Chapter 5 tackles the meanings and emotions an image can afford through its contents and form. The body of the image refers to the characteristics of the image, its visual features, pictorial composition, and material form, and how those together afford certain meanings and interpretations of the image in a specific moment in its life trajectory. The visual interpretation method is presented then applied on a case example of street poster images.

Legg draws on Charles Peirce’s semiotics to help explain the semantic limitations of genAI software. Early AI developers were stymied by the assumption that meanings are discrete, abstract, and internal and by an approach that disallowed the growth of meaning. Legg describes some of the progress on AI that has been made in recent years but argues that some of its remaining weaknesses stem from a failure to understand that semiosis occurs in three fundamentally different ways: symbolicity, indexicality, and iconicity. Contemporary genAI systems never go beyond symbolicity to instantiate indexical signs, which are required to point to the world external to those systems, and they are not sufficiently constrained by iconic signs, especially those that would bring logical structure. Legg also critically considers claims that genAI will enable new achievements with regard to knowledge and truth, as well as claims that it will further erode our collective grasp on truth. Drawing on Peirce’s realism his view of inquiry as essentially social, Legg explains how we can reconceive reality, truth, and knowledge so as to avoid mistaking the texts created by genAI for genuine knowledge.

This essay explores William James’s debt to Charles Peirce, arguing that this debt is integral to pragmatism’s historical use-value for studies of race and racism. Scholars of race have historically found pragmatism useful because of its anti-foundationalism. A philosophical stance resistant to abstraction and ossification, pragmatism’s emphasis on continuity through adaptation makes it useful for dismantling racial essentialism while preserving the experience of social and historical continuity necessary for the ongoing recognition of disenfranchised groups. In the late nineteenth century, however, pragmatism failed to reckon with the systematic denial of power and representation to racialized subjects. I argue that this failure is inseparable from pragmatism’s weddedness to the concept of experience and that a deep dive into how pragmatists have relied on this concept to negotiate the relationship between mind and body reveals the racial contours of its genealogy. Transforming what for Peirce was a methodological rule for scientific investigation into a theory of Truth, James imagined a world made entirely of subjects rather than objects. In so doing, he also dismantled the dialectical aspect of Peirce’s principle and the semiotics on which it depends. As this essay argues, James’s pragmatism does have potential for interpreting the history and significance of race. This potential, though, lies less in its anti-foundationalism than in its materialism and a reclamation of Peirce’s more dialectical model of embodied consciousness.

In eighteenth-century Britain, insects like fleas and lice not only commonly troubled corporeal existence but also received notice in poetry and prose. In contrast, Fielding’s Tom Jones avoids any mention of insects at all. Why? A neoclassical aesthetic explains Fielding’s omission of those aspects of terrestrial life thought to be unworthy of representation. Grounded in the Great Chain of Being, the novel expresses an androcentric view also observed in poets like Alexander Pope. Fielding’s theological and aesthetic commitments also explain the existence of his little-known satire attacking a significant myrmecological work by his cousin Arthur Gould: according to Fielding’s scathing response, humans alone – not insects like ants – deserve the spotlight. As expressed in his satire and elsewhere, Fielding’s agenda belongs to what biosemiotician Wendy Wheeler has called the “semiotic disenchantment” of the world. It also helps to explain why insects go missing.

The treatment of Rome and its history in Ennius’ Annales has received significant scholarly attention in recent years. This work has shown well that the epic sets the city at the centre of a widening Roman world, thereby making it a cosmic hub of space and time. Such epic transformations also transform perspectives on the past and the present. What of Rome in the rest of Ennius’ wide-ranging literary output? How does the tri- or quadrilingual former Rudian approach his new unelected home and its socio-cultural practices in genres beyond epic? Taking into consideration the representation of (urban) space, monuments, social practices (especially ritual acts, praise, and elite self-presentation), and intersectional conceptions of Roman identity, this chapter examines the ways in which Ennius’ writings construct and reflect Rome qua city and set of cultural values and perspectives. The Scipio, Ambracia, and Sabinae anchor the chapter, but the contribution also uncovers key themes in less expected places, with some comment on the epigrams, Hedyphagetica, and philosophical works.

This chapter considers why conformation systems matter for scholars studying any aspect of human sociality; the importance of the book’s compilation of many hundreds of instances of conformations; how each of the four evolved dispositions for conforming constitutes a niche for the cultural evolution of congruent practices, artifacts, art, and architecture; and the selective forces on cultural practices and institutions in those niches.

Fashion – the way we dress – is often an important reflection of the zeitgeist or the spirit of a given point and place in time. The fashion phenomena of recent years, such as self-disruption, upcycling and phygital experiences, can be studied as characteristics of a post-postmodern condition where a new cultural paradigm has emerged. The term post-postmodern has appeared in an increasing number of scholarly works that address a new cultural milieu – one that faces shifting global political centres and geopolitical boundaries, threats of climate change and an endangered ecosystem, destabilisation from armed conflicts and pandemics, obsessions with autonomous individuality, accelerating advances in artificial intelligence and the pervasiveness of information and communications technology in our daily lives. This chapter explores how such theories may be relevant to understanding contemporary fashion trends and their implications for intellectual property laws.

Chapter 3 concentrates on the semiotics of onomatopoeia, mainly the frequently discussed issues of iconicity, arbitrariness, and motivation. It is claimed that rather than opposing terms, arbitrariness and motivation are complementary notions. It introduces the concept of causality into the discussion of the nature of onomatopoeia as linguistic signs. The chapter discusses five basic oppositions: causality versus noncausality; arbitrariness versus nonarbitrariness; iconicity versus non-iconicity; motivation versus lexicalization; and conventionalization versus nonconventionalization. Considerable attention is paid to the views that criticize Saussure’s comprehension of onomatopoeia and his concept of arbitrariness. Arguments are presented in support of Saussure’s position. In addition, Peirce’s triad of hypo-icons (image, diagram, metaphor) is discussed in terms of their relevance to the characterization of onomatopoeias.

All animal species seem to have some sort of communication system that is (largely or completely) innate. What is the nature of such systems? We will only have space to look at a few examples, which will show that some species use very complex systems. We can then ask, assuming that the human language capacity consists of several cognitive submodules, whether it is the case that some of those modules are shared with the innate communication capacities of other species. As we have seen, in recent years Chomsky has argued that the language capacity that is uniquely human (being specific to the domain of language) is the ability to form recursive structure. This has led to research to find out whether other animal species can also “handle” recursive patterns either in their communication systems or in other cognitive systems.

Kant argues that sensible signs are necessary for thinking and considers only audible words adequate signs. For, since the sense of hearing does not immediately lead to specific images, only audible words express the generality of conceptual representations and have such a constitutive role in thought that deafness from birth constitutes an impediment to thinking. Words have this role because they are arbitrary and associated signs that serve to memorize the logical essence of concepts and function as mere characterizations that ‘mean nothing,’ unlike symbols, which provide images. Kant considers symbolic script a symptom of the lack of general concepts and banishes symbolic language from the core of his philosophy which he requires to provide acroamatic proofs that grant nothing to images. However, he not only recognizes the relevance of symbolic language in poetry and as a means of sensualizing abstract concepts, but appreciates its importance when he develops an interest in a heuristic methodology not based only on chance or luck, and in whose preliminary stages he recommends investigating metaphors, etymologies, and synonyms, and even rehabilitates topics, as heuristic tools to obtain insights that help formulate hypotheses to solve problems.

This chapter provides theoretical and practical examples of how children’s meaning-making is enriched through teachers’ mediation. It shifts attention away from a traditional literacy perspective to a semiotic orientation that honours young children’s symbolic communication through art, music, play and dance. Exemplars are given of how children’s sign-making practices in the arts are of equal significance, and are the precursors, to sign-making in language and literacy. Indeed, the arts are children’s ‘first literacies’ because they help children find their way into the sign systems of reading and writing. Illustration of Practice 8.1 demonstrates the notable link between playing and drawing, and how children cross between graphic, narrative and embodied modes to communicate meaning. Illustration of Practice 8.2 foregrounds art making in a Reggio-inspired preschool classroom. Concluding sections focus on the building blocks of meaning-making, with an emphasis on its co-creation and the importance of documenting and interpreting children’s creative processes and learning.

Considers how clothing is related to memory and personal identity. Examines how we communicate with clothing by considering both Roland Barthes’ semiotic account and a Gricean account of meaning. Considers how we might think of uniforms in light of these observations.

This chapter develops the theoretical framework. It defines international orders as configurations of authority. It then conceptualizes representants as effectively integrating material and ideational features, while being irreducible to either. It explains how representants relate to discourses, and material resources, and highlights the value-added of representants in relation to cognate concepts, like Bourdieu’s symbolic capital, status symbols, or Pitkin’s representation. Representants do not come alone, but are embedded into semeiotic webs. On this basis the chapter develops four mechanisms through which representants constitute international orders: they characterize the units of international politics, they legitimize them, they position them in power relations towards each other, and they serve as tools for governing. Representants are constitutive of international orders, while also being the building blocks political agents use to change orders. The chapter develops two mechanisms of changes in representants. One focuses on struggles between actors over getting specific representants socially recognized. The other is an unintentional change in representants themselves. It outlines why some artifacts, practices, and language become socially recognised representants. The last section develops a semeiotics of materialism to study representants and capture the constitutive effects of material reality on a par with those of language.