具身认知科学对传统认知科学的元理论突破

作为认知科学的一个新取向,具身认知科学对传统认知科学有很大的突破。其中在元理论上,突破第一代认知科学作为思想基础的身心二元论,取而代之的是身心一体论和身心辨证统一论;突破人是机器的基本论断,提出人是人,与动物和机器不同,具有机器和动物所不具有的意向性和具身性,能够提问,能够沉思他们存在的意义,能够批判地反省其生命的意义,以使其行为方式发生变革;突破语言学哲学尤其是其重要理论形态逻辑实证主义,以心智哲学为指导思想。正是元理论突破,使得具身认知科学建构了与传统认知科学不同的体系,在理论、方法论、研究领域和研究方法等诸多方面都有新的突破。     

A critical discourse analysis of 2008 advertising campaigns against software piracy in South Africa

Abstract

This article examines the discursive landscape of anti-piracy campaigns run by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) on behalf of major global software companies. Using semiotic techniques, rhetorical analysis and critical discourse analysis, the article demonstrates the primacy of new capitalism in reinforcing the public understanding of global knowledge economy. But the BSA's strategies and tactics are also found to offer mixed discursive messages, possibly attenuating a major objective of any communication campaign: social behaviour change.     

Semiotizing a product into a brand

A product is simply something that is material or substance of some kind. In order to be transformed into a brand with its own code of meanings and system of rhetorical allusions, it needs to be semiotized. And the marketing and advertising industries have become semioticians in this sense, semiotizing a product by assigning it a name, a visual sign (logo), a system of language forms (slogan, taglines, etc.), and then textualizing the brand by creating appropriate ads and commercials for it. This paper will show how this network of semiotizing events coheres into an overall macrotext to produce the brand as a sign system.     

Brands as semiotic molecular entities

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the understanding of how brands are a phenomenon endowed with signs and meanings. From the background of Peirce's process of representation a model is developed that characterises brands as a network with three semiotic dimensions. Signs of brands spread out in the markets and establish relations of dependence between different elements. Brands can be defined through the wholeness of these semiotic elements and their relations, resembling a molecule. Thus, it is proposed that brands can be regarded as tridimensional molecule-shaped networks of semiotic elements that evolve through continuous processes of representation. The implications of the model are discussed and the article ends with suggestions for future research.     

The interpersonal voice: applying appraisal to the rap and sung voice

Following in the traditions of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and social semiotics, this paper applies the linguistic system of appraisal to the mode of sound. More specifically, it aims to describe and compare the interpersonal properties of the rap and sung performance voices. In doing so, this paper also aims to provide analysts with a systematic, principled method by which to identifying interpersonal meanings in sound. Drawing on various aspects of the appraisal framework, and the respective sound features of the rap and sung voice, this paper offers three approaches. The first approach employs the grammatical frames used to classify the attitude sub-systems of affect, judgment, and appreciation. The second approach is more general in scope and analogizes from the sound systems of melody, time, and voice quality to the appraisal systems of attitude, engagement, and graduation, respectively. The third approach applies the concept of binding to the distinctive sounds of the rap and sung voice. The paper concludes by considering some future directions for this research.     

The Lord of the Rings and New Zealand: fantasy pilgrimages,imaginative transnationalism and the semiotics of the (Ir)Real

Peter Jackson's decision to make the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films in his native New Zealand has given the country a major boost in tourism, but this has also become the paradigm of a new imaginative transformation of landscapes. The zeal with which many tourists visit these sites has similarities to the religious pilgrimage, not only in terms of the degree of enthusiasm invoked, but also in rituals of knowledge, ardour and “spiritual” envisioning. The global fantasy industry thus fosters alternative and dualistic engagements with the land that have come to contest the cultural and physical engagement with and even access to the land, as well as exacerbating the existing racial politics, particularly in smaller and more vulnerable nations such as New Zealand. What might be called the “(ir)realist” semiotics of fantasy – with its own cultural hegemony disguised as playful dualism – becomes a notable form of global remapping, often with positive benefits, but also with dangers to local cultures and identities.     

Observatory's linguistic landscape: semiotic appropriation and the reinvention of space

Using a longitudinal ethnographic study of the linguistic landscape (LL) in Observatory's business corridor of Lower Main Road, the paper explores changes brought about by the influx of immigrant Africans, their artefacts and language practices. The paper uses the changes in the LL over time and the development of an “African Corner” within Lower Main Road, to illustrate the appropriation of space and the unpredictability, which comes along with highly mobile, technological and multicultural citizens. It is argued that changes in the LL are part of the act of claiming and appropriating space wherein space becomes summarily recontexualized and hence reinvented and “owned” by new actors. It is also argued that space ownership can be concealed through what we have called “brand anonymity” strategies in which the identity of the owner is deliberately concealed behind global brands. We conclude that space is pliable and mobile, and that, it is the people within space who carve out new social practices in their appropriated space.     

Visualization of “people” in Soviet Estonian public photographs of the Stalinist era

The main purpose of this article is to elaborate some conceptual tools for clearer analysis of social reality, power relations and their visual representations. One of these instruments through which power relations are established in society is photography. The paper focuses on different strategies by which, in photography, the “people” are constructed as a homogeneous whole of specific historical self-reflection of culture. The first part of the paper discusses the relationship between the theory of hegemony as elaborated by Ernesto Laclau and the semiotics of culture of Yuri Lotman. The ground for believing this incorporation of the two thinkers to be successful is the very apparent theoretical congeniality between them. They both belong to the Saussurean ontological terrain. The second part of the paper tries to develop a bridge between the given theoretical framework, especially Laclau's concept of empty signifier and Barthes's concepts of studium/punctum, and “iconic photograph” from visual rhetoric. I will distinguish four hegemonical strategies of signification: visual naming, dominant text, code text, and dominant language. The analysed material is taken from Stalin-era soviet Estonia's newspaper and magazine photographs.     

Chav-spotting in Britain: the representation of social class as private choice

The word chav is a relatively new one in British English, used to describe a supposed social group defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a young person of a type characterised by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-style clothes … usually with connotations of a low social status”. Discourse on chavs in contemporary Britain has been widely implicated in the reinforcement of social inequalities. This article argues that a central element of such discourse is the representation of “everyday” British public experience as a practice of chav-spotting, of reading materials as signs of the private characteristics of those with which they are associated. This means reading class as a privately motivated phenomenon, as the product of the “choice incompetence” of chavs. This chav-spotting practice is viewed from two perspectives: (1) as a recontextualisation of class as the result of private choice; and (2) as a practice of sign-making by which meanings are articulated for publicly observable materials in accordance with (1).     

The semiotics of religious space in Second Life®

Scholarly research on the religious dimension of Second Life® can be conducted with reference to several elements: ties between the religious dimension of Second Life and that of the “First Life” (an approach privileged by the sociology and the psychology of religion); the transcendent value inherent in the creation of an alternative reality (an approach favored by the philosophy of religion); the enunciation of a “virtual” religious dimension through the digital artifacts of Second Life (an approach promoted by aesthetics, phenomenology, and semiotics); and so forth. Adopting the point of view of cultural semiotics, the paper summarizes the results of a “virtual” ethno-semiotic participant observation conducted over six months in portions of the digital “metaverse” of Second Life where a religious dimension is predominant. The consequent analysis of digital places of worship singles out five main characteristics of their aesthetics, phenomenology, and semiotics: isolation, prototypicality, didacticism, anarchy, and parasitism.