Chamada de trabalhos / Call for papers – vol. 18, n. 2 (2022) - Dossiê temático "Semiótica e verdade"

2021-05-10

Thematic issue "Semiotics and Truth"

Edited by Paolo Demuru (Universidade Paulista: Post-Graduate Program in Communication, São Paulo) and Franciscu Sedda (Università di Cagliari)

 

Nowadays more than ever, before the spread of misinformation and conspiracy narratives, it is urgent and necessary to rethink the semiotic nature and the status of truth.

Always implicitly or explicitly at the centre of semiotic studies – from Greimasian and post-Greimasian semiotics to Peircean semiotics, Umberto Eco’s interpretative semiotics and Jurij Lotman’s semiotics of culture – the problem of truth invites us to tackle both of its epistemological implications and the concrete ways in which truth is affirmed or denied.

It may seem that semiotics, assuming a “non-referentialist” posture before the relationship between languages, discourses and the world, has put aside the “Truth with a capital T”, leaving it to philosophy and other human sciences. The fact is that semiotics has not considered the “Truth” – the ultimate and absolute Truth – in order to tackle the many “truths” that humans seek and produce to build their beliefs and identities. This means that, despite its ephemeral and contingent nature, or perhaps precisely because of that, “truths” are semiotic objects always at stake and, therefore, triggers of meaning, the catalysts of historical, social, cultural and political struggles for meaning.

Let’s think, for example, in this regard, on Greimas’ seminal essay “The Veridiction Contract”. In this article, dedicated to Paul Ricoeur, the semiotician tackles the problem of the semiotic nature of truth. The first conclusion he reaches is that, from the theoretical-epistemological standpoint of his discursive semiotics, truth is nothing but an effect of meaning. The second is that, consequently, the production of truth relies on a discourse “whose function is not truthsaying, but rather seeming-to-be-true”. From this point of view, what matters is not so much the adequacy of languages and discourses to an alleged external referent, but the ways in which a receiver is led to believe in a discourse that is built as true. That is, in Greimas’ words, “under what conditions do we believe that the discourse of others is true”? Therefore, thinking about truth in discursive semiotic terms means asking oneself about the strategies used by a given sender to make his speech apparently true, as well as about the paths followed by the receiver to embrace it as such. In fact, according to Greimas, truth is a “veridictory modality” that emerges through a contract between the actants of the communicational process. A contract that Greimas himself defines as “the veridiction contract”. In other words, the problem of the semiotic status of truth is a problem that concerns the types of discursive manipulation. Greimas identifies two in particular: “the objectivizing camouflage” and the “subjectivizing camouflage”. The first consists in a discursive strategy that “to the possible extent, erases all marks of enunciation”. The second is a discourse in which the subject of enunciation explicitly manifests himself, building himself “as an I (je) that is the guarantor of the truth”. In this case, we are faced with a real “hermetico-hermeneutic” discourse that “it must appear as a secret (…) whose purpose is only to suggest the existence of an anagogical level for us to decipher”. This raises, among other issues, the problem of the relationship between the term “truth” and its opposite, contradictory and complementary terms, that is, “falsehood”, “lie”, “secret”, discussed in the famous semiotic square of “veridictory modalities”.

The same issues have been addressed by authors such as Paolo Fabbri, in his article Semiotica e camouflage, and Umberto Eco, who in A Theory of Semiotics (1975), defined semiotics as the “discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie”. In his later works, Eco constantly developed this fundamental point of his semiotics, reflecting in depth both on the different genres of the fake (historical forgery, imitation, counterfeiting, etc.), and on the aspects of the so-called “hermetic semiosis”. As Eco argues, the main objective of hermetic semiosis is to build a discourse that identifies the truth̀ with what̀ is not said, or that is said in an obscure way, thus producing an almost irrepressible shift in the meaning of truth, according to which every semiotic interrogation about it never tells the ultimate truth, but only shifts the secret elsewhere (The limits of interpretation).

However, it must be said that Eco also tackled the problem of truth in more markedly theoretical-epistemological terms, especially in Kant and the Platypus ([1997] 1999) and more recently, in his essay Di un realismo negativo (On negative realism, 2012). Eco follows here a different approach to that of Greimas. For instance, he argues that there are limits that define “what can be said” and “what cannot be said” about the “real world” and the “real facts”: As Eco states: “does there exist a hard core of being, of such a nature that some things we say about it and for it cannot and must not be taken as holding good (and if they are said by the Poets let them be held good only insofar as they refer to a possible world but not to a world of real facts)?” (Kant and the Platypus [1997] 1999: 50). Nevertheless, Eco’s idea of truth is also grounded in a discursive perspective and in the principle of negotiation. Truth always depends on sociocultural processes and evaluations about its adequacy to the “natural world”.

Another semiotic theory of truth developed in the field of structural semiotics was put forward by Jacques Geninasca in his La parole litteraire. According to Geninasca, truth arises from the links between the thymic and predicative evaluations that found the individual and collective beliefs. It is in the possibility of producing and/or assuming a Discourse – i.e., a universe of values ​​– that sutures the rupture between feeling and knowing, that the Subject inscribes himself in a Truth and constitutes himself as such. Likewise, thanks to this gesture of assumption, the Subject (re) inscribes his/her truth in the flow of (his/her) history, affirming that a specific discourse is “The Discourse”, a “Discourse” which exceeds the contingencies of time and the contradictions of mood to become a personal and collective reference.

Such reflections invite us to reflect on a sociosemiotic and a cultural semiotics of truths, which takes into account the problem of their sensible dimension and of the regimes of interaction through which beliefs emerge and consolidate (Landowski, 2005). At the same time, this approach must provide a broad perspective on the historical dimension of the systems and processes of production of truths, as in Lotman and Foucault’s works.

On the basis of these assumptions, this issue of Estudos Semioticos aims to tackle

the relationship between semiotics and truth from multiple and different angles, following the path that leads from empiricism to method, theory and epistemology, and vice versa. We seek to address both the theoretical and the empirical dimensions of truth, tackling the multiplicity of its objects, subjects, systems, processes and modes of production, as well as the values ​​that orbit around it. In fact, what is “true” does not emerge only in relation to what is “false”, but also to what is “right”, “correct”, “adequate”, “authentic” and so on. And what about the nuances of meaning that truth assumes in a social field dominated by the idea of ​​“post-truth”? How the very idea of truth itself changes before post-truth and its practices?

Tracking the truth effects that are subtly built within the most varied discursive spheres and practices. To grasp, analyse, criticize the truth: or rather, “the truths” of science, politics, daily life, cultures, collectives and, why not, the very truths of Semiotics as a theory and method. Identify the values and the meanings of truth, as well as the conflicts through which it emerges as such. These are some of the guidelines in this issue of Estudos Semioticos.

Starting from these guidelines, we invite authors to present both theoretical reflections and empirical analysis. The main topics of interest for this special issue, while not being exclusive, are the following:

  • Truth and truths: systematizations and theoretical-epistemological proposals;
  • The enunciative strategies of the veridictory discourse;
  • Genres of veridictory discourse;
  • Truth and aesthesis: the role of aesthesis in the construction of truths;
  • Regimes of interactions and processes of construction of truths;
  • Cultures, history, stories and truths: the problem of truth in the light of historical development and cultural differences;
  • Truth and socio-cultural stereotypes;
  • Politics of truth and truths of politics:
  • Post-truth, misinformation and the construction of beliefs on social media;
  • Truth and secrecy in current conspiracy theories.
  • Truth, memory and testimony

    Deadlines: 


    Stylesheet: 

    • languages: portuguese, french, english, italian, spanish
    • abstract must be written in the language of the article and in english (if the article is written in english, the abstract must be written in one of the other languages above)
    • papers must not exceed 50.000 characters (including spaces, bibliography and footnotes) 
    • Please, check all the details on: https://www.revistas.usp.br/esse/about/submissions