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doi: 10.1515/SEM.2008.045pmid: N/A
This paper aims to briefly survey the epistemological debate about the connection between perception and cognition. Contemporary representationalists agree that both perception and cognition can represent how things are in our environment. They customarily separate two types of content. In the standard version, the content of paradigmatic perceptual processes is held to be nonconceptual. On the other hand, our typical conscious processes, such as thinking or remembering, operate with a representational content that might be called conceptual content. According to Peacocke this disctinction may be used to explain how we can gain a priori knowledge about the world. I argue in the final section that this claim poses a considerable problem, because the notion of the a priori seems to be incompatible with the representationalist's overall position. For this reason I present a new — emergentist — version of Peacocke's thesis.
doi: 10.1515/SEM.2008.046pmid: N/A
Semiotic aspects of time are neglected by many semioticians; time is condemned to be the context, frame, or ‘dynamic component.’ We examine representation in terms of encoding processes, pointing out emerging modalities of Time: History on the one hand, Past on the other hand. In this respect, socially-constructed tacit knowledge is a key concept, and the hic et nunc semiotic encoding of it is called representation. Representation as emergence is a shift from denotation to connotation, a dissolution of the denotation, its submergence, based on conventions (past tense, evocatio , etc). History emerges in particular semantic and institutional contexts, such as school and textbook, cemetery and commemoration. Its emergence is preconditioned by the emergence of the Past; but, as soon as History emerges, Past submerges. Past tense, black-and-white, are the base. The History-sign — dating and proper names of persons who existed — appears as a split: a number among words, a well-known figure among typical extras, or the Eiffel-tower under construction in the background of a fin-de-siècle Parisian cityscape. Most often, the representation process leads to polyisotopy: the co-existence of the emerged, the referred, and the submerged, the union of their horizons of meaning.
doi: 10.1515/SEM.2008.047pmid: N/A
This article analyzes how the concept of symbolic reference arises from Whitehead's theory of perception. Perception is also the emergence of a new product in experience, an element of the self-creation of man, an individual synthesis, an exemplification of freedom. For Whitehead, it is the relationship between symbol and meaning, bidirectional and dual. The function of words involves enhancing the relevance of a meaning-event and making it communicable. The novelty emerging in the course of perception introduces a new intensity of individual feeling that is emphasized even more by the forming of propositions and evaluating them before the background of alternatives. Language and philosophy face the same paradox in the emergent continuity: how to handle the contrast between many things and one world. For Whitehead, the final metaphysical principle of the emergence of novelty is universally valid, and human beings crave novelty and fear it at the same time, searching for novelty without loss. Creativity arises par excellence in the phenomenon of originality of life and is completed by the adventure of human discoveries.
doi: 10.1515/SEM.2008.048pmid: N/A
This article argues in favor of the idea that works of art in Early German Romanticism, as conceived of by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, were conceptually considered as an integrated whole, consisting of very different and diverging elements that determine each other in a dynamic process. In this respect, the aesthetic views of this literary movement can be related to some basic postulations about dynamic systems, chaos, order, and emergence. The assumptions of system theory as well as of chaos theory can lead to their application to postmodern works of art that can be described by the categories of nonlinearity, self-reflectivity, irreversibility, and self-organization. Moreover, it can be supposed that these categories apply also to Romantic works of art. The article demonstrates it through the analysis of some late narrative texts of E.T.A. Hoffmann, who could be considered a very modern or an avant la lettre postmodern author.
doi: 10.1515/SEM.2008.049pmid: N/A
In this article, the emergence and evolution of poetic meaning in the literary text is examined in the theoretical problem context of a special semantic construct. Its peculiarity lies in offering a double reading based on the internal contradiction of activating two opposed sense-orientations. Due to this poetic feature, this kind of meaning-formation can easily assume the function of semantic mediation between two crucial meaning units. When poetically placed into interrelation with other levels of the text structure, the mediatory function of this formation is realized as a meaning shift. Thus, the mediatory semantic construct can be construed as a germ for the emergence and evolution of new meaning, and it plays a crucial role in ensuing text-connectedness. The illustrations of this special function are given through two case studies, the analysis of Hamlet's madness in Shakespeare's play and Raskolnikov's murder in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment . In both cases, it is the semantic intersection of different text-layers that provides the clue for the realization of the mediatory function. In Hamlet , the most intensive semantic activity of this kind of intersection can be grasped in the interference of the plot level and a special metaphoric sequence evolving in the play. In Crime and Punishment , it is the active interrelation of several semantic evaluations of the murder that serves as the basis for the meaning shift linked with the protagonist's figure, including his transformation.
Kapitány, Ágnes; Kapitány, Gábor
doi: 10.1515/SEM.2008.050pmid: N/A
The theme of this article is emergence in the field of the symbolic content of objects. The authors analyze the characteristics of symbolic thinking, then collect some aspects of emergence, making use of the example of the Coca-Cola bottle that plays an important role in the Jamie Uys film ‘The Gods Must Be Crazy’. They distinguish emergence from innovation and recount different features and preconditions of emergence. Besides the symbolic elements of the Coca-Cola bottle, they present some typical changes in the culture of objects in the countries of Eastern Europe (after the system change of 1989–1990). They analyze the popularity of Asian objects (and their meaning), the changing role of television, and, finally, they present some results of their new research. In this research, they have looked for symbolic association in fields of objects, and they show some changes of these associations, for example the change of the meaning of ‘old,’ ‘young,’ or ‘adult.’ The article is about the symbolism of objects and about emergence of new elements in these symbols, but the conclusions attempts to summarize the general features of emergence.
doi: 10.1515/SEM.2008.051pmid: N/A
This article sets out to link the philosophical interpretation of evolution to one of its basic corollaries: emergence. An emergent process is one characterized by the generation of a new quality. In languages, where word formation devices include compounding, grammatically analyzable structures are increasingly replaced with synthetic compounds that are insusceptible to paraphrase. Emergence arises and endures by means of cumulative cultural evolution and learning, collectively termed the ‘ratchet effect’ in Tomasello's theory. This article cites two nearly identical parables of cumulative cultural evolution: one by Tomasello and the other one by Leontev, adopted from Pieron. Subsequently, the article describes a concrete area of semiotic, specifically linguistic, research on emergence: language reform, with special regard to its successful implementation in nineteenth-century Hungary. By way of conclusion, two ideas are offered for further analysis: (a) emergence and cultural shifts (the potential change of semiotic systems), particularly in the twenty-first-century information society; (b) the social responsibility of applied linguists and, in general, scholars. While the ratchet effect is clearly still with us, the question arises whether there is any social momentum that forces it to stop or reverse.
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