Sodium: sign, signifier, or signified, of sepsis?

Linguistic representations of motion events: What is signifier and what is signified?

What sort of resemblance or analogy is “natural”? (What would an “unnatural resemblance” be?) What part of the linguistic message is to be considered the relevant “form of a sign” for a particular resemblance or analogy? And, most difficult for a psychologist, what are the referents for the terms “object” and “concept”—two very different notions; and what cognitive activities or states are to b...

Human and Machine Sign Systems

A schema’s role is to mediate and adjudicate between human and machine semantics; recognizing this can help us manage our schemas better. Some practitioners work solely with an operational semantics, according to which the meaning of a tag is what we want it to cause the processing software to do with the data. A better understanding is reached if we adopt the structuralist view that a sign is ...

Trauma or Tumor? The Nail Splay Sign

Revisiting the Master-Signifier, or, Mandela and Repression

The concept of the master-signifier has been subject to a variety of applications in Lacanian forms of political discourse theory and ideology critique. While there is much to be commended in literature of this sort, it often neglects salient issues pertaining to the role of master signifiers in the clinical domain of (individual) psychical economy. The popularity of the concept of the master (...

Living Legal Fictions: Constituting the State or Submerging the Signifier

This is an inquiry into the ways the state is constituted as an effective legal fiction. It is based on the premise that the state was not constituted, once and for all, some three centuries ago (as Bourdieu suggests) but that the existence of the state relies on continuing legal and social processes. The focus is on the translation from the legal to the social, specifically the semiotic intera...