In this paper I present the view that inquiry in education can profit from insights from semiotics. Semiotics holds that cognition, or semiosis, is the building up of structures of signs from experience. We create a personal world, an Umwelt, that determines what we perceive and know. The environment also “affords” various structures and these affordances offer special ways to interact with the...

The immune self is one of the main organizing concepts in immunology. However, it is not quite clear what the immune self is and heated debates are taken place among immunologists concerning the usefulness and the meaning of this concept. In this paper, I argue that the problem of the immune self is analogous to the problem of finding the meanings of the sign in semiotics. Following this sugges...

This paper presents some key concepts and underlying assumptions of three current fields of research: the Theory of Organized Activity, Organizational Semiotics and Language Action Perspective. All these fields are related by a human/social/organizational common view of Information Systems. In our analysis and, within Organizational Semiotics field Ronald Stamper’s theory was chosen, while with...

This paper describes the application of basis concepts in semiotics and nonsmooth systems to robot control. The resulting framework yields a vocabulary of movements tailored to the control of semi-autonomous robots. Semiotics provides a set of classes of objects to model the interactions among humans. The paper proposes the use of these semiotic objects to model human–robot interactions, accoun...

The Internet is a giant semiotic system. It is a massive collection of Peirce's three kinds of signs: icons, which show the form of something; indices, which point to something; and symbols, which represent something according to some convention. But current proposals for ontologies and metadata have overlooked some of the most important features of signs. A sign has three aspects: it is (1) an...

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In this paper I take a look at what semiotics has to offer inquirers. I look at its implications for epistemology and method, especially in light of its support for multiple realities. Inquirers will find it provides a framework in which they can find a place for any method that does not objectify the sign process and in which they as authors of inquiry will be made visible to readers of that i...

The overall purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the relevance of semiotics concepts to the analysis of intelligent control systems. Semiotics has only a minor impact on research within intelligent control or robotics. These areas are currently dominated by mathematical concepts of control theory and information processing concepts of artificial intelligence. This situation is unfortunate be...