The Semiosic Evolution of Education

Abstract

The recent development of biosemiotics has revealed the achievement of knowledge and the development of science to be the results of the semiosis of all life forms, including those commonly regarded as cultural constructs. Education is thus a semiosic structure to which evolution itself has adapted, while learning is the semiotic phenomenon that determines the renewal of life itself. Historically, it was a semiotic paradigm that determined the emergence of institutions such as universities and that underpinned the development of liberal education. The present article considers the history of education in terms of sign emergence and evolution, regarding education as currently being conceived and practised as a stage in the general evolutionary action of signs. This approach differs from the prevailing modern approaches to education, which are mostly applied psychology and sociology.

Transition, Action and Education: Redirecting Pragmatist Philosophy of Education

“…Dewey continues to retain a considerable influence on the sub‐field of philosophy for children, mostly because of the concern for community and democracy in the development of shared sustained thinking (Johannson, ). Exceptions to the concern with Dewey include the influence of Peirce, especially on edusemiotics (Olteanu, ; Pesce, ; Semetsky, ; Stables, ; Strand, ; also Strand, , Thayer‐Bacon, ), and work in which Saito and Standish have consistently invited consideration of Emerson, Putnam and Cavell (Cavell and Standish, ; Saito and Standish, ) . In much of this work, James has been neglected, and needlessly so.…”

Analysing videos in educational research: an “Inquiry Graphics” approach for multimodal, Peircean semiotic coding of video data

“…Edusemiotics is an emerging philosophical and theoretical approach to learning, knowledge and education. It recommends semiotics as providing the core conceptualization for a philosophy of education liberated from the rather rigid assumptions of analytical philosophy, which have dominated this area for some decades (Stables and Semetsky, 2014;Semetsky and Stables, 2014;Olteanu, 2014Olteanu, , 2016Stables, 2012, Stables, 2006Olteanu and Campbell, 2018). It could be seen to bridge American pragmatism, European semiotics (e.g.…”

“…Peirce developed a rather complex and elaborate system of semiotics rooted in pragmatist relations between the mind, the world of concrete existence and representation (Peirce, 1991). This entire section and the remainder of the article builds both on edusemiotics and Peirce, since the two are inseparable (Olteanu, 2014). Philosophers of education who develop the semiotic approach to educatation as edusemiotics, for example Andrew Stables and Alin Olteanu, have written about edusemiotics foundations.…”

“…In Peircean terms, as used in edusemiotics, Research Object represents a type of argument (Noth, 2014). It means that it takes all various levels of interpretation in question to come to some research arguments, via the process of associative thinking as the discovery of similarities among entities and things (Olteanu, 2014(Olteanu, , 2015. This analytical and interpretational discovery is fixed via the research aim, objective and questions, including any theoretical and/or conceptual framework.…”

Predicating from an Early Age: Edusemiotics and the Potential of Children’s Preconceptions

“…Semiotics and education have a long common history, as for a long historical period semiotics underpinned the medieval liberal curriculum (Olteanu 2014). The decline of interest for semiotics during modernity and the modern dualist mindset separated semiotics from philosophy of education, favouring cognitive and social approaches to pedagogy.…”