What is a semiotic machine? A robot, a computer running programs endowed with artificial intelligence, any computer, a simple calculating machine, or even an ordinary mechanical typewriter? The question will be examined in the light of Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of semiosis, which requires reference to processes such as reasoning, translation, interpretation, control, self-control, autopo...

In this reply to James H. Fetzer’s “Minds and Machines: Limits to Simulations of Thought and Action”, I argue that computationalism should not be the view that (human) cognition is computation, but that it should be the view that cognition (simpliciter) is computable. It follows that computationalism can be true even if (human) cognition is not the result of computations in the brain. I also ar...

Understanding early traces of symbolism and the origins of language is challenging given the difficult access to the psychological and cognitive operations which underlay them from the archaeological record. In order to address this issue, we propose a semiotic framework based on the notion of representational medium. This concept helps bridging the gap between ancient and modern semiotic activ...

This paper is an inquiry into the empirical grounding of actability—an important concept for the understanding of information systems pragmatics. The paper describes the structure and the application of an analytic framework based on actability and the semiotic framework. Actability has been proposed as an important concept for the understanding of information systems pragmatics and the semioti...

In academia, celebrity study remains an ever growing interest, especially in media and culture studies. However, few researchers have expanded their scope of exploration to the celebrities who gain stardom across national and cultural borders. The current study considers Psy and his music video Gangnam Style as a site for examining globalized language and cultural contacts. Its primary concern ...

This paper presents semiotics as a framework for unders tanding and designing computer systems as sign systems. Although semiotic methods can be applied to all levels of computer systems, they view computer systems under a particular perspective, namely as targets of interpretations. When we need to see c o m p u t e r systems as automata, semiotics has little to offer. The main focus of the pa...

The explosive expansion of the World Wide Web makes the search problems more challengeable. In this paper we present a search improvement method based on a semiotic connection network and a genetic algorithm. The semiotic connection network expands given keywords to an extended set of keywords. The genetic algorithm tunes up the parameters for search. The experimental results showed 6% improvem...

EUGEN BAER (b. 19 August 1937). AcademicStatus: Professor of Philosophy. Mail Address: Box 4010 Scandling Center, Geneva, NY 14456, USA. E-mail: . Personal Office Tel: (315) 781-3376; Fax: (315) 781-3348. Educational Background: Ph.d, Yale University,1971. Research Interests: (I) Philosophy of medicine; (2) Philosophy of language; (3) Philosophy of Religion. Professional Backgroun...

In the following, elementary constituents of models in computational semiotics are outlined. This is done by referring to computer simulations as a framework which neither aims to describe artificial sign systems (as done in computer semiotics), nor to realize semiotic functions in “artificial worlds” (as proposed in “artificial semiosis”). Rather, the framework referred to focuses on precondit...