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doi: 10.1515/sem-2013-0044pmid: N/A
Abstract As Thomas Sebeok led the move globally from semiology as a part to semiotics as the whole of the doctrine of signs, so his close colleague, translator, and collaborator, Susan Petrilli, has proven to be a central figure in the extension of semiotics (as a theoretical understanding of the role of signs in nature and experience) to the practical question of human responsibillty – as the only animal able explicitly to realize the role of signs in the maintenance of life – for the impact of human behavior not only within human society but on the whole community of living things, the biosphere. Just as Charles Peirce was for Sebeok the lodestar for semiotics in its theoretical development, so the close correspondent of Peirce, Victoria Lady Welby, proved to be a lodestar for Petrilli in the development of the practical, ethical extension of semiotics called by Welby “significs” but by Petrilli “semioethics.” Petrilli's vast archival work “reading the works of Victoria Welby and the signific movement,” embodied in her volume Signifying and Understanding , ensures the work of Lady Welby will be central to the developing extension of semiotics into the ethical sphere.
doi: 10.1515/sem-2013-0045pmid: N/A
Abstract Victoria Lady Welby dealt with all the major philosophical questions relevant to herself and to her environment. She also came to write about subjectivity and difference among I, Me, and Self as well as about transcendence. In that sense she is extremely “modern,” perhaps even au courant . Susan Petrilli's great work has rescued from oblivion an important scholar of the past, a pioneer in the history of the semiotic movement, whose thought provokes the most diverse interpretations. She ranks among the great classics of semiotics – in the side of Peirce and Royce – although her significs project never became part of mainstream philosophy nor even within the scope of semiotics. She herself was a true “significian” throughout her life, and much remains to be learned about her writings. Finally we have the access to the sources of Welby's activities, thanks to Petrilli's years of devoted research.
doi: 10.1515/sem-2013-0046pmid: N/A
Abstract Victoria Lady Welby's notion of wit plays a pivotal role in her voluminous writings and, accordingly, in Susan Petrilli's illuminating expositions of the most relevant texts bearing on this central notion. The author of this essay translates Welby's conception of wit into ingenuity and shows how this translation aids us in appreciating the salience and subtlety of Welby's notion. He also follows up on a suggestion offered by C. S. Peirce in his review of Welby's What Is Meaning? (the suggestion that the primitive mind of our remote ancestors was hardly as deficient an instrument as such theorists as E. B. Tylor and Herbert Spencer depicted this mind). Moreover, he takes seriously Welby's insistence upon the gendered character of the specific form of human ingenuity to which she devoted her greatest attention. Finally, the author notes how the cultivation of ingenuity, precisely in Welby's sense, is inextricably linked to the cultivation of signs and especially symbols.
doi: 10.1515/sem-2013-0047pmid: N/A
Abstract Beginning with the work of Lakoff and Johnson in the 1980s in cognitive linguistics there has been an intense exploration of image schemas, i.e., corporeal schemas that are projected into language at various levels. These include up is good, container, inside/outside, path to goal , and many others. I propose an intercorporeal schema derived from mothering and being mothered, giving and receiving, which I call the image schema of the gift. This schema, abstracted in early childhood from the experience of being nurtured, includes the other from the beginning as giver and receiver of nurturing. The image schema of the gift is mapped into language as transitivity in syntax but also exists in the communicative interaction per se. Many of the aspects of Welby's Mother sense or primal sense can be applied to the image schema of the gift. For example, like Mother-sense the schema is “an apriori with respect to sexual identity (indeed with respect to any form of separation based on the logic of identity)” (Petrilli 2009) though the Western construction of masculinity has become caught up in the abstract and ego oriented anti-maternal logic of the market (and vice versa). The transitive logic of the gift is other oriented, value-conferring, and humanizing. Projecting mothering and being mothered onto our surroundings provides a rationale for understanding signs and perceptions as need-satisfying gifts and services. Thus, like Mother-sense, the image schema of the gift can be considered part of the human species specific primary modelling device.
doi: 10.1515/sem-2013-0048pmid: N/A
Abstract Lady Victoria Welby was born to an era when women were challenging their station as summarily subject to the discretion of the dominant male proprietors. The furtive soil of women's liberation had been enriched by the quill and fountain of epic female figures such as Abigail Adams (1744–1818, First Lady of the United States of America between, 1797–1801, promoted property rights for women), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797 – Vindication on the Rights of Women, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935 – The Home: Its Work and Influence). The Victorian period witnessed the burgeoning of a female authority in public consciousness with vigorous support from public figures such as John Stewart Mill (1806–1873 – The Subjection of Women), who openly rejected inequality between sexes, and John Ruskin (1819–1900), who urged women to “abandon trivial feminine pursuits in order to act as a moral force in countering the ills of society” (Ruskin, Of Queen's Gardens, Sesame and Lillie, 1865). It is, therefore, not astonishing that Lady Victoria Welby's authority among semioticians emerged from her endeavours interpreting scriptures. Moral gatekeeping was fast becoming a female authority widely respected, though most prominently within the confines of the private sphere. Women were socially groomed to manage the family's moral code, shape children's character, and nurture the husband's honorable conduct (Meyrowitz 1985: 200). However, respect for women's particular authority and power within the private sphere was limited and remained ancillary to the dominance of the masculine paradigm. Though common sensibility has changed toward women's mobility within the public sphere, the socio-operative dynamics of power between genders remains asymmetrical, the scale tipped decidedly in favour of the masculine domain. Given that the social world operates to a significant degree within the ambit of symbolic elocutions, there has never been a better moment in history to apply Lady Victoria Welby's theory of significs to examine the contemporary subordination of women, and Susan Petrilli's publication of Welby's correspondence is nothing short of timely.
doi: 10.1515/sem-2013-0049pmid: N/A
Abstract Science is my theme in this paper devoted to a celebration of Susan Petrilli's pathbreaking book, Signifying and Understanding . Why science? Because it has a long conflicted history, yet it is the source of the greatest creative works of humans. I compare Welby's humanistic and unbounded science together with that of Peirce to the bumpy up and down that marks the American anthropological story of science. Welby describes clearly her modern and foresighted program. I believe that we need to accept hers and Peirce's paradigm for global semiotics.
doi: 10.1515/sem-2013-0050pmid: N/A
Abstract In carrying out her archival research of Victoria Welby's collected scholarly documents and personal correspondence, Susan Petrilli has engaged in a demanding type of academic inquiry that requires critical and analytical skills of the highest order. The present essay focuses on this aspect of Petrilli's research, which culminated in her opus magnum Signifying and Understanding . It also addresses the need to continue to extract additional materials from these important documents, many of which are located at York University (Ontario, Canada). This will enable scholars to have easier access to them in order to facilitate future research on significs and Victoria Welby's role in its ideological development.
doi: 10.1515/sem-2013-0051pmid: N/A
Abstract Just three years after Susan Petrilli's Signifying and Understanding was published in 2009, the one-hundredth anniversary of Victoria Lady Welby's death (1912) has arrived. Susan Petrilli's book is a great work manifesting a great English scholar, a significian, a “founding mother” of semiotics. In this paper, the author gives a brief introduction to Susan Petrilli's Signifying and Understanding , a milestone work in promoting the development of semiotics, indicating its important role in discovering Lady Welby and making her better known to the world, and then analyzes the commonalities between Lady Welby and Mikhail Bakhtin, following Susan Petrilli to establish an “ideal relation” between Welby and Bakhtin and to get them into a “dialogue,” which will help readers to understand the great significance of recovering an almost forgotten figure – Victoria Lady Welby.
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