35.2123, Calls: Extended Semiotics Clues, Signs, Representation

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-2123. Fri Jul 26 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.2123, Calls: Extended Semiotics Clues, Signs, Representation

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Date: 25-Jul-2024
From: Chloé Laplantine [shesl at shesl.org]
Subject: Extended Semiotics Clues, Signs, Representation


Full Title: Extended Semiotics Clues, Signs, Representation
Short Title: SHESL 2025

Date: 27-Jan-2025 - 28-Jan-2025
Location: Paris, France
Contact Person: Chloé Laplantine
Meeting Email: shesl at shesl.org
Web Site: https://shesl.org/en/shesl-conference-2025/

Linguistic Field(s): History of Linguistics

Call Deadline: 15-Sep-2024

Meeting Description:

The semiotics that aimed to build a logical taxonomy of the different
types of signs –linguistic or nonlinguistic signs, natural or
non-natural ones– (Peirce, Bühler, Marty, Gatschenberger, etc.) were
most often developed on the outskirts, or even at the margins of
grammatical semantics, sometimes arousing opposition from professional
linguists for this very reason[1]. And when, a little later,
Lévi-Strauss drew on contemporary linguistic notions (borrowed from
structuralism), he was concerned with social interaction and language
in the broad sense of the term, with what he sometimes called the
“symbolic function”, understood as man’s capacity to detect
differential marks organized in a system. These approaches were
therefore not linguistic, since they did not call on specific
linguistic properties, but they did concern human communication. The
situation became quite different when, later still, the μ group also
used a model of binary oppositions inspired by structuralism to
attribute to earthworm behavior a very elementary “grammar” governed
by the light/dark contrast (Klinkenberg 2018, cited by Fontanille
2019). As Fontanille points out, Groupe μ applies similar analyses to
material objects, such as a thermostat, which also interacts with its
environment, since it can be considered to “select” relevant
properties from it. More encompassing than the Saussurean notion of
difference, the old notion of selectivity[2] here has nothing to do
with language, except metaphorically, and if nevertheless we wish to
characterize this phenomena as semiotic, the sign is then reduced to a
signal, or even, rather, to an index, conceived as an unintentional
sign.

The emergence of this generalized semiotics can be understood in
different ways. In biology, recourse to the notion of sign, and, more
generally, to a “non-causal” order, is part of a long history, in
reaction to the limits inherent in physicalism. Driesch’s attempt to
empirically test the Weismanian germ plasm thesis (Driesch 1919) comes
to mind, as does Uexküll’s work. In Uexküll this is an assumed
methodological artifact, which consists in expressing in a semiotic
metalanguage what could not be described at the time in the language
of chemistry or physiology. Similarly, Uexküll replaces the physical
notion of milieu inherited from Comte and Lamarck with that of Umwelt,
which designates what makes sense for a living being. Yet many
biosemioticians of the following period went much further, abandoning
this still-Kantian approach in favour of the much stronger thesis that
semiosis embraces all levels of the living within organisms.
“According to some scholars, Kull argued in a recent article (Kull,
2023), semiosis is even the criterial characteristic of life. This
means that theoretical biosemiotics must be a part of theoretical
biology, and the latter is incomplete without biosemiotics.” Such
maximalist positions represent the historical culmination of a
semioticization of the living, at the obvious risk of a petition of
principle, which reduces semiosis to an ill-defined notion of
information transmission. Whereas naturalist linguistics claimed to
naturalize language, by an effect of inverse symmetry, we are
witnessing a desire to assimilate the living world to semiosis[4].
Moreover this semiotic conception of the exchanges with the natural
environment has its exact opposite counterpart, that of the
naturalization of meaning and intentionality (Dretske 1981), but it
seems thus that, despite their profound differences, both theses tend
then to short-circuit the technical notion of sign in favour of that
of information.

Call for Papers:

Please send abstracts for contributions by 15 September 2024 to
shesl2025 at listes.u-paris.fr
Abstracts should be around 250 words long and include a bibliography.

Information:  https://shesl.org/en/shesl-conference-2025/ and
shesl2025 at listes.u-paris.fr

Scientific committee
 Pierluigi Basso (Université Lumière Lyon 2, ICAR)
 Pauline Delahaye (SfZ, Université de Tartu)
 Jean-Michel Fortis (SHESL, CNRS, HTL)
 Jacques François (SHESL, Université de Caen)
 Janette Friedrich (Université de Genève, HTL)
 Astrid Guillaume (SfZ, Sorbonne Université, STIH)
 Lia Kurts (Sfz, Université Bordeaux Montaigne, TELEM)
 Hélène Leblanc (LabEx COMOD, Université Lumière Lyon 2)
 Philippe Monneret (Sorbonne Université, STIH)
 Franck Neveu (Sorbonne Université, STIH)
 Luca Nobile (SfZ, Université de Bourgogne, CPTC)
 David Piotrowski (CNRS, HTL)
 Didier Samain (SHESL, Sorbonne Université, HTL)
 Malika Temmar (Université de Picardie Jules Verne)
 Anne-Gaëlle Toutain (Université de Berne, HTL)
 Ekaterina Velmezova (SHESL, SfZ, Université de Lausanne)

Organizing committee
 Lionel Dumarty (SHESL, CNRS, HTL)
 Astrid Guillaume (SfZ, Sorbonne Université, STIH)
 Chloé Laplantine (SHESL, CNRS, HTL)
 Didier Samain (SHESL, Sorbonne Université, HTL)



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