Despite the fact that educational knowledge is massively dependent on verbal learning, theories of learning have not been specifically derived from observations of children’s language development. But language development is learning how to mean; and because human beings are quintessentially creatures who mean (i.e., who engage in semiotic processes, with natural language as prototypical), all ...

The present chapter discusses the different epistemologies behind different strands of management thinking and calls for the need for further theoretical development. It proposes a specific management methodology, Semiotic Learning, that corresponds to an innovative approach to the field of organizational learning, one that draws on social semiotics and on ontological hermeneutics in order to d...

While institutional theory has focused on the effect of institutions on individual organizations, this paper addresses the relationships between institutions. Using a case history approach, it examines the relationship of one institution, the University, within an institutional complex. The study suggests that the University acts and has a role akin to the Fool in the medieval royal court. The ...

The paper considers the principles and basic stages of decomposing georeferenced documents oriented to the problems of markup and semantic search. The paper justifies the necessity to develop a multimodal semiotic system and discusses verbal-visual knowledge representation in digital libraries. To represent knowledge, verbal-visual thesaurus is proposed. The thesaurus includes verbal, verbal-vi...

This paper explores a theoretical perspective to information systems engineering, correlating requirements modelling techniques with Norm Analysis, to elicit organisational semantics and to formalise complex business rules. At present noticeable disparity exists between systems models, and the actual, 'real' organisation information systems. The modern multifaceted organisational disposition is...

Documents act as a medium to permanently record and communicate concepts, thoughts, procedures and data. Traditional documents of our interest consist of a physical support modified by some physical action performed by an author. Examples are written papers, engraved stones etc. Traditional documentation techniques result from a long evolution: professional communities developed and shaped cust...

System Metaphor is one of the core practices of the software development process known as “Extreme Programming” (XP). Unfortunately, the System Metaphor practice is poorly understood, and is the practice XP teams most commonly choose to ignore. We provide a simple, structural model of system metaphors, based upon Peircean semiotics, giving a fundamental account of the way metaphors can contribu...

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...

FLOYD MERRELL (b. 16 November 1937). Academic Status: Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies. Mail Address: Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Purdue University, West lafayette, IN 47907, USA. E-mail: . Personal Office Tel: (765) 496-2265. Fax: (765) 496-1700. Educational Background: Ph.D., University of New Mexico, 1972. Research Interests: (1) Spanish an...

This paper explores the mutual implication of critical realism and semiosis. Three key questions can be posed in this regard. 1 The first (discussed in Section II) concerns how far critical realism needs to include semiosis, provisionally defined as the intersubjective production of meaning, 2 in its more general approach to social relations, their reproduction and transformation. In exploring ...