The Semiotic Window – Kalevi Kull, Frederik Stjernfelt

Does meaning need a moment to exist? Professors Kalevi Kull and Frederik Stjernfelt explore how signs aren't just things—they're relationships that have to snap together to mean anything at all. Both a predator reading a scent and you understanding this sentence depend on seconds-wide windows where space and time tighten enough for meaning to flicker into being. Miss it, and the sign collapses. Catch it, and a world appears. Talk details: Co-presence and Co-localization in the Umwelt: The Semiotic Window – Kalevi Kull, Frederik Stjernfelt Kalevi Kull Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, Estonia [email protected] Frederik Stjernfelt Professor, Aalborg University Copenhagen [email protected] Abstract Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg recently described cognition and experiencing through the feature of associative learning, at the symbolic level through unlimited associative learning, relating it to minimal consciousness or subjective experiencing (Jablonka, Ginsburg 2022). From the semiotic point of view, meaning making is the establishment of a sign relation as a precondition to associative learning. Here we point out some important conditions for creating a semiotic relation. We observe that making an association requires a certain co-existence of the associates. On the one hand, it is co-localization, that is, the synthesizing cognition of co-localized subject and predicate is possible, occurring in a small spatio-temporal window (Stjernfelt 2020). This spatio-temporal window can also be termed the specious present, co-extensive with semiosis or meaning-making (Kull 2018). Such a window is, in other terms, a specification of the „momentary umwelt“ introduced by Jakob von Uexküll. Our hypothesis is that while cultural and biological semiotic systems may evolve and exist over very long periods, the event of concrete meaning-making, on the basis on such systems, occurs in such brief semiotic windows. References Jablonka, Eva; Ginsburg, Simona (2022). Learning and the Evolution of Conscious Agents. Biosemiotics 15(3): 401–437. Kull, Kalevi 2018. On the logic of animal umwelten: The animal subjective present and zoosemiotics of choice and learning. In: Marrone, Gianfranco; Mangano, Dario (eds.), Semiotics of Animals in Culture: Zoosemiotics 2.0. (Biosemiotics 17.) Cham: Springer, 135–148. Stjernfelt, Frederik 2020. Co-localization as the syntax of multimodal propositions: An amazing Peircean idea and some implications for the semiotics of truth. In: Jappy, Tony (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Contemporary Peircean Semiotics. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 419–458. Original video footage from: https://www.ufs.ac.za/conferences/con...