This collection of chapters features several interdisciplinary perspectives on the application of semioethics for critique and response to precarity, insecurity, and crisis in today’s globalised world.
A recent trend in sign, language and meaning studies, semioethics prioritises the connection to values, with a special focus on human responsibility. Different dimensions of the relation between sign, self and social reality are investigated, interrogating the ethical complexities of self-other relationships and addressing systemic inequalities that perpetuate conflict in a world ever more plagued by violence, conflict and war. Signs do not only represent reality but contribute to constructing it, modelling knowledge and experience, communication and human action. As social symptomatology, semioethics like ancient medical semeiotics (Hippocrates and Galen), is committed to interpreting signs of illness, intent on listening to the other and caring for the health of life and communication. The introduction to this book outlines the basics of semioethics as a theoretical orientation and instrument of analysis for the challenges of our day. The five parts that follow investigate the workings of different types of signs, verbal and nonverbal, from the socio-psychological to the political-economic and broadly cultural, through to the ecological and again the digital revealing the extent to which the material of humanity is entangled in AI-driven reality, its rhythms and algorithms, setting the pace of the world. Semioethics interrogates the sense and significance of sign networks constitutive of life in the great semiobiosphere, highlighting the connection between nature and culture and between the disciplines that study them.
This book will be of interest to scholars across such fields as semiotics, philosophy, education, political science, and cultural studies.