Paris seminar programme 3-4 Oct. 2011

SEMINAR “SEMIOSIS AND EDUCATION”

Semiotics as Philosophy for Education – 3/4 Oct. 2011 - Université de Cergy-Pontoise / Gennevilliers

Programme

Andrew Stables (Bath, UK) – Peirce, Saussure and the Limits of Semiosis

To what extent can all living be understood as semiotic engagement? Where does the pre-semiotic end and the semiotic begin? The dominant Peircean tradition of philosophical semiotics variously adopts Peirce’s triadic scheme in which Firstness and the Object are assumed, though they can, by definition, not be identified. The Continental semiological tradition, drawing on Saussure, stresses relations of signs to signs without recourse to an explanation of the link to the presemiotic. Adherents of the former may regard those of the latter as dangerously relativist, but structuralists and poststructuralists may point to extreme variations in interpretations of Peirce as evidence that relativism cannot be overcome.

My ‘fully semiotic’ argument is that this problem can be seen as symptomatic of a crude mind-body dualism that understands signs as the activity of minded human beings only and mere signals (in the limited sense of ‘that which occasions action’) as the activity of non-minded brute nature, including the non-biological. Dewey, for example, challenged mind-body dualism but not the sign-signal dualism that, thus construed, is its inevitable corollary. To problematize this distinction is to raise questions about the limits of semiosis and of rationality. Understanding these limits is important in dealing with the problem of the non-rational sentient being: the child, the demented and the animal.

Winfried Nöth (Kassel, Germany/Sao Paulo, Brasil) – Signs as educators: Peircean insights

According to C. S. Peirce, it is in the nature of a sign to create, as its interpretant, “a perhaps more developed sign” and thus “to convey some further information” concerning the object which it represents (CP 2.228, 2.231; 1897, 1910). These semiotic premises have educational implications. Not only communication is fundamentally educative, as Dewey declared in 1897, but the signs by means of which we communicate are too. They are not only the instruments of those who use them in communication but semiotic agents on their own. By creating interpretants, signs are teachers of their interpreters, who learn from them through observation. Furthermore, signs are also teachers of themselves since they evince a potential of self-correction which Peirce interprets as their “vital power of self-control” (CP 5.582, 1898). In this respect, signs are so to speak self-teaching learners. 

The power of signs to educate depends on the sign type. The educational potential of signs is the inverse of their degree of semioticity. Genuine symbols, the signs of the highest degree of semioticity, are unable to teach new knowledge about the objects they represent (unless these objects are themselves symbols) since they are related to their objects by habits, whereas the acquisition of new knowledge means changing a semiotic habit. Indices (signs of secondness) cannot teach knowledge since they are uninformative being only able to show. Icons (signs of firstness), especially diagrams and metaphors, are best suited for teaching world knowledge. Only they are able to teach new insights about the objects they represent. 

It is true that educational discourse is largely verbal discourse and hence consists of symbols when their signs are considered individually, but in any verbal and even more so in educational discourse, verbal symbols can only be understood if they become icons and indices in dicents (propositions) and arguments, in the form of which they create mental images indexically related to the experiential world to which they refer.

Torill Strand (Oslo, Norway) – The rudeness of lived experience. C.S. Peirce on the dynamics of knowledge and learning

Through a reading of the later writings of Charles S. Peirce (1839 – 1914), I hope to demonstrate how Peirce’s conception of experience lies at the heart of his philosophy. On the one hand, Peirce’s notion of experience is a vital key to his later writings, in which he integrates phenomenology, pragmatism and semiotics while renewing them all. On the other hand, Peirce’s conception of experience appeals to the concerns of contemporary philosophers of education, since it carries a potential of a renewed epistemology emphasizing the semiotic production of knowledge. But how should we read Peirce’s notion of experience? And how does he portray the paradox of lived experience in relation to the dynamics of knowledge and learning? I start by introducing an analogy on pedagogy used by Peirce in a 1903 paper on phenomenology. Next, I hope to sketch out - through a closer reading of this analogy - Peirce’s perspective on the ways in which “experience teach”. In summing up, I point to some prospects and limitations of a Peircean perspective on lived experience in relation to the paradoxical attributions of knowledge and learning.

Keywords: Experience – Semeiosis – Semiotics – Phenomenology – Pragmatism – Learning – C. S. Peirce – Philosophy of Education

Inna Semetsky (Newcastle, Australia) – At the interface of theory and practice: exploring Edusemiotics

Semiotics in Academia mainly "belong" to the departments of media and communication, and the value of semiotic methodology remains underrated in educational research.  Edusemiotics can become a conceptual framework especially fruitful for education because people are always already sign-using systems, even if they may not know it. Signs exceed their linguistic forms and include images, both external and internal.

As a philosopher of education, I am mainly concerned with educational theory. However edusemiotics - educational semiotics - represents a theory-practice nexus in education due to importance of human experience.

In accord with the triadic structure of a genuine sign, experience plays the role of an interpretant that embodies the meaning of experience by means of establishing a relation between what dualist ontology posits as two irreconcilable opposites. Learning is experiential in nature and oriented to the interpretation of signs, with which according the Peirce, the world is perfused.  Education rather than accumulating facts should aim for our becoming more fully developed signs. The moral dimension is thus germane to edusemiotics.

Eetu Pikkarainen (Oulu, Finland) – Education, Values and Authority: a Semiotic View

The topic of my presentation will be the question how we could theoretically and philosophically study the problem of values and authority especially in the context of education using the concepts of action theoretical and Greimassian semiotics. First I will shortly present the conception action theoretical semiotics developed in my previous writings and its relationship to the general theory of education (the continental tradition on general pedagogics). The main focus point of the latter is the idea of pedagogical paradox, a thought famously formulated by Kant: the object of education is to foster the freedom of educandee, so how can we do this by using the necessary power and coercion? This means roughly that during the education the education is an authority, but the action should proceed so that in the end the educandee would be free from it.  Greimassian semiotics fits well to study authority realtionships, using of power in communication. But can it help in analyzing the emancipation process which is built into the pedagogical action. A special question here is that as for the values, are the authority of external Sender actant always necessary.

Ronald Soetaert & Kris Rutten (Ghent, Belgium) – A Rhetoric of Turns: Signs and Symbols in Education.

In our research and teaching we explore the value and the place of rhetoric in education. From a theoretical perspective we situate our work in different disciplines, inspired by different major “turns”:  linguistic, cultural, anthropological/ ethnographic, interpretive, semiotic, narrative, rhetorical... All these turns highlight the importance of signs and symbols, language and stories in the way we construct meaning. Human beings are described as symbol-using (Burke, 1966), story telling (MacIntyre, 1981) animals, living and learning in a world of signs (Stables, 2005). However, these turns can also be read rhetorically as an entelechy (Burke, 1972) or as an aggrandizing move (Edwards et al., 2004). 

One of the challenges is to look for a core that links all these turns beneath their differences. The suggestion of doing a rhetorical analysis of all the turns, implies to introduce rhetoric as a major discipline, presenting a meta-perspective on all perspectives. But in the discipline of rhetoric, the quest for the core of the discipline is also high on the agenda. Apart from becoming symbol-wise we also need to become discipline-wise. This is particularly important for education because we are obliged to reflect upon the interaction between theory and practice. In our paper, 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).

We will specifically confront this rhetorical-semiotic turn with the narrative turn. Stables (2005) asserts that “approaches to knowledge themselves are opened to question [and] if the world is a text, then literary studies may be the way to understand it” (p. 2). As Brummett (2005) argues: “the most fundamental reality is the symbols we use, especially the larger structures, such as drama or narrative, into which these symbols are arranged” (179). In our presentation we will illustrate these theoretical perspectives with educational projects in which we introduce rhetoric as a “perspective on perspectives” (Burke, 1966) in Teacher Education, Social Work, Disability Studies and Educational Studies, exploring the importance of narratives in general and the “why literature?”- question (Van Heusden, 1997) in particular.  

Brummett, B. (2006). Rhetoric in Popular Culture. London: Sage.

Burke, K. (1966). Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and Method.  Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Burke, K. (1972). Archetype and Entelechy. In Rueckert, W.H. & Bonadonna, A. (Eds.).  (2003), On

Human Nature: A Gathering While Everything Flows (pp. 121-138).  Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 

Colapietro, V. (2007). C.S. Pierce’s Rhetorical Turn. Transactions of the Charles S. Pierce Society, 43 (1): 19-52.

Edwards, R., Nicoll K., Solomon N. & Usher R. (2004). Rhetoric and Educational Discourse. Persuasive texts. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

MacIntyre, A. (1981). After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.

Pesce, S. (2011). From Perce’s Speculative Rhetoric to Educational Rhetoric. Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Smith, R. (2005). Introduction. In A. Stables. Living and learning as semiotic engagement. A new theory of education (pp. i-ii). Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press.

Stables, A. (2005). Living and learning as semiotic engagement. A new theory of education. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press.

Van Heusden, B. (1997). Why Literature? Verlag: Stauffenburg.

Derek Pigrum (Vienna, Austria) – ‘Starting from Scratch’: Semiotic Philosophy of Education and ‘Transitional Notation’

In terms of semiotic philosophy of education, what the author terms, ‘transitional notation’ (Pigrum, 2001, 2009, 2011) is heterogeneous, and includes modes of scientific diagramming, field notes, artistic sketches, rough workings, and literary and poetic drafts.

In the paper the author positions ‘transitional notation’ in relation to the post Freudian psycho-analytic theory of Winnicott (1971). Central to the author’s definition of ‘transitional notation’ is a principle of transformation in which new structures can be continuously generated, modified and developed. The paper explores the extent to which C.S. Pierce’s own statements on the function of drawing and diagramming, his notion of ‘abduction’, and his conception of the fundamental exteriority of the mind, can be related to ‘transitional notation’. 

‘Transitional notation’ often leaves room for the participation of different actors in terms of dialogic interaction and here Wittgenstein’s notions of ‘saying and showing’, of ‘signposts’ and ‘knowing how to go on’ are closely related to the way the higher function of transitional notation is acquired. Regular use of the ‘signposts’ of transitional notation produce, what Peirce describes as, 'habit change', because each notational experience changes and affects the disposition to use transitional notation in future as a repeatable framework of creative agency.

The paper argues that the acquisition of  ‘transitional notation’ is related to Peirce’s purposive interpretation of mind, of perception as infused with meanings structured by purposive activity, where relevance, selective emphasis and expectation come into play. In this context the paper also looks at Deleuze’s analysis of the painter Francis Bacon’s  initial  diagramming as a mode of transgressing ‘figurative givens’ and to Winnicott’s use of the “scribble game’ in his clinical practice as forms of transitional notation. The main argument of the paper is that “showing” is as complex as “saying” and that an amalgam of the two in transitional notation provides a powerful tool for the teaching/learning situation. However, the paper argues that transitional notation is not a tramline to the generation of ‘epistemic effects’, or creative solutions but, following Aristotle on potentiality, hinges on a polar relation to impotentiality. 

In terms of semiotic philosophy of education, an increased emphasis on transitional notation, involves a pervasive change in our approach to being, doing, process and closure that is no longer based on certitudes, and finished products but rather on process and potential possibilities. 

Alin Olteanu (Bath, UK) – Investigations on the relation between learning and semiosis

As a contribution to what can be a fully semiotic perspective on learning (Stables, 2005) I am interested in investigating the theoretical relation between the processes of learning and that of semiosis. If learning is a semiotic engagement then the process of learning has to be investigated in semiotic terms. The idea that we learn by means of signs dates back to Saint Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana. In recent times, investigations on Peirce’s semiotics led to the idea that unless a sign has an Iconic character there can be nothing understood (or learned) from it and that only because of similarity we are capable to learn more (Stjernfelt, 2007). The main aspect of this research consists in finding which types of signs are implied in learning and in which way they are used. My approach is embedded in a Peircean workframe, taking Peirce’s account of the concepts of semiosis and sign and his classifications of signs. In my hypothesis the process of learning is understood as „a retrospective judgement dependent on social and cultural context” (Stables, 2008), or, loosely speaking, in a broad pragmatistic sense, the process of learning consists in any gain of useful information. 

The theoretical semiotic understanding of learning has the purpose of being practically used there were learning is crucial, namely in education.

Stables, A. (2005), Living and Learning as Semiotic Engagement: A New Theory of Education (Lewiston, NY/Lampeter: Mellen Press)

Stables, A. (2008), Semiosis, Dewey, Difference: implications for pragmatic philosophy of education, Contemporary Pragmatism 5/1, 147-162

Peirce, C. S. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, electronic edition reproducing Vols I-VI, Charles Harthshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1931 - 1935), Vols. VII-VIII, Arthur W. Burks, (same publisher, 1958)

Stjernfelt, Frederik (2007), Diagrammatology. An Investigation on the Borderlines of Phenomenology, Ontology and Semiotics (Dordrecht: Springer)

Saint Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, [On Christian Teaching], (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)

Christiane Moro (Lausanne, Suisse) – 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 examples issued from works realized 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 semiotic shifts and movements which produce development. 

Cole, M. (1996). Cultural Psychology. A once and future discipline. Cambridge, Massachussetts, and London, England : Harvard University Press.

Moro, C. (2011). Material Culture, Semiotics and Early Childhood Development. In M. Kontopodis, C. Wulf & B. Fichtner (Eds.) Children, Development and Education. Cultural, Historical, Anthropological Perspectives (pp. 57-70). London, New York : Springer Verlag.

Moro, C. (2000). Vers une approche sémiotique intégrée du développement humain. Université de Bordeaux 2. 118 p. Ouvrage déposé à la bibliothèque de l’U.F.R. des sciences sociales et psychologiques à l’Université de Bordeaux 2 – Victor Segalen.

Moro, C. & Decosterd, C. (in prep.) Praxis et idéalité : statut de l’usage de l’objet et de la gestualité matérielle dans l’avènement du langage (titre provisoire). In No spécial de Psychologia Culturale, C. Moro & N. Muller-Mirza, Guest Editors.

Moro, C. & Joannes, E. (accepted). Development of Speech through Materiality in French Nursery School. A case study at 2/3 and 5/6 years old during Activities based on the Story of « The Three Little Pigs » pour Companion to Cognitive Semiotics.

Moro, C. & Rodríguez, C. (in prep., commande). Early Child Development. The Cambridge Handbook of Cultural-Historical Psychology.

Moro, C. et Rodríguez C. (2008). Production of Signs and Meaning-Making Process in Triadic Interaction at Prelinguistic Level. A Task for Socio-Cultural Analysis. The Case of Ostension. In R. Diriwächter & E. Abbey (Ed.), Innovating Genesis : The Constructive Mind in Action, Advances in Cultural Psychology (pp. 207-228). Charlotte NC : InfoAge Publisher. 

Moro, C. et Rodríguez, C. (2005). L’objet et la construction de son usage chez le bébé. Une approche sémiotique du développement préverbal. Berne : Peter Lang, Collection Exploration. (446 p.) Ouvrage subsidié par le FNRS et l’Université de Genève.

Moro, C. & Tapparel, S. (en prép. pour Revue suisse des sciences de l’éducation). L’activité de peinture sous le double regard institutionnel d’un centre de vie enfantine et de l’école enfantine.

Moro, C., Schneuwly, B. et Brossard, M. (Eds.). (1997). Outils et signes. Perspectives actuelles de la théorie de Vygotski. Berne: Peter Lang. 221 p. 

Rodríguez, C. et Moro, C. (2008). Coming to Agreement : Object Use by Infants and Adults. In J. Zlatev, T. Racine, C. Sinha & E. Itkonen (Ed.). The Shared Mind : Perspectives on Intersubjectivity (pp. 89-114). Amsterdam : John Benjamins. 

Vygotski, L.S. (1034/1997). Pensée et Langage. Paris : La Dispute.

Sébastien Pesce (Cergy, France) – Embodied cognition from a semiotic standpoint

My aim is to explore recent research from different fields (eg philosophy, cognitive linguistics, educational studies) about embodied cognition (focusing on the part played by perception, motion, action in learning and more broadly in social cognition), and to analyse connections between such research and Peircean semiotics: does (or to which extend) research on embodied cognition confirms Peirce’s insights? Does Peirce’ later semiotics offer complementary perspectives on embodied cognition? What does the triadic Sign tell us about learning by doing and situated cognition?