Syllabus
Introduction and overview, Why Semiotics? The basics of semiotics - Semiotics for Beginners, Chandler. Peirce’s semiotics - What is a sign and.
Semiotics as biological selection - Tractatus Hoffmeyerensis, Stjernfelt. Semiotics as life - To know what life knows, Kull.
From biology to humanity - The play of musement, Sebeok. Semiotics and the post-modern human - The semiotic animal, Deely.
Being human - The Symbolic Species, Deacon. The limits of semiotics in small worlds - A theory of semiotics, Eco.
The explosive advance of small world semiotics - A Universe of Mind, Lotman. Semiotics as post-biotic living systems - The Life of symbols, Noth.
Annotation
This course explores the science of signs, which are the means by which we know, and the objects of knowledge itself. A sign is simply something that stands for another thing to a living mind; thus semiotics conflates biology and culture.
Signs and signs systems form the basis of life processes, and form the basis of cultural units, both individual and collective. The study of semiotics offers techniques that both leap and connect every scale of life – from DNA to wolf howls, to ‘Czechness’, and from single amoebas to Gaia.
And yet, semiotics maintains both the popular and the religious conceptions of ‘sign’ – as we think in signs (of all variety) and speak in signs (specifically, legisigns), the study of signs is a necessary component of any study of life, as it is in all fields of the humanities.