture, or film exist. The article covers how movable font, which changes in shape and color, participates in shaping literary meanings; the creation of semiotic and interactive figures; the textualization of the user’s actions and body; dematerialization; processuality; narrativization; the temporalizing of sculpture which changes before the eyes of the recipient; the presence of alternative narratives in literature and film; multi-variant plots co-created by the recipient; and the artistic use of other discourses. The author proves that the structure and specificity of the digital sign lies at the base of the changes. The digital sign is immaterial, programmable, and hybrid, and combines aspects of expression, meaning, and action, which makes it efficient.
Professor Jerzy Pelc was the creator and long-time manager of the Department of Logical Semiotics, University of Warsaw. He also founded the Polish Society of Semiotics. He published six own books, among others Studies in Functional Logical Semiotics of Natural Language (1971; in English); he edited also dozens of volumes of Semiotic Studies and Library of Semiotic Thought. As Kotarbiński, his master, and Twardowski, the master of his master, Professor Pelc was a radical rationalist. This radical rationalism has linked him to atheism, anti-communism, a distance to politics, and a frown on the falsehood of public life. He was a great patriot – in his life and in his work. He considered himself a successor of the Lvov-Warsaw School tradition. In the field of metaphysics, Professor Pelc combined theoretical minimalism with anti-rationalist attitudes, including the postulate of precision and the requirement of criticism. The main field of his interest was logical – and broader: theoretical – semiotics. He advocated and largely developed the functional concept of signs. To traditional paradigms of research: historical, teleological, causal and prognostic ones – Professor Pelc has added a semiotic paradigm, determined by the question “What does it mean that p?”. Referring to the interdisciplinary fashion for interdisciplinary research, he conducted an analysis of the notion of INTERDISCIPLINARITY. In ontology, he analyzed the notions of OBJECT and CAUSALITY. In his approach, aesthetics was treated form a semiotic point of view: he sought mainly ways to logically rewrite its terminology. In particular, he reconstructed the main aesthetic notions: FORM and IDEOLOGY (of literary works), THEME, MOTIVE, METAPHOR and (literary) FICTION – as well as semiotic notions essential to the description of literary arts, namely the notions of ASSERTION and INTENSIONALITY. In the field of ethics, Professor Pelc declared himself as an advocate of the ideal of trustworthy guardian, which he took over from his teacher, Kotarbiński. In metaethics, he analyzed the notions of NORM, EVALUATION and HUMANITY. A master of Polish: beautiful Polish – he was certainly a true humanist.
The article tackles issues of the pedagogy of place, with a special emphasis on the urban context. On the basis of fundamental theses asserting that a city is a text (Vladimir Toporov) and that places are pedagogical (Maria Mendel) – the author concentrates on symbols. Definition of this concept, as well as de3 nitions of its particular exemplifications, create a theoretical basis for further practical considerations. Presenting methodology of a research project Reading the City (Czytanie miasta) conducted in the years 2015–2016, the author creates new research challenges for pedagogues. Presentation of wide variety of city symbolism, encompassing both cultural manifestations (towers, bridges) and a realm of nature (mountains, river), leads to proposed educational applications. Descriptions of realized animations based on research form a summary of this article.
This article examines the contribution of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics to semiotic studies of history, with the main focus on the work of Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky.
For several decades of the last century, semiotic arrangements enriched the sociology of culture. The aim of the article is to show the achievements of the empirical school of sociology of culture in the perspective of the significant semiotic issues on the example of selectively selected works of the eminent scientist Antonina Kłoskowska and the “Łódź school” which she created. Thanks to Antonina Kłoskowska, the empirical way of the “Łódź school” sociology of culture led from literature reception research to visual arts research. Her students made a significant contribution to Polish sociology of art, sociology of literature, sociology of film, sociology of theater, and visual sociology. The text attempts to sketch semiotic theoretical inspirations, a characteristic theoretical and methodological approach to the study of symbolic culture. The problems of research on the reception of works were described in the context of selected studies on film reception. The starting point was the empirical research of Antonina Kłoskowska regarding the reception of the screening of the Wedding (dir. A. Wajda, 1973).
The article highlights the significance of the first full English translation of Naqd al-Hitāb ad-Dīnī (Critique of Religious Discourse), one of the most characteristic and important works of the acclaimed Egyptian intellectual Nāsr Hāmid Abū Zayd (1943–2010). The work was firstly published in 1992 by Sīnā li-an-Našr in Cairo, coinciding with the beginning of the so-called Case of Abū Zayd (1992–1995), the campaign of Egyptian fundamentalists against the scholar. Abū Zayd’s critique of the dominant discourses and worldviews in the Arab world, created both by the Islamic fundamentalists and so-called Islamic left, has gained huge acclaim in the international academia but so far there has not been a full translation of the work into English (also taking into account the important role of the full German edition published by Chérifa Magdi and Navid Kermani in 1996). In 2018 Jonathan Wright’s translation was published by Yale University Press in the series “World Thought in Translation”. The edition was enriched by Carool Kersten’s scholarly introduction. The following article discusses the translation dilemma regarding Naqd… (e.g. problems with finding equivalents for Arabic semiotic and hermeneutical terminology utilised by the Egyptian scholar), giving examples of the choices made by the translator. Adding to it, the more general issues of the impact of Abū Zayd’s work on the contemporary rereading of Arab-Islamic turāt are analysed.
The article consists of two parts. In the first one (introductory) I recall—following Edmund Husserl, Stanisław Ossowski and Adam Schaff—the main formulations of the “principle of transparency of the sign.” In these formulations it is usually said about (1) the transparency of the sign regarding objects denoted by the sign (denoted, designated and/or named), or (2) the transparency of the sign regarding its meaning (respectively, events, states of affairs and facts designated by the sign). However, as Husserl pointed out, one can also speak about (3) the transparency of the sign in relations to the activities and mental states of the sign’s users (senders and recipients). After all, only due to the transparency of the sign understood in this way, it is possible for people to communicate with each other, thus the sign can also has an expressive and communicative function. In turn, the second part of the article (essential) contains a reconstruction of the Leon Koj’s approach; Koj gave a consistently formalized form to the theory of sign based on the principle of transparency— the form of an axiomatized logical system (using Quine's formalism from his Mathematical Logic). One of Koj's main goals was also to indicate the close relationship between semantics and pragmatics, and even the primacy of pragmatics over semantics. Formal-logical tools have also shown that the theory of sign based on the principle of transparency neither contravene The Law of Non-Contradiction (at least in its psychological formulation), nor contain or imply semantic antinomies such us antinomy of the liar. Because it is a theory easily negotiable with Alfred Tarski’s theory of language levels.