Susan Petrilli, Sign Crossroads in global perspective. Semioethics and Responsibility, John Deely Editor, Transactions, New York, 2010.
This book testifies to the scope of studies on signs, language and communication, crossing over different spheres of human knowledge (from the natural sciences to the social sciences) in the context of global communication today.
The general science of signs or semiotics is unique in providing the only inherently interdisciplinary perspective available and critiques the tendency to exasperate specialization and separatism among the sciences. Without belying the need of specialization for progress in science, this book contributes to a better understanding of what all intellectual pursuits share in common through their dependency upon signs and the action of signs. It is committed to a critique of all forms of sectorialization and separtism, of arrogant individualism, in a social system, that of globalization, that does not consent any one of these attitudes, but on the contrary urgently calls for participation, involvment, and critique which a global science of signs can adequately provide. Sign Crossroads addresses universal issues connected with meaning and interpretation, knowledge and understanding, significance and translation, signs, values and ideologies in a global semiotic perspective developed in the direction of 'semioethics'. Other topics include the question of responsibility, freedom, the interpersonal relation, subjectivity.
The eight chapters forming the book are the following:
1. Semioethics and Responsibility. Beyond Specialisms, Universalisms, and Humanisms
2. Working with Interpreters of the "Meaning of Meaning". International Trends among 20th-Century Sign Theorists
3. The Relation with Morris in Rossi-Landi's and Sebeok's Approach to Signs
4. Iconicity and the Origin of Language: Charles S. Peirce and Giorgio Fano, 123
5. Bodies and Signs: For a Typology of Semiosic Materiality
6. Semiotic Phenomenology of Predicative Judgement
7. On Communication. Contributions to the Human Sciences and to Humanism from Semiotics Understood as Semioethics
8. Iconicity in Translation. On Similarity, Alterity, and Dialogism in the Relation among Signs
Language is the species-specific human version of the animal system of communication. In contrast to non-human animals, language enables humans to invent a plurality of possible worlds; reflect upon signs; be responsible for our actions; gain conscious awareness of our inevitable mutual involvement in the network of life on this planet; and be responsibly involved in the destiny of the planet.
The author looks at semiotics, the study of signs, symbols, and communication as developing sequentially rather than successively, more synchronically than diachronically. She discusses the contemporary phenomenon that people in today's society have witnessed and participated in, as part of the development of semiotics. Although there is a long history preceding semiotics, in a sense the field is as a phenomenon, more "of our time" than of any time past. Its leading figures, whom Petrilli examines, belong to the twentieth and twenty-first century.
Semiotics is associated with a capacity for listening. This capacity is also the condition for reconnecting to and recovering the ancient vocation of semiotics as that branch of medical science relating to the interpretation of signs or symptoms The pragmatic aspect of global semiotics studies the impact of language or signs on those who use them, and looks for consequences in actual practice. In this respect, Petrilli theorizes that the task for semiotics in the era of globalization is nothing less than to take responsibility for life in its totality.
Susan Petrilli is the Seventh Thomas A. Sebeok Fellow of the Semiotic Society of America and professor at the University of Bari, Italy. In addition, she is the author of numerous books including Semiotics Unbounded (with Augusto Ponzio), 2005,Translation Translation, 2003, Signifying and Understanding. Reading the works of Victoria Welby and the signific movement, 2009.
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