On family secrets and –K

In this paper I present a novel interpretation of family secrets. Leaning on Bion's concept of ‐K, the constitution of secrecy is interpreted in terms of family dynamics that actively prevent knowledge formation and mental growth. Family secrets are interpreted as a destructive process that attacks the family's truth‐generating‐space – the shared semiotic space within which meanings are constituted through family relationships. The paper explores the microstructure interpersonal process of ‐K through the analysis of Mike Leigh's movie, Secrets and Lies. Two scenes in the movie are used to demonstrate how ‐K is worked out in the form of a specific intersubjective semiotic endeavor that unconsciously blocks the process of meaning‐making.     

MATRIX THINKING: AN ADAPTATION AT THE FOUNDATION OF HUMAN SCIENCE,RELIGION, AND ART

Intrigued by Robinson and Southgate's 2010 work on “entering a semiotic matrix,” we expand their model to include the juxtaposition of all signs, symbols, and mental categories, and to explore the underpinnings of creativity in science, religion, and art. We rely on an interdisciplinary review of human sentience in archaeology, evolutionary biology, the cognitive science of religion, and literature, and speculate on the development of sentience in response to strong selection pressure on the hominin evolutionary line, leaving us the “lone survivors” of complex, multiple lines of physical and cultural evolution. What we call Matrix Thinking—the creative driver of human sentience—has important cognitive and intellectual features, but also equally important characteristics traced to our intense sociability and use of emotionality in vetting rational models. Scientist, theologian, and artist create new cultural knowledge within a social context even if alone. They are rewarded by emotional validation from group members, and guided by the ever present question, “Does it feel right?”     

LANGUAGE AS A VALUES‐REALIZING ACTIVITY: CARING,ACTING, AND PERCEIVING

A problem for natural scientific accounts, psychology in particular, is the existence of value. An ecological account of values is reviewed and illustrated in three domains of research: carrying differing loads; negotiating social dilemmas involving agreement and disagreement; and timing the exposure of various visual presentations. Then it is applied in greater depth to the nature of language. As described and illustrated, values are ontological relationships that are neither subjective nor objective, but which constrain and obligate all significant animate activity physically, socially, and morally. As an embodied social activity, conversational dialogue is characterized in terms of values, pragmatics, and presence rather than in terms of syntactic and semantic rules. In particular the nature of dialogical arrays is explored, and the hypothesis that language is an action system, a perceptual system, and a caring system is explored. Language expands horizons and makes it possible for humans to realize their calling as culture makers and caretakers.     

Signs in their times: introducing a review symposium on Robert Yelle's Semiotics of Religion

This essay introduces a review symposium on Robert Yelle's Semiotics of Religion: Signs of the Sacred in History (2013). It first reviews the book's argument, then offers a selective review of the six contributions to the symposium, along with aspects of Yelle's responses to these.     

Altered states of consciousness

This commentary dwells on the intellectual, methodological, and stylistic characteristics that constitute the novelty of Robert Yelle's approach to the semiotics of religion. While praising Yelle's refreshing approach and his ability to combine a semiotic mindset with accurate comparative perspective, deep contextual knowledge, and historical sensibility, the commentary raises the issue of the extent to which semioticians can, and should, acknowledge the transient, historical nature of their point of view. This acknowledgment, it is argued, does not necessarily result in a self-deconstruction of the semiotic method itself but in the somewhat paradoxical awareness of the semiotic ideology underpinning it.     

Inter‐religious Encounter

This article examines Robert A. Yelle's Semiotics of Religion. The author argues that the project is weakened by an over-privileging of language as the only mode of semiosis. Using the figure of Orpheus and the semiotic exteriority of music, the author suggests that a semiotics of religion must escape this most fundamental logocentrism if it is not simply to perpetuate the ideological gestures Yelle works hardest to expose.     

Tyndale's Disagreement with Luther in the Prologue to the Epistle to the Romans

Abstract

Although it is generally assumed that Tyndale's Prologue to the Epistle to Romans (1526) is a translation of Luther's Preface (1522), this article examines those places where Tyndale deviated from a straight translation of Luther's text, and supports Thomas More's statement that Tyndale was a worse heretic than Luther. Tyndale's doctrine of God, the Father, Christ, and especially of the Holy Spirit, faith, righteousness, flesh and spirit, the state of fallen man and the temporal regiment show Tyndale was not doctrinally a Lutheran when he wrote his Prologue to Romans.     

Noise,Economy, and the Emergence of Information Structure in a Laboratory Language

The acceptability of sentences in natural language is constrained not only grammaticality, but also by the relationship between what is being conveyed and such factors as context and the beliefs of interlocutors. In many languages the critical element in a sentence (its focus) must be given grammatical prominence. There are different accounts of the nature of focus marking. Some researchers treat it as the grammatical realization of a potentially arbitrary feature of universal grammar and do not provide an explicit account of its origins; others have argued, however, that focus marking is a (grammaticalized) functional solution to the problem of efficiently transmitting information via a noisy channel. By adding redundancy to highlight critical elements in particular, focus protects key parts of the message from noise. If this information‐theoretic account is true, then we should expect focus‐like behavior to emerge even in non‐linguistic communication systems given sufficient noise and pressures for efficiency. We tested this in an experiment in which participants played a simple communication game in which they had to click cells on a grid to communicate one of two line figures drawn across the grid. We manipulated the noise, available time, and required effort, and measured patterns of redundancy. Because the lines in many cases overlapped, meaning that only some parts of each line could be used to distinguish it from the other, we were able to compare the extent to which effort was expended on adding redundancy to critical (non‐overlapping) and non‐critical (overlapping) parts of the message. The results supported the information‐theoretic account of focus and shed light on the emergence of information structure in language.     

Medical semiotics in the 18th century: A theory of practice?

Medical semiotics in the 18th century was more than a premodern form of diagnosis. Its structure allowed for the combination of empirically proven rules of instruction with the theoretical knowledge of the new sciences, employing the relation between the sign and the signified.     

WALKER PERCY,LANGUAGE, AND HOMO SINGULARIS

The novelist Walker Percy argued that modern science has a tremendous blind spot in its view of human nature. Unlike purely physical phenomena, which can be explained by the interaction of dyadic relationships, human beings must also be understood in terms of triadic relationships brought into being by symbolic language. The self brought into being by symbolic language is nonmaterial but real, and operates by different “laws” than those that govern dyadic relations. In making this case, Percy drew a sharp line between human and nonhuman language, a line that more recent developments in science has challenged. However, Percy's central point, that the agent of symbolic language cannot be understood within a materialist framework, remains valid.