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Group Description
Developed by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, semiotics refers to the study of sign use or semiosis. To Peirce, a sign is anything that represents something to someone. As the impressive breadth of Peirce’s work demonstrates, semiosis can be understood narrowly as the representations people use to reason or talk, or broadly as the sign activity through which all living organisms perceive and learn about the world, communicate with other organisms, and act. Within this broader Peircian perspective, topics of scientific investigation often opposed to one another, such as instinct and free will, mechanical law and learned habit, basic communication and human language, and evolution and culture, are subsumed within an encompassing theoretical approach that challenges the way we understand each of these distinctions.
Because Peircian semiotics questions the ontological separation of person from thing, mind from body, and society and culture from biology, it provides unique and valuable insights into a variety of disciplines including, but not limited to, cognitive studies, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and evolutionary biology. Peirce offers scholars with different backgrounds a common language with which to engage in a dialogue that transcends orthodox disciplinary divides.
Our Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop explores the potential for Peircian semiotics to foster disciplinary exchange and address pressing theoretical challenges. This leads our group into some of the most important questions in the study of human beings: what is the role of the environment, language, material culture, and the mind in the development of the human condition? In what ways do these various entities mediate our relations to each other and to the world? How do we reconcile both the natural and socio-cultural aspects of humankind? What role does the growth and development of the body and its senses play in the fusion of these aspects? If humans are considered part of the natural world, can non-humans be characterized as active participants in the human world, perhaps even types of “persons”? These and other questions motivate our regular workshop discussions, which encourage trans-disciplinary thinking, in keeping with the four-field nature of anthropological inquiry.
Semiotics Work Group Activities
May 16, 2007 Discussion of papers and feedback from Prof. Parmentier
May 3, 2007 Workshop with Richard Parmentier, Brandeis University
Readings: participant papers
April 19, 2007 Discussion of Richard Parmentier’s work
Parmentier, Richard
1994. Chapter One, Peirce Divested for Nonintimates. In Signs in Society: Studies in Semiotic Anthropology. Pp. 3-22. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
1997. Semiotic Approaches to Meaning in Material Culture. Special Issue, The Pragmatic Semiotics of Cultures. Semiotica 116 (1): 43-63.
1997a. Charles S. Peirce. In Handbook of Pragmatics. Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola Östman, Jan Blommaert, and Chris Bulcaen, eds. Pp. 1-18. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
2002. Representing Semiotics in the New Millennium. Semiotica 142 (1): 291-314.
2006. Semiotic Anthropology. In Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Second Edition. Pp. 1-17. Edmonds.
March 15, 2007 Discussion with Webb Keane of his new book below
Keane, Webb. 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission
Encounter. University of California Press.
February 15, 2007 Preparatory discussion of Webb Keane’s book above
January 23, 2007 Discussion of Putnam and Travis
Travis, Charles. 2000. "Shadows", "Situated Representing", and "Truth and Sense".
Chapters 1, 9, and 10 from Unshadowed Thought: Representation in Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pp. 1-26, 197-252.
Putnam, Hilary. 1996[1975]. "The Meaning of 'Meaning'". In The Twin Earth Chronicles: Twenty Years of Reflection on Hilary Putnam's "The Meaning of 'Meaning'". Andrew Pessin and Sanford Goldberg, eds. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Pp. 1-52.
December 14, 2006 Discussion of historical and philosophical introduction to Peirce and his work
1) Philosophical and Historical Introduction to Peirce and His Work
Houser, Nathan. 1992. Introduction. In The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical
Writings, 1867-1893. Volume I. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Houser, Nathan. 1992. Introduction. In The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical
Writings, 1893-1913. Volume II. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
2) Philosophical Principles and Debates
Peirce, Charles S. 1868. Some Consequences of the Four Incapacities. Journal of
Speculative Philosophy 2: 140-157.
Peirce, Charles S. c.1902 [1940]. Logic as Semiotic. In The Philosophy of Peirce.
Justus Buchler, ed. London: Routledge.
Peirce, Charles S. [1931-1935]. The Categories in Detail. A. Firstness, B. Secondness,
C. Thirdness. From The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. I-VI. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, eds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
November 30, 2006 Discussion of Peirce, semiotics and pragmatism
Peirce, semeiotic, and pragmatism [electronic resource] : essays / by Max H. Fisch ; edited by Kenneth Laine Ketner and Christian J.W. Kloesel. Preface and Chapters 1, 3, 4, 10, 17-20
October 27, 2006 Discussion with Matthew Hull, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill about his work on semiotic technologies
September 21, 2006 Discussion with David Pedersen, University of California, San Diego
David Pedersen. N.d. From Actual to General: The Value of Getting to Value in the Era of “Globalization”
Keane, Webb. 2003. Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things. Language and Communication 23: 409-425.
Kockelman, Paul. 2006. A Semiotic Ontology of the Commodity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 16(1): 76-102.
September 7, 2006 Organizational meeting
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