Bath seminar May 7-8 2012
Bath seminar abstracts

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Bath seminar abstracts

Semiotics as Philosophy for Education, Seminar 2

Abstracts

Monday 7^th May

Mats Bergman, Helsinki University: ‘Epistemic Virtues in Speculative Rhetoric’

The field of speculative rhetoric–the third branch of C. S. Peirce’s semeiotic or “logic in the broad sense”–can be broadly reconstructed as integrating philosophical studies of communication, learning, and methods of inquiry. Rather than being a secondary application that a theoretician could safely ignore, the complex rhetorical field can be viewed as both the pre-theoretical starting point and the principal theoretical end of philosophical semeiotic. Arguably, the ultimate aim of rhetoric–which Peirce strikingly characterises as “the highest and most living branch of logic”–ought to be the improvement of semiotic habits. This goal can also be construed as the third and highest conception of learning implied by his philosophy.

This emphasis on the improvement of habits highlights the normative nature of Peircean rhetoric. Speculative rhetoric is not only a branch of semeiotic; as logic in the full sense, it is also significantly dependent on ethics and esthetics as understood by Peirce. This reliance is perhaps better characterised as one of interdependence; the speculative rhetorician is in effect also an ethicist and esthetician. A closer examination of this normative relationship, and what it may entail in the practice of education and learning, is therefore needed. Here, it will be argued that Peircean rhetoric, so interpreted, points toward a variant of virtue epistemology; the ideals discovered and developed in in the esthetic and ethical phase of semiotic inquiry can be fruitfully construed as epistemic virtues. What the Peircean point of view in particular highlights is the fact that such virtues are at heart also pragmatic virtues, inherently bound to the forms of practice from which they emerge and which they produce as ultimate interpretants.

Inna Semetsky, University of Waikato: ‘Taking a semiotic turn: a bodymind approach to education’

Educational philosophy in English-speaking countries tends to be informed mainly by analytic philosophy common in Western tradition. An welcome alternative is provided by pragmatism in the tradition of Peirce, James, and Dewey. Still the habit of the so-called “linguistic turn” has a firm grip. Analytic philosophy of language grounded in the logic of non-contradiction (excluded middle) presented verbal signs as the sole means of directly representing reality.

In education, integrative–bodymind–approaches are usually delegated to Eastern traditions and philosophies (Tao, Yoga, Buddhism), while Western thinking is habitually equated with rationality and logical reason. So Western philosophy and education alike continue to suffer from the great bifurcation between body and mind.

In this presentation I want to explore what I call the semiotic turn. Importantly, the semiotic turn is not illogical. My thesis is that it is logic as semiotics (that is, the logic of the included middle) that foregrounds bodymind learning. The process of reasoning however is indirect or mediated; it involves interpretation versus direct representation, it is analogical and connects what otherwise are doomed to remain two separate Cartesian substances of body versus mind thereby contrasting knowledge and action.

Using examples from Dewey, Deleuze, and Nel Noddings, I will demonstrate how the bodymind assemblage is created in practice and what may be the ethical implications of such a stance for educational philosophy.

Torill Strand, Østfold University College & University of Oslo, Norway: ‘“Experience is our only teacher”. A Peircean reading of Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire ‘

Wim Wender’s film Wings of Desire tells a story of an angel who wishes to become mortal in order to know the simple joy of human experience. Told from the angel’s point of view, the film is shot in black and white. But at the very instant the angel perceives the realities of human experience, the film blossoms into color. In this paper, I take this film to illustrate and explore Peirce’s notion of experience and his claim that “experience is our only teacher”.

In his 1903 Harvard lectures, Peirce placed phenomenology at the heart of his philosophy, while outlining a notion of “experience” that clearly integrates his semiotics, phenomenology and pragmatism.

To Peirce, experience is a “brutally produced conscious effect” that comes “out of practice” and is a “forcibel modification of our ways of thinking”. But as this modification is generated by the actions and flows of signs, it Peirce’s notion of experience needs to be read parallel to his notion of semiosis. Consequently, a peircean reading of Wings of Desire not only helps to explore the rudeness of lived experience, but also how such experience cannot be fully understood without considering the sign’s action.

Eetu Pikkarainen, University of Oulu, ‘Semiotic Theory of Education and Semiotic Research of Teaching’

In this paper I will first shortly summarize the main structure of the philosophical theory outline of action theoretical semiotic view of education. According to this view, education means the process of developing competencies for human action. The core problem in this view is that human action should be from on hand suitable for the structures of environment but at the same time autonomous. Especially this is problematic for teaching and educational action generally because the educator should direct and restrict the action of educandee in such a manner which would promote the autonomy, freedom and responsibility of the latter. The main task and problem in the empirical research of education is how to analyze and make visible those features of the lively situations which are central from this educational theoretical point of view. I will make a trial use of Greimassian meaning analysis methods which are earlier utilized mainly to the action in literary texts (‘paper action’) but also to action in theatrical play.

Sébastien Pesce–Université de Cergy-Pontoise/IUFM: ‘Edusemiotics as a framework for teachers’ lifelong training and practice analysis’

Edusemiotics offer a new perspective on educational settings: another way of thinking communication, learning and teaching. For this reason, this emerging theoretical model constitutes a fruitful framework for teachers’ training and practice analysis.

In this presentation, my aim is to describe an ongoing experiment, implemented with several groups of teachers and educators, in the context of practice analysis sessions. The goal of such sessions is to use Peirce’s pragmaticism and semiotics to accompany teachers and educators in the development of what has been described as a “semiotic consciousness” (Tochon, 2002): semiotic consciousness implies the awareness of: a) the variety of signs which structure our semiotic environment; b) the major role played by these signs in learning and teaching processes; c) the way semiosic processes occur in educational contexts. Another key idea of these sessions is that teachers and educators, while building a new view on education, develop radically new ways of fulfilling their mission.

In my presentation, I will stress the following aspects of this experiment:

1/. The origins of such practice analysis methods (a part of this methodology is based on existing methods, which have been transformed in order to make the most of Peirce’s semiotics), among which Noël Denoyel’s “GAEP” —Groupe d’Analyse de l’Experience Pragmatique— (Denoyel & Pesce, 2009).

2/. The way sessions are actually organized (steps of the process, training aids used, theretical models)

3/. The links between analysis and the actual transformation of “professional gestures” and teachers’ practices, made possible by a process of “action-research based training” (“recherche-action-formation”)

Christiane Moro, University of Lausanne: ‘How to re-think psychological development from preverbal period onward in a semiotic perspective ?’

In developmental psychology, semiotic approaches are still rare and, when they exist, their field of research mainly concern linguistic development (e.g. Bronckart, Bruner, Nelson). Very few researchers are interested to develop a whole culture-inclusive (Cole, 1996) semiotic perspective of development including semiotico-material systems (e.g. objects artifacts and their uses through gestures) from preverbal period onward (Moro, 2000 : 2011 : Moro & Rodríguez, in prep. ; Rodríguez & Moro, 2008). In my talk, I will argue that to understand development from a semiotic point of view, it is necessary to investigate the variety and complexity of semiotic systems including these semiotico-material systems and their interactions with the so-called symbolic systems (mainly language) in which infants and pupils are involved in various ordinary institutional contexts (everyday life, semi-formal and formal at school) all along development.

I will argue that a semiotic approach in developmental psychology needs to be grounded in an outside-in conception of development where culture and education are the conditions of possibility. To understand how children/pupils develop, it is necessary to rearticulate communication and cognition and to take into account that the entry in cultural semiotic systems have to be guided by other people, as public meaning doesn’t tell us what it is and progressively needs to be reconstructed and shared through signs. The innovative ideas expressed by Vygotski (1934/1997 : Moro & Schneuwly, 1997) about thought, language and semiotic mediation, needs to be extended to other semiotic systems, and more specifically, to those semiotic systems which include objects artifacts and their uses, which could be considered either as a source or a resource for psychological development.

Through exemples issued from works realised in Lausanne (in early infancy, e.g. Moro & Rodríguez, 2005 : 2008, and development at school age, Moro & Joannes, accepted : Moro & Tapparel, in prep. : Moro & Decosterd, in prep.), after a brief review of the question of semiotic systems in the fields of philosophy and sciences such as linguistics, semiotics and psychology, I will discuss the necessity to re-think semiotic systems in the context of ordinary multimodal activities in educational and institutional contexts. Then, I will illustrate how Peirce’s semiotics allows us to elaborate a new analytic perspective by following the meaning-making processes which is going on in everyday life or in classroom activities through signs. Finally I will show how microgenesis help the research by maintaining the time sequence of the data and allows us to access semiotical shifts and movements which produce development.

Alin Olteanu, University of Bath: ‘The Sign: suprasubjective being’

My investigation on the role of Icons in the process of learning is embedded in a tradition called Doctrine of Signs (Deely, 1982, 2000a, 2000b) which can also legitimately be refered to as realist semiotics. A first step in this investigation on Icons consists in understanding and framing epistemologically this paradigm. I consider that the Doctrine of Signs can serve as a proper starting point for postmodern philosophy. My arguementation consists in three phases. The first phase is realising and explaining that modernist philosophy has tended to produce unnecessarily clear-cut dualisms like mind/body, thought/belief or epistemology/ontology which probably have their origin in the essential characteristic of modern thought that considered being to be that which is objectified by the mind and that the mind can only comprehend the mind’s own makings. The second phase consists in comparing two alternative accounts of postmodern philosophy: the mainly semiological approach of Jean-François Lyotard and John Deely’s interpretation of Peircean semiotics and his proposal of considering Charles Peirce the first of the postmoderns (Deely 2000a). In modernity and before, philosophers, except some genuine exceptions, acknowledged that there is an ontological difference between mind-dependent and mind-independent being. Peirce’s Doctrine of signs, as John Deely would argue (Deely, 1982, 2000a, 2000b), does not make any more this nominalistic clear-cut. The third phase of this paper consists in arguing that the Doctrine of Signs, as revitalised by Peirce has a proper historical tradition that recommends it as a good candidate for postmodern philosophy. The realist semiotics of Charles Peirce is a recovery of the lost pre-modern debate on signs. Finally, this paper argues that a postmodernity of a semiotic realist fashion can bring to light the revolutionary realization that being is the sign-relation and along with it a logic which will have a much broader grasp of the concept of Being (Nöth & Santaella, 2011).

Andrew Stables, University of Bath: ‘Rationalism/Empiricism/Semiotics: is Peirce a fully semiotic thinker?’

In rejecting thoroughgoing mind-body dualism, semiotics has the potential to offer ontological and epistemological perspectives that resolve the conflicts between (pure) rationalism and (pure) empiricism. Of course, this is not a straightforward matter, as neither rationalism nor empiricism is ever ‘pure’. For example, Plato emphasised the importance of physical training, while Locke and Hume acknowledged mental capacity in turning ‘impressions’ into ‘ideas’. Nevertheless, it is claimed, for example by Deely, that Peirce offers a radical break from a dualistic modernist tradition. The question for present consideration is therefore that of how far Peirce offers an alternative to the rationalist and empiricist traditions. The discussion will focus on Peirce’s response to six claims of Kant (the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge, the contextualisation of the empirical within the rational, the claim of universal subjectivity, the inevitability of triadic vs. dyadic models, the noumenon/phenomenon divide, and moral absolutism) and two of Hegel (spiritual progress and the importance of agonism). I will suggest that Peirce’s thinking is not as far from the rationalist tradition as is sometimes claimed. To misquote Heidegger, for Peirce, Semiotics is the House of Reason; for Stables, Reason is (merely) a Tenant in the House of Semiosis. Following Hume, I argue that experience cannot be shown to be ultimately subject to reason, though human experience (at least) inevitably involves reasoning and must be approached semiotically on that basis.

It should also be stressed that this is not a Realism vs. Relativism argument, as it has sometimes been construed, since most realists are relativistic in certain respects, and most relativists are not anti-realist. Entities may not be differentiated at the noumenal level, so Peirce’s appeal to the Object is of little use in resolving the fundamental metaphysical issue. It would, therefore, be naïve to contrast Peircean realism with, say, semiological nominalism. Rather, both Peircean and Continental traditions can inform the development of a fully semiotic approach to epistemology, ethics or education, as can British empiricism and Humean scepticism.

Tuesday 8^th May

Michael Schneider, University of Applied Arts, Vienna: ‘Printing around the Globe’

Discussing transformative reception as element of creativity and a possible explanation for cultural invention and its practical application within art education. The conceptual base of my artwork is in part built on the process of transformative reception as a globally active engine of cultural invention that is visible especially in

the field of printmaking, a genre that may be considered the origin of media art. Since the discovery of the means to multiply and consequently publish images, printmaking has created innumerable images that have become part of the collective memory in their respective communities. The tradition, travel and transformation of these images through time, societies and cultures has become an invaluable resource for the development of understanding of the field for aspiring artists who study printmaking.

One telling example that proved to be useful when teaching printmaking is popular playing cards. Invented in China, the cards moved to Persia, later to the Mediterranean See, made it to Spain and Italy, crossed the Pyrenees and the Alps, spread out on European ships all over the globe and made their way also back to Asia.

With every transgression into a new culture, iconographic change became evidence of the transformation process that shows how misunderstanding is as valuable for the creation of new forms and images as understanding. Transformative reception is evident in almost all creation of visual art, historic and contemporary.

The process, often mistaken for copying, is increasingly endangered by intellectual property and copyright laws. This process is, however, of importance for the acquisition of skills, experience and understanding that enable young artists to learn how to visualize their ideas within a framework that allows communication through their art.

Derek Pigrum: ‘Desire and Deixis in ‘Multi-Mode’ Transitional Notation: Towards a Semiotic Philosophy of Education’

Transitional ‘multi-mode’ notation is projected towards something it seeks to grasp, modify and develop, an uncertain and intermediate object that often employs the triad of signs that Peirce termed the iconic, symbolic and indexical. But transitional notation remains pervasively incomplete, what the author has termed ‘das Gegenwerk’, or the work towards the work that avoids definitive closure. In this respect transitional notation has vital links to Benjamin’s notion of the ‘Dialectical Image’ some of which are explored in the paper in terms of the author’s ‘recognition’ of the unfolding combination of writing and figural relief produced by ancient Egyptian and Babylonian cylindrical seals and Hebraic scrolls. As in previous papers, an exemplar of transitional ‘multi-mode’ notation is examined and related to semiotic philosophy of education. Based on this reflection, and following, Lyotard (2011), the paper situates the event of ‘multi-mode’ transitional notation ‘in the vacant space opened up by desire’ (Lyotard, 2011, p.18), of the lack associated with desire as setting the Deixis, or showing, of transitional ‘multi-mode’ notation to work. As in previous papers, the author returns to a prior idea or formulation, this time the importance Heidegger placed on the ‘ready-to-hand’, and reframes it through a theoretical shift in perspective The paper also compares and contrasts Heidegger’s notion of the ready-to hand, and Wittgenstein’s ideas on unproblematic, non-interpretative immediate understanding, with Peirce’s notions of ‘firstness’, ‘secondness’ and ‘thirdness’. The paper views transitional notation as constitutive of experience and Peirce’s notion of habit change, of sign use located in the gap between desire, intentions and effects, inscriptions and significations, presence and representation. Finally the broader cultural shift in emphasis from the work to notation that Lammert (2008) comments on and which Steiner ( 2011) has termed our fascination with ‘the open ended, la forma aperta’ is conceived of as being particularly relevant for semiotic philosophy of education.

Michael Marshall, Institute of Education (UK): ‘Why are some art schools endorsing Neo-Thomism? Questions put to John Deely’s biosemiotics on behalf of postgraduate practitionership programmes in Fine Art’

Most academic philosophers, like most artists, are inclined to paint the same painting or retail the same set notion over and over again. Even as stellar a habitué of academe as John Deely, conversant as he is with forms of scholarship that avowedly prefigure the Modern, can be seen as repeating himself, often literally, in the emphatic pursuance of his intellectual itinerary. That the destination of this circuit must always be a commitment to a religious idea; and though that idea may be properly understood as articulating the Mediaeval discourse of theology from which a professional philosophy emerged: such caveats may nonetheless remain obscure to the artist-student embarking on a doctoral programme for which she has to conjure an endorsed theoretical context to place alongside (or ‘map’) her practice.

So why is semiotic taught at art schools? Having evolved my attitude towards both Saussaurean and Peircean traditions by worrying at this very question, while addressing the variants for successive generations of visual art students, I have long felt the assumed reason for their curricular inclusion misconceived or specious. I came in fact to approach semiotic as a thought experiment, a disciplinary study with no obvious utility in practical terms.

While some of this determined neutrality stems directly from the fraught problematic of art schools’ absorption into the higher education system of the university (from 1960 onwards); yet another strand of resoluteness is stiffened by the Deelyan disavowal of the entire course of philosophical Modernity, in favour of the Postmodernity that retrieves a highly developed Late Scholastic discourse of semiotics.

If it is not particularly amenable to meet him on this ground, it will be perhaps more so in his 1971 work The Tradition via Heidegger, and various other remarks addressed to Heidegger throughout his published corpus.

Winfried Nöth (Catholic University of São Paulo and University of Kassel): ‘Processes of Semiosis in Second Language Learning’

In several passages of his writings, Charles S. Peirce has illustrated his theory and the process of semiosis in general by examples from second language vocabulary teaching and learning. The insights conveyed in these passages are not meant as contributions to the psychology of second language learning. Instead, they elucidate more fundamental semiotic implications of the teaching, learning, and acquisition of new knowledge. The paper is a study of these implications. It shows how icons, indices, and symbols are essential, very different, but necessarily complementary signs in the process of foreign language learning, and it examines semiotic prerequisites of the learning as well as sign processing in general, such as experience and collateral knowledge.

Marina Morani, University of Cardiff: ‘Umberto Eco’s Textual Cooperation Theory and some suggested insights into literary interpretation within an educational context’

The presentation aims to reflect on Umberto Eco’s Interpretive Semiotics suggesting that an examination of its key concepts and ideas may raise some interesting contributions to a Philosophy for Education.

Throughout his vast production of works, Eco has extensively explored the dynamic process of interpretation. Grounded on the concept of infinite semiosis developed by Charles S. Peirce, Eco’s idea of interpretation emerges by considering his Textual Cooperation Theory on the pragmatics of texts. According to Eco, every text presupposes a model of competence coming from the reader’s “encyclopaedia” necessary to actualise its meaning (Eco, 1979, 1990, 1992). At the same time, the text works to build up, by merely textual means, such a competence. Therefore, every text always foresees and constructs a “model reader” who is able to “cooperate” with the text in a specific generative manner. After providing an overview on the complex interrelations between reader, author and text explored in Eco’s works, my proposal is then to consider the practice of literary interpretation within an educational context by addressing the following questions: is the “model reader” of a literary text re-framed whenever the interpretation occurs in an educational context? To what extent an “over-interpretation” may be elicited and declared acceptable?

Kris Rutten and Ronald Soetaert, Ghent University: ‘A fully rhetorical perspective on education. Revisiting Kenneth Burke’s Linguistic Approaches to Problems of Education’

In our research and teaching we explore the value and the place of rhetoric in education. In our previous paper for the Semiotics and Education Network we introduced rhetoric as a major turn that offers a meta-perspective for the related linguistic, cultural, anthropological, narrative and semiotic... turns. We specifically want to confront the semiotic and rhetorical turn, embedded in the analysis of the rhetorical turn in Pierce’s later work as described by Colapietro (2007) and as elaborated upon by Pesce (2011).

In this paper we want to elaborate on what a ‘fully’ rhetorical perspective can imply for education. Specifically we will focus on ‘new rhetoric’ in general and the work of Kenneth Burke in particular to explore what can be learned from rhetoric about language, culture and education in a post- (or anti-) foundational world.

There is a small but growing body of work that revisits Kenneth Burke’s essay Linguistic Approaches to Problems of Education (Enoch, 2004; Zappen, 2009; Rutten 2010; Smudde 2010). However, there is need for a further exploration of the “educational potential” of Burke’s educational theory, specifically in relation to different traditions within curriculum theorizing. The relationship between rhetoric and education has a long historical background, which goes back to the rhetorical curriculum of the Greek Sophists. Classical rhetorical education aimed to form citizens for an emerging democratic society. The seminal work on paideia by Werner Jaeger (1945) has offered new ways for understanding these ideals of Greek culture and was at the same time very influential in the revival of the idea of Bildung (from Humboldt to Klafki).

In this paper, we will revisit the classical rhetorical curriculum (paideia) by introducing concepts from Kenneth Burke’s LAPE and relating these perspectives to modern conceptions of Bildung (e.g. Hopmann and Riquarts, 2000; Biesta, 2002). We will explore how these perspectives can function as an “educational answer” to a world that is increasingly changing and becoming ever more complex.