
A unified academic catalogue for books, journal articles, book chapters, proceedings papers, conference abstracts and semiotic research materials.
A unified academic catalogue for books, journal articles, proceedings papers, collection articles and semiotic research materials. Search across the full database; results are shown with pagination.
Language of Life
- Dependent title
- A Peircean Approach to Living Organisms
- Edition
- 1 edition
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Notes: general editor of the series Elize Bisanz
Annotation: In this book, Peirce’s logical apparatus is used to explain some topics in biology where traditional scientific methods fail to establish the relation between the real and the virtual in the genetic script, the irreducibility of evolution to the genome, and the multidimensionality of the passage from genotype to phenotype. The interdisciplinary nature of this study consists in combining Peirce’s triadic logic, linguistics and biology; the author, as a linguist, draws out similarities between sentence construction and protein folding. Three main branches from the biological sciences are focused on: evolution, epigenetics and protein folding. The volume applies Peirce’s logical tools to demonstrate the universal validity of his scientific method in the current research.
Identifier: 9783631925935
Status: Available
From matter to form: the evolution of the genetic code as semio-poiesis
In: Semiotica 2022, Issue 245
- Pages
- 17-61
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/sem-2020-0088
Joint origins of speech and music: testing evolutionary hypotheses on modern humans
In: Semiotica 2021, Issue 239
- Pages
- 169-176
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/sem-2019-0048
Peirce’s vocation for consciousness: an evolutionary account
In: Semiotica 2021, Issue 243
- Pages
- 1-10
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/sem-2021-0123
Multiculturalism as Multimodal Communication
- Edition
- 1 edition
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Other title information: A Semiotic Perspective
Annotation: This highly readable book develops a numanistic, and specifically semiotic approach to multiculturalism. It reveals how semiotics provides fresh and valuable insights into multiculturalism: in contrast to the binary logic of dualistic philosophy, semiotic logic does not understand the value of truth in rigid terms of ‘true’ or ‘false’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ only. The value of truth resides in meaning, which is a dynamic, evolutionary phenomenon, rooted, nevertheless, in factuality. Drawing on recent developments in biosemiotics, the book presents a theoretical approach to multiculturalism, regarding the lives of people living in multicultural environments. Rather than analyzing political or economic phenomena, it offers a semiotic analysis of multiculturalism and discusses its educational implications. It also invites readers to regard learning as a phenomenon of ecological sign growth and to understand multiculturalism along the same lines. As such, it brings together the life and social sciences and the humanities in a unified perspective, in an approach fitting postmodernism.
Identifier: 9783030178826
Status: Available
An Invitation to Creative Reflection
In: Cybernetics & Human Knowing 2017, Volume 24, Issue 1: Evolution and Communication—Heterodox Rethinkings
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Building Communication Theory From Cybersemiotics
In: Cybernetics & Human Knowing 2017, Volume 24, Issue 1: Evolution and Communication—Heterodox Rethinkings
- Pages
- 9-32
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Cassirer as Revolutionary: Semiotics as Embodied Worldview: Appreciating the Other in Ourselves
In: The American Journal of Semiotics 2017, Volume 33, Issue 3/4
- Pages
- 233-332
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Evolution and Communication: Heterodox Rethinkings
In: Cybernetics & Human Knowing 2017, Volume 24, Issue 1: Evolution and Communication—Heterodox Rethinkings
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Gli stili prenatali
- Dependent title
- Un'estetica psicofisiologica
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Annotation: This book, in this re-edition, contains a broad update of the research on the topic of prenatal styles. What is proposed here is a psychophysiological aesthetics and at the same time a semiotics that provides tools to diagnose "senseless" pathological behaviors as symptoms of an obsessive or regressive condition corresponding to a certain prenatal evolutionary phase. The volume is aimed at a wide and varied audience. In particular, it is proposed as a training tool for teachers of verbal and non-verbal expressive disciplines, for teachers and students of humanistic disciplines, for educators, animators, community assistants and health personnel.
Identifier: 9788869922787
Status: Available
Some 19th Century Problems Of Evolution (1965)
In: Cybernetics & Human Knowing 2017, Volume 24, Issue 1: Evolution and Communication—Heterodox Rethinkings
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The Relationship Between Social and Biotic Evolution: The Evolution of Autopoietic Systems
In: Cybernetics & Human Knowing 2017, Volume 24, Issue 1: Evolution and Communication—Heterodox Rethinkings
- Pages
- 33-53
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Virtual Logic: The Logic of Quantum Theory
In: Cybernetics & Human Knowing 2017, Volume 24, Issue 1: Evolution and Communication—Heterodox Rethinkings
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Waddington, Bateson, Evolution, and Cybernetics
In: Cybernetics & Human Knowing 2016, Volume 23, Issue 3: Batesonian Facets
- Pages
- 9-27
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Between emotion, imagination and cognition: Play as a hybrid neuro-evolutionary concept in bridging Saussure, Hegel and Alexander von Humboldt
In: Sign Systems Studies 2015, Volume 43, Issue 2/3
- Pages
- 249-268
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Identifier: 10.12697/SSS.2015.43.2-3.07
Moral Systems and the Evolution of Human Rights
- Edition
- 1 edition
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Annotation: This volume offers a comprehensible account of the development and evolution of moral systems. It seeks to answer the following questions: If morals are eternal and unchanging, why have the world’s dominant religious moral systems been around for no more than a mere six thousand of the two hundred thousand years of modern human existence? What explains the many and varied moral systems across the globe today? How can we account for the significant change in moral values in one place in less than 100 years’ time? Using examples from classical civilizations, the book demonstrates how increasing diversity compromises a moral system’s ability to account for and integrate larger populations into a single social unit. This environmental stress is not relieved until a broader, more abstract moral system is adopted by a social system. This new system provides a sense of belonging and purpose for more people, motivating them to engage in prosocial (or moral) acts and refrain from socially disruptive selfish acts. The current human rights paradigm is the world’s first universal, indigenous moral system. Because moral systems can be expected to continue to evolve, this book points to current boundaries of the human rights paradigm and where the next major moral revolution might emerge.
Identifier: 9789401795500
Status: Available
Philosophy of Education in the Semiotics of Charles Peirce
- Edition
- 1 edition
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Other title information: A Cosmology of Learning and Loving
Annotation: This book investigates the philosophy of education implicit in the semiotics of Charles Peirce. It is commonly accepted that the acts of learning and teaching imply affection of some sort, and Charles Peirce’s evolutionary semiotics thoroughly explains learning as an act of love. According to Peirce, we evolved to learn and to love; learning from other people has proved to be one of the best ways to carry out our infinite pursuit of truth, since love is the very characteristic of truth. As such, the teacher and the student practise love in their relation with one another. Grounded within an edusemiotics framework and also exploring the iconic turn in semiotics and recent developments in biosemiotics, this is the first book-length study of Peirce’s contribution to the philosophy of education.
Identifier: 9783034318822
Status: Available
A History of Psycholinguistics
- Edition
- 1 edition
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Other title information: The Pre-Chomskyan Era
Annotation: How do we manage to speak and understand language? How do children acquire these skills and how does the brain support them? These psycholinguistic issues have been studied for more than two centuries. Though many Psycholinguists tend to consider their history as beginning with the Chomskyan "cognitive revolution" of the late 1950s/1960s, the history of empirical psycholinguistics actually goes back to the end of the 18th century. This is the first book to comprehensively treat this "pre-Chomskyan" history. It tells the fascinating history of the doctors, pedagogues, linguists and psychologists who created this discipline, looking at how they made their important discoveries about the language regions in the brain, about the high-speed accessing of words in speaking and listening, on the child's invention of syntax, on the disruption of language in aphasic patients and so much more. The book is both a history of ideas as well of the men and women whose intelligence, brilliant insights, fads, fallacies, cooperations, and rivalries created this discipline. Psycholinguistics has four historical roots, which, by the end of the 19th century, had merged. By then, the discipline, usually called the psychology of language, was established. The first root was comparative linguistics, which raised the issue of the psychological origins of language. The second root was the study of language in the brain, with Franz Gall as the pioneer and the Broca and Wernicke discoveries as major landmarks. The third root was the diary approach to child development, which emerged from Rousseau's Émile. The fourth root was the experimental laboratory approach to speech and language processing, which originated from Franciscus Donders' mental chronometry. Wilhelm Wundt unified these four approaches in his monumental Die Sprache of 1900. These four perspectives of psycholinguistics continued into the 20th century but in quite divergent frameworks. There was German consciousness and thought psychology, Swiss/French and Prague/Viennese structuralism, Russian and American behaviorism, and almost aggressive holism in aphasiology. As well as reviewing all these perspectives, the book looks at the deep disruption of the field during the Third Reich and its optimistic, multidisciplinary re-emergence during the 1950s with the mathematical theory of communication as a major impetus. A tour de force from one of the seminal figures in the field, this book will be essential reading for all linguists, psycholinguists, neuroscientists, and psychologists with an interest in language.
Identifier: 9780199653669
Status: Available
Approaching a semiotics of exaptation: At the intersection between biological evolution and technological development
In: Sign System Studies 2013, Volume 41, Issue 4
- Pages
- 504-527
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Identifier: 10.12697/SSS.2013.41.4.07
Are You Stupid?
- Edition
- 1 edition
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Other title information: A Second Revolution Might Save America From Herself
Annotation: In the most dynamic and prosperous country on Earth-the USA-stupidity overshadows the intellectual and technical accomplishments that other nations envy. If Americans continue to delude themselves about their country, the USA will end up like the USSR: imploding from within. This work analyzes the systemic aspects of America's current condition: across-the-board-dumbing down through media and in education; growing dependence on and demand for entitlements; corruption in the private and political domains; chronic cronyism; the opportunistic engineering of reality. Consequently, individual and collective stupidity not only leads to crises, it renders the USA impotent in dealing with the challenges of the fast dynamics characteristic of our time of post-industrial capitalism oriented towards consumption. The causes for this state of stupidity are examined: the people's willful ignorance of the nation's true history and development; an economic system that does not foster a sense of citizenry; cultivated mediocrity in education and entertainment; corruption of justice; rampant consumerism; a state of prosperity that lulls the people into complacency. Taking the rewards of change for granted, Americans no longer understand what change entails. Gazing into the rear-view mirror of history in search of answers, they forget that the USA was founded in a world more similar to the 1st century than the 21st. Americans will have to start fighting their own stupidity instead of further exhausting the country's (and the world's) resources in wars and entitlement measures. America has to "reset" herself, within an authentic democratic process, on a foundation appropriate to the integrated world of the global information age.
Identifier: 9781490525655
Status: Available
Tuning the Self
- Edition
- 1 edition
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Other title information: George Herbert’s Poetry as Cognitive Behaviour
Annotation: This book provides a cognitive analysis of the poetry of George Herbert (1593- 1633). From Herbert’s own thinking, recorded in his prose treatises, can be deduced that his poems should serve a specific function: teaching self-knowledge to his readers. Self-knowledge is a necessary skill, to be applied in one’s strife for ‘temperance’: the regulation of body, house, church, mind, and community. To Herbert, the meaning of his poems is subservient to this function: poetry should aid his readers to temper their lives. The cognitive framework applied here can serve to explain this function. Following Merlin Donald’s theory of cognitive evolution, art serves the purpose of mimetic meta-cognition: a specific cognitive strategy at the disposal of a county priest. Moreover, a cognitive framework can serve to explain why the Herbert-tradition has paid so little attention to this artistic function; this tradition operates within specific confines, the same confines that Herbert sought to compensate with his poetry and his thinking.
Identifier: 9783034313780
Status: Available
The Shared Mind
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Other title information: Perspectives on intersubjectivity
Annotation: The cognitive and language sciences are increasingly oriented towards the social dimension of human cognition and communication. The hitherto dominant approach in modern cognitive science has viewed social cognition through the prism of the traditional philosophical puzzle of how individuals solve the problem of understanding Other Minds. The Shared Mind challenges the conventional theory of mind approach, proposing that the human mind is fundamentally based on intersubjectivity: the sharing of affective, conative, intentional and cognitive states and processes between a plurality of subjects. The socially shared, intersubjective foundation of the human mind is manifest in the structure of early interaction and communication, imitation, gestural communication and the normative and argumentative nature of language. In this path breaking volume, leading researchers from psychology, linguistics, philosophy and primatology offer complementary perspectives on the role of intersubjectivity in the context of human development, comparative cognition and evolution, and language and linguistic theory.
Identifier: 9789027239068
Status: Available
Russian Formalist Criticism
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Other title information: Four essays
Annotation: College English Russian formalists emerged from the Russian Revolution with ideas about the independence of literature. They enjoyed that independence until Stalin shut them down. By then they had produced essays that remain among the best defenses ever written for both literature and its theory. Included here are four essays representing key points in the formalists' short history. Victor Scklovsky's pathbreaking "Art as Technique" (1917) vindicates disorder in literary style. His 1921 essay on Tristram Shandy makes that eccentric novel the centerpiece for a theory of narrative. A section from Tomashevsky's "Thematics" (1925) inventories the elements of stories. In "The Theory of the 'Formal Method'" (1927) Boris Eichenbaum defends Russian formalism from many attacks. An able champion, he describes formalism's evolution, notes its major workers and works, clears away decayed axioms, and rescues literature from "primitive historicism" and other dangers. These essays set a course for literary studies that led to Prague structuralism, French semiotics, and postmodern poetics. Russian Formalist Criticism has been honored as a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of the Year by the American Library Association.
Identifier: 9780803254602
Status: Available
Re-semblance and re-evolution: Paramorphism and semiotic co-option may explain the re-evolution of similar phenotypes
In: Sign System Studies 2010, Volume 38, Issue 1/4: Semiotics of Resemblance
- Pages
- 378-392
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Identifier: 10.12697/SSS.2010.38.1-4.12
Semiosis and Catastrophes
- Edition
- 1 edition
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Other title information: René Thom’s Semiotic Heritage
Annotation: The central concern of this volume is semiogenesis, i.e. the evolution and differentiation of meaningful («pregnant») forms in the field of symbolic systems – from bio-communication to language and cultural forms like music, art, architecture or urban forms. The basic questions are: How are meanings created and further differentiated? Where do they come from? What kind of forces drive their unfolding? How can complex cultural forms be understood based on simple morphodynamic principles? Applications concern the perception of forms by animals and humans, the categorization of forms e.g. in a lexicon, and predication or other complex symbolic behaviors which show up in grammar or in cultural artifacts like the unfolding of urban centers.
Identifier: 9783034304672
Status: Available
Biosemiotics
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Other title information: An examination into the signs of life and the life of signs
Notes: originally published in Danish as Biosemiotik. En afhandling om livets tegn og tegnenes liv (2005)
Annotation: Recent debates surrounding the teaching of biology divide participants into three camps based on how they explain the appearance of the human race: evolution, creationism, or intelligent design. Biosemiotics discovers an intriguing higher ground respecting those opposing theories by arguing that questions of meaning and experiential life can be integrated into the scientific study of nature. This groundbreaking book shows how the linguistic powers of humans imply that consciousness emerges in the evolutionary process and that life is based on sign action, not just molecular interaction. Biosemiotics will be essential reading for anyone interested in the nexus of linguistic possibility and biological reality.
Identifier: 9781859661691
Status: Available
The origins of meaning
- Dependent title
- Vol. 1
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Other title information: Language in the Light of Evolution
Annotation: Hurford integrates findings from ethology and neuroscience with concepts from philosophy and linguistics to make an explicit and convincing case that animals have rich concepts, and thus that meaning predated language
Identifier: 9780199207855
Status: Available
The Logos of the Bios 1
- Dependent title
- Contributions to the Foundation of a three-leveled Biosemiotics
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Annotation: This book opens a new perspective on living nature through the philosophical foundation of biology as an understanding social science. The contributions integrate the pragmatic turn of the theory of science discussion, replacing the solus ipse subject of knowledge of objectivism by the intersubjective - communicative character of thought, experience and research. A three-leveled biosemiotics investigates rule-governed sign-mediated interactions within and between organisms of all organismic kingdoms. This approach underlines the complementarity of syntactic, pragmatic and semantic rules as a precondition for adequately investigating the languagelike structure of the genetic code and the communicative organization of interacting living nature.
Identifier: 9525576019
Status: Available
Uexküll and the post-modern evolutionism
In: Sign System Studies 2004, Volume 32, Issue 1/2
- Pages
- 99-114
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Identifier: 10.12697/SSS.2004.32.1-2.04
The Organic Codes
- Dependent title
- An Introduction to Semantic Biology
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Annotation: Marcello Barbieri sets out his theory that there are many more organic codes in nature than the genetic code. The existence of these codes can be used to explain the major steps in the evolutionary history of life, and processes like epigenesis and complexity generation in embryos
Identifier: 0521824141
Status: Available
Biological evolution — a semiotically constrained growth of complexity
In: Sign System Studies 2002, Volume 30, Issue 1
- Pages
- 271-282
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Identifier: 10.12697/SSS.2002.30.1.16
Energy and evolutionary semiosis
In: Sign System Studies 2002, Volume 30, Issue 1
- Pages
- 361-381
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Identifier: 10.12697/SSS.2002.30.1.23
Evolution of the “window”
In: Sign System Studies 2002, Volume 30, Issue 1
- Pages
- 259-270
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Identifier: 10.12697/SSS.2002.30.1.15
Human/animal communications, language, and evolution
In: Sign System Studies 2002, Volume 30, Issue 1
- Pages
- 201-212
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Identifier: 10.12697/SSS.2002.30.1.11
Readers of the book of life
- Dependent title
- contextualizing developmental evolutionary biology
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Annotation: The "chicken-and-egg" enigma of how genetic information and the body intermingle in "performing life" is a fascinating challenge for biology. The "Jurassic Park Fallacy" is a more traditional interpretation, stating that all the information necessary to build a body is present in DNA; the cell is but a "juke box" playing unambiguously what is in its genetic text and tuning the performance to the environment. Anton Markos suggests a complementary approach: to assume that living beings are endowed with a capacity analogous to a human reader, who is able to extract meaning from a given text, according to her or his personal experience and cultural background. Hermeneutics was developed in the humanities as a method to achieve understanding, in a given context, of texts, history, and artwork. The author takes living beings as hermeneutical interpreters of "texts" encoded in DNA." "This book should interest scholars in both biology and the humanities. To bring both kinds of reader to a common platform, the first part compares two problem-solving strategies: the "objectivist" approach common in natural sciences and hermeneutics as used in the humanities. The second part surveys aspects of the development of twentieth-century biology, also accentuating branches that never became part of today's mainstream. The third part reviews a large body of recent evidence, which can be interpreted in favor of the author's arguments."
Identifier: 0195149483
Status: Available
Global Semiotics
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Annotation: The study of semiotics underwent a gradual but radical paradigm shift during the past century, from a glottocentric (language-centered) enterprise to one that encompasses the whole terrestrial biosphere. In this collection of 17 essays, Thomas A. Sebeok, one of the seminal thinkers in the field, shows how this progression took place. His wide-ranging discussion of the evolution of the field covers many facets, including discussions of biosemiotics, semiotics as a bridge between the humanities and the natural sciences, semiosis, nonverbal communication, cat and horse behavior, the semiotic self, and women in semiotics. This thorough account will appeal to seasoned scholars and neophytes alike."
Identifier: 025333957X
Status: Available
The ‘human behavior complex’ and the compulsion of communication: Key factors of human evolution
In: Semiotica 2000, Issue 2024-03-04 00:00:00
- Pages
- 243-258
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/semi.2000.128.3-4.243
The Perception of the Environment
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Other title information: Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill
Annotation: In this work Tim Ingold offers a persuasive new approach to understanding how human beings perceive their surroundings. He argues that what we are used to calling cultural variation consists, in the first place, of variations in skill. Neither innate nor acquired, skills are grown, incorporated into the human organism through practice and training in an environment. They are thus as much biological as cultural. To account for the generation of skills we have therefore to understand the dynamics of development. And this in turn calls for an ecological approach that situates practitioners in the context of an active engagement with the constituents of their surroundings. The twenty-three essays comprising this book focus in turn on the procurement of livelihood, on what it means to ‘dwell’, and on the nature of skill, weaving together approaches from social anthropology, ecological psychology, developmental biology and phenomenology in a way that has never been attempted before. The book is set to revolutionise the way we think about what is ‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ in humans, about evolution and history, and indeed about what it means for human beings – at once organisms and persons – to inhabit an environment. The Perception of the Environment will be essential reading not only for anthropologists but also for biologists, psychologists, archaeologists, geographers and philosophers.
Identifier: 0415228328
Status: Available
Evolutionary perspective for cognitive function: Cerebral basis of heterogeneous consciousness
In: Semiotica 1999, Issue 2024-01-04 00:00:00
- Pages
- 227-238
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/semi.1999.127.1-4.227
Natural selection and Maxwell’s demons: A semiotic approach to evolutionary biology
In: Semiotica 1999, Issue 2024-01-04 00:00:00
- Pages
- 133-150
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/semi.1999.127.1-4.133
The emergence of difference: Some notes on the evolution of human semiosis
In: Semiotica 1999, Issue 2024-01-04 00:00:00
- Pages
- 631-646
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/semi.1999.127.1-4.631
The micro-grading of procedural words as a metric of behaviors: The evolutionary sequenceability of verbs
In: Semiotica 1999, Issue 2024-03-04 00:00:00
- Pages
- 269-298
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/semi.1999.124.3-4.269
The origin and evolution of signs
In: Semiotica 1999, Issue 2024-01-04 00:00:00
- Pages
- 521-536
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/semi.1999.127.1-4.521
Sign as an object of social semiotics: evolution of cartographic semiosis
In: Sign System Studies 1998, Volume 26
- Pages
- 392-416
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Identifier: 10.12697/SSS.1998.26.16
‘Concept’ and ‘communication’ in evolutionary terms
In: Semiotica 1997, Issue 2024-02-04 00:00:00
- Pages
- 189-216
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/semi.1997.116.2-4.189
Evolution of symbol conventionality
In: Synthesis in Diversity, Volume 2
- Pages
- 789-792
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Peirce’s revolution: Semiotic vs. transcendental unity
In: Synthesis in Diversity, Volume 2
- Pages
- 1069-1072
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Semiosis and evolution
In: Synthesis in Diversity, Volume 2
- Pages
- 977-982
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The evolutionary mystery: A dialogue between C. S. Peirce and Edgar Morin
In: Synthesis in Diversity, Volume 2
- Pages
- 749-752
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The semiotics of a phenomenological research paradigm for investigating the evolution and ontogenesis of cultural norm-systems in distributed virtual environments
In: Semiotica 1997, Issue 2024-03-04 00:00:00
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/semi.1997.115.3-4.235