Semiotic.....for Dissertation of Margith Strand/Fielding Graduate University/January 12, 2011

There is a second, concrete goal to the issue: To gather researchers in


applied semiotics who have data to illustrate this bidirectional action from

consciousness to signs, to make new advances in the field of active symbolics

understood as a physical, mind-reality relationship. This gathering of

educational researchers was to demonstrate how consciousness relates to

applied semiotics. It illustrates how, in education, signs can become consciously

active and get symbolic power, creating anomalies in the usual

course of learning and teaching, and educational events. Diverse educational

researchers approached this theme from various perspectives, and a

debate followed.

The concept of “semiotic consciousness” is not really new. It was first

used ten years ago by John Deely, currently president of the Semiotic Soci-

IJAS Vol. 3, No 2 3

ety of America. Deely wanted to addresses aspects of semiosis that relate to

conscious awareness of meaning making processes. There has been a lot of

research on semiotic consciousness and its underlying processes in terms

of what semioticians call semiosis and the type of inference named “abduction”

that represents “insight.” I proposed the concept of semiotic consciousness

as an instrument to study how the variety of signs in the

environment of a learning or teaching or an educational task is dynamically

recomposed towards representing a flow of meaning that supports a symbolic,

interactional process with the world. Consciousness being sensitive

to signs, builds insights that have semiotic features: As Papert would put it,

they are “microworlds” in coherence with how external reality is perceived.

Speaking of “microworld” is to allude to a tridimensional nature of the inner

signs that shape our reality.

In this direction, a semiotic theory of consciousness already exists

within the Peircean triad. While Saussure’s semiology was languageoriented

and dualist, Peircean theories after his Kantian period (1850–

1870) propose a definition of the Sign that is based on a dynamic interplay

of three poles: The ground that appears to immediate perception, the object

to which the sign process refers, and the interpretant that is the function resulting

from the semiosis process. The interpretant defines a second state

of the sign, a plus. It is in the interpretant that semiotic consciousness is revealed

as an active process through creative link-making and the perception

of causation. The relationship between conscious insight and the world has

been studied in Peircean semiotics as the building of a representamen

within a given semiotic triad. Peirce’s theory describes the relationship between

the representamen and the object as serial and unidirectional; in the

articles presented in this issue of International Journal of Applied

Semiotics we show that the building of the representamen is a highly parallel

process and a dynamic feature of consciousness.

Semiosis is the dynamic of transformation constructing