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A Short Introduction to Edusemiotics

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DOI 10.1515/css-2018-0015  Chinese Semiotic Studies 14(2):245–260

Alin Olteanu and Cary Campbell*

A Short Introduction to Edusemiotics
Abstract: This article reviews and discusses some the main aspects of the
growing edusemiotic research movement. The authors briefly explore the
historical antecedents to educational semiotics in antiquity, before going on to
discuss edusemiotic’s fundamental “triadic” (non-dualistic) orientation. They
focus on the use of Peirce’s categorical semiotic philosophy to conceptualize
educational dynamics; the alignment of edusemiotics with biosemiotics; the
relevance of Thomas Sebeok’s modeling theories to education; and the primacy
of iconicity in learning. Throughout the article, it is emphasized how
edusemiotics does not mean semiotics applied to education, as a pedagogical
aid or teaching/research tool, but is rather, “thinking” semiotics as the
foundation for educational theory and practice at large (cf. Stables and
Semetsky, 2015).

Keywords: Andrew Stables; Augustine; C. S. Peirce; ecosemiotics; Inna

Semetsky; philosophy of education; umwelt


*Corresponding author, Cary Campbell: Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada,
e-mail: clc25@sfu.ca
Alin Olteanu: Kaunas University, Kaunas, Lithuania, e-mail: alin.olteanu@ktu.lt

1 Historical antecedents
One does not have to look far to find a common history between semiotics (the
study of signs, and signification) and education. In fact, Augustine (354–430AD)
begins his famous De Doctrina Christiania (on Christian doctrine, or, On
Christian Teaching) with the important remark “learning concerns either things
or signs, but it is through signs that we learn what things are” ([397AD], book 1,
line 2).1 In these opening lines a sophisticated philosophical perspective is put
forward, a point of view that will eventually come to be recognized within the
purview of semiotics. Here is the recognition that humans and animals alike


1 It is useful to compare the differences in translation of these cited passages from De Doctrina
Christiania with what is included in Deely 2009 and the translation by Shaw 2009. We have
relied here on the translation included in Deely 2009.

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246  Alin Olteanu and Cary Campbell

only know the mind-independent things of their environment through

attributing meaning and value to them: by bringing them within their species-
specific phenomenal world (or Umwelt, the term later adopted in biosemiotics
from von Uexküll 1973 [1928], see Sebeok, 2001 [1994]: 27, and, further, also in
edusemiotics, see Nöth in Semetsky, 2010:5 and Stables 2012:1, 40, Stables et al.
2014).2
Let us be clear, edusemiotics does not mean semiotics applied to education,
as a pedagogical aid or teaching/research tool. Edusemiotics is a growing global
research project that, like Augustine, thinks semiotics as the foundation for
educational theory and practice at large.3 “A sign is something by knowing


2 Semiotics, or the awareness of semiotic consciousness, emerged in the Western world in two
similar yet distinctive ways, both in the service of educational programs. First, with
Hippocrates (460 BCE – 375 BCE) and Galen’s (129 CE – 216) formulation of the science of signs
in the service of medical practitioners and medical pedagogy. And secondly, with Augustine’s
(and the Patristic age generally) calls for liberal education. The earlier expression of a
formulized semiotic was very much in line the Greek understanding of the sign (σημεῖον),
which was something far narrower than Augustine’s “signum” conception, being confined to
the connotation of mostly indexical signs, clues, tracks, signs of the weather, divinatory signs
(cf. Deely 2001 for a comprehensive historical account). As many have noted (Deely 2001, 2009;
Eco et al. 1986) it was probably Augustine's ignorance of Greek that led him to a more holistic
understanding of sign that doesn’t sharply distinguish cultural signs (that is, symbols, words,
ideas) from natural signs: “Anything impressing our senses that makes us aware of yet
something else again is acting as a sign” (De Doctrina Christiania, Book II, line 1). Looking at
the broader historical context, it was possibly the meeting of Greek and Roman natural
philosophy with Semitic text hermeneutics that opened for the early Christians the possibility
of such an interpretative semiotics (e.g. Deely’s [2001] historical tracking of the mutation from
natural σημεῖον to Augustine’s more comprehensive signum). Olteanu (2014, 2018) is one
scholar who has emphasized the historical grounding of liberal education in semiotic
philosophical awareness. His analysis reveals how, while St Augustine brilliantly developed an
early “doctrine of signs” in the service of legitimizing the educational discipline, such
hermeneutics were present throughout the Patristic age generally. He also emphasizes how
“[t]he entanglement of education and semiotics, due to their common roots in the
hermeneutics of medieval mystical theology, underpinned an anthropological and ecological
bearing. Arguably, this was rediscovered by recent edusemiotic research” (2018: 3). This is also
confirmed by Nöth’s (1998, 2001) coinage of ecosemiotics: The semiotic theory of ecology has
roots in a medieval, theological text hermeneutics with certain allegorical conceptualizations
of nature.
3 For some recent introductions to edusemiotics, see Semetsky’s (2010) edited anthology
outlining various approaches to edusemiotics from leading authors; Nöth’s (2010) thorough
literature review included in this Semetsky volume; see also the recent handbook also edited
by Semetsky (2017). The term neologism “edusemiotics” was coined by Marcel Danesi (2010) in
the forward to the above-mentioned Semetsky volume (2010). The co-authored book
Edusemotics: Semiotic philosophy as educational foundation (Stables and Semetsky 2015) has

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 A Short Introduction to Edusemiotics  247

which we know something more” (CP 8.332) Charles Peirce said. That is, a sign’s
meaning is always virtual and waiting to be realized in some (possible) future
interpretation (see CP 5.427, CP 5.97). Conceptualizing learning-as-semiosis
means that learning is not reducible to internal mental states, neurological
activity, or behavioral responses. Undoubtedly this deferred event we call
learning involves a little of all the above, for signs are mediations. Mediating
what? Well, anything entering-into-relation: subject–object; mind–body;
animate life–inanimate matter; culture–nature; and most directly for our
purposes, teacher–learner. Recognizing the primacy of relations in these
various encounters involves recognizing a distinctive form of being (ontology)
that doesn’t reduce neatly into axioms, formal systems, or reductionist accounts.

2 Transcending dualism
As Andrew Stables (Semetsky and Stables 2015: 31–45) details clearly, when
mind and matter are thought of as fundamentally distinct, learning is reified
and mystified, no matter where we sit on the mentalist–materialist tightrope:

Thus the mind-matter dualism partly attributable to, and certainly exemplified by,
Descartes encourages materialist responses that both valorize mathematically-based
conceptions of nature and society as predictable and controllable and devalue any
conception of mentalistic activity. As a result, conceptual confusion can occur between
positions that are “anti-Cartesian” in a thoroughgoing way (those that reject the mind-
matter divide) and those that are materialistic and anti-subjectivist (that prioritise
objectifiable matter over mind). (32)

Such a research heritage has resulted in inadequate explanatory frameworks

that adhere to a strongly dyadic conception of the sign defined through binary
opposition, “in which a term is understood in the context of its opposite”
(Stables and Semetsky, 2015: 32). Thus, these frameworks privilege substance
dualism, materialist and behaviorist responses that favor predictability and the
rejection, or at least nullifying, of mental processes, and paradoxically, the
opposite, that is, radial constructivism and solipsism, where any interpretation
can be recognized as valid. Without going too deeply into analysis, we can
witness this substance mind–body dualism at work in popular pedagogical


quickly emerged as a foundational text for this new research project (for a review of this book
see Olteanu 2016). For more on the essential points and perspectives of edusemiotics see the
recent interview with Inna Semetsky (Semetsky and Campbell 2018).

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248  Alin Olteanu and Cary Campbell

assumptions that “take for granted the existence of an ‘educable’ inner

intelligence distinct from a ‘trainable’ bodily organism, despite calls in the
philosophy of education for more attention to the embodied nature of both
knowledge and teaching” (33). Indeed, the very orienting premise of much
formal education (that the child is an incomplete or underdeveloped adult) is
reflective of this basic substance dualism.
The anthropocentrist idea of humans being distinguished by their
potentiality to undergo education and, as such, of participating in a
sociocultural life which is unknown to other animals originates in the early
modern educational philosophy of contractualism (see Rousseau’s Emile, 1911
[1762]; Hobbes’ Leviathan, 1909 [1651]), inherent in turn of mind–body dualism.
This assumption oriented much of the modern educational research to come,
which, as particularly noticed in Piaget (1959 [1926]), has attributed particular
cognitive capacities for learning to human infants. Thus, particularly the
capacity of learning a language, as a specifically human capacity, came to be
considered as the key to all learning, endorsing the linguistic turn, whereby
knowledge, the object of learning, came to be understood as constructed
entirely in linguistic categories. The semiotic approach to education challenges
the assumptions for learning and education of the linguistic turn, claiming that
learning processes occur more broadly in nature. In this view, learning is not
construed as a matter of linguistic articulation but, more generally, as meaning-
making (semiosis).

3 Peirce’s categories
To address these inadequacies there has been this growing body of educational
scholarship that has looked to C. S. Peirce’s categorical semiotic philosophy.4


4 For important modern introductions into the possibility of a Peircean philosophy of learning
see:
-Houser (1987), Toward a Peircean theory of learning for a notably early contribution to this new
field of research;
-Semetsky (2005a, Peirce and education: an introduction) written as an introduction to a special
issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory intended to introduce the import
of Peirce’s scholarship for a broader community of educational researchers;
-Colapietro et al. (2005) who introduce a special issue of Studies in Philosophy and
Education with a thoughtful review of the various aspects of Peircean education, arguing
that Peirce’s most significant contribution to the philosophy of education is not his explicit
texts on higher education, interpreted as some guiding principles on what and how to educate.

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 A Short Introduction to Edusemiotics  249

The strength in Peirce’s semiotic is precisely that it is triadic and thus non-
dualist, that is, it purports to explain relation itself as an ontological modality.5
More specifically, we can say that a Peircean (edu)semiotic doesn’t “locate”
learning solely within ens rationis (mind dependent reality), nor in the
“processing” of an external and independent ens reale (mind-independent
reality), but rather in the dynamic and triadic mediation of observer, the
observing, and the observed. This is a step beyond substance dualism and the
corresponding principle of non-contradiction (this is this, because it is not that),
to recognize the logic of the included (rather than excluded) middle (this is
always becoming that). This perpetual becoming characteristic of educational
processes is conceptualized through the growth of signs (semiosis). Semetsky
(in Semetsky and Campbell 2018: 124) explains further in an interview recently
published in CSS:

We perceive the environment as, mainly, consisting of objects. What there “is” is a
question addressed by ontology that accounts for the so-called “furniture of the universe.”


Peirce’s most valuable contribution is rather his semeiotics” (2005: 173);

-The special issue of the journal Semiotica “Semiotics and Education” introduced by Donald
Cunningham (2007).
To generalize, many earlier studies into the relevance of Peircean thought on education have
focused on the more conscious scientific reasoning processes we see emphasized in Peirce's
pragmatic method. In this research, we find an educational outline that emphasizes the
processes of right reasoning (CP 5.421)4 and analytic thinking strategies. Chiasson (2001, 2005)
has accomplished this to great results, developing an educational approach rooted in Peirce's
pragmatic method that she calls engaged intelligence training. More recently the aspect of
Peirce’s thought that many edusemiotic scholars have focused on is a post-1885 Peirce, in
which, after first elucidating the concept of semiosis in 1883 (CP 5.829), his semiotics turned
away from formal logic, becoming more existential and phenomenological. Eco (2014: 511), in
a late paper entitled “The threshold and the infinite,” explains his approach to
interpreting Peirce in Kant and Platypus: “My starting point was in fact a suggestion made
by Armano Fumagalli (1995: ch. 3), who saw in the post-1885 Peirce an almost Kantian
return to the immediacy of intuition, antecedent to any inferential activity (the Ground
is no longer a predicate but a sensation, and indexicality becomes the kind of experience
which takes the form of a shock; it is an impact with an individual, which “strikes” the
subject without yet being a representation) .” This less logic-based (post-1885) reading of
Peirce has informed what has been called the “iconic turn” (Olteanu 2015; see also
Stjernfelt 2007: 53) in Peircean scholarship.
5 Augustine’s sign definition had to wait for the publication of John Poinsot’s Tractatis de
Signis (1985 [1632]) to receive its fully relational status (for the sign cannot be fully relational
if it is tethered to sense perception and a subject-perceiving) and not until the late 19th
century will Charles Peirce give the sign its fully triadic formula.

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250  Alin Olteanu and Cary Campbell

But the universe, which is perfused with signs, cannot be reduced to “objects” that
subscribe to the logic of identities – that is, being those things that they “are” and
definitely not being what they are “not”: there is no in-between, any “middle” is excluded,
and we can say with certainty that this is this and that is that. The semiotic reality,
however, is not the world of substantial things: this or that. Signs are relational entities,
which are defined as such by virtue of “mediation”, of the “included” middle without
which the evolutionary process of semiosis is unconceivable. Signs – via interpretants
(that is, “thirds” as a middle term in a relation) always become other signs: they evolve.

Such a conceptualization requires the expanded tripartite conception of

experience offered by Peirce’s categories of firstness (the possible), secondness
(the actual), and thirdness (the would be) (Merrel 1997: 27):

First is the conception of being or existing independent of anything else. Second is the
conception of being relative to, the conception of reaction with, something else. Third is
the conception of mediation, whereby a first and second are brought into relation...
Feeling is First, sense of reaction Second... the tendency to take habits is Third. Mind is
First, Matter is second, Evolution is Third. (CP 6.32 1891; emphasis added)

Recent edusemiotic research suggests that one of the central innovations

of these categories for educational theory is that they offer the ability to describe
and understand learning and cognition beyond what is actually (that is,
materially) manifest, and incorporate:
1) the realm of virtual potential, what in some instances is also framed as
pre- cognitive (firstness) experience (cf. Semetsky 2005b; Stables and
Semetsky 2015 Ch. 2; Campbell 2018; Legg 2017);
2) the “forceful, dyadic consciousness of ‘resistance’” (Strand 2013: 754;
Colapietro 2013; West 2015; Campbell 2016) to new learning
(secondness); and
3) the growth and becoming that results through mediation: a first coming
into relation with a second (thirdness).

Thirdness underlines the process of semiosis in its full estimation, and is

representative of the emergence of new possibility (firstness) from out of the
continuity of being in-habit (thirdness) with an environment, felt and realized
through the encounter with exterior resistance (secondness). Torill Strand
makes this same point, saying authoritatively that “(t)hirdness is learning”
(2013: 795) and always encapsulates firstness and secondness:

‘Thirdness essentially involves the production of effects in the world of existence, —not by
furnishing energy, but by the gradual development of Law’ (Peirce 1903c, p. 271). So, in
addition to the immediate, incommunicable perception of the qualities of ‘pure presence’
(firstness) and the forceful, dyadic consciousness of ‘resistance’ (secondness), thirdness

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 A Short Introduction to Edusemiotics  251

entails ‘learning’, or ‘the felt sense of personal transformation (of acquiring a new habit or
at least of having one’s present habits strengthened, refined, or in some other way
modified)’. (Colapietro, 1999, p. 23) Thirdness contains firstness and secondness, but it is
by no way reducible to the two.

Because of this non-reducibility of the categories, edusemiotics attempts to

replicate this tripartite fullness of experience in educational settings. This has
been referred to as the palimpsest nature of the categories (cf. Campbell 2016,
2017, 2018). In line with Peirce’s scholastic realism, this means recognizing that
both individuals and generals are admitted to have causal efficacy. Thirdness –
or the growth of interpretants and thus the growth of perception and action-
possibilities – occurs in perceptual learning to mediate between the processes
of qualification (firstness) and sense-impression (secondness), or to put it more
directly, to mediate the potential becoming actual in experience.6 It is in this
sense that we can understand learning in the Deweyian sense (2005[1916]) as
“the formation of habits that will engender a [future] receptiveness to novelty”
(Campbell 2017:17)7. Semetsky explains this Deweyian perspective very much in
line with a theory of unlimited semiosis: “The more an organism learns the
more it still has to learn: education means more education and becoming more
developed signs” (Stables and Semetsky 2015: 81). Learning in this
understanding is expressed in an anticipatory dynamic (Nadin 2010, 2014, 2017a,
2017b), where the anticipation of a future state changes and mediates the
learner’s relation to the present as well as the past.8 Such an account of learning
involves the ability to conceptualize oneself as a semiotic entity, as a sign in a
process of continual unfolding (cf. Olteanu 2015: 74), undergoing continuous


6 “We only know the potential through the actual, and only infer qualities by generalization
from what we perceive in matter” (CP 1: 429).
7 Affifi (2014: 76) explains: “For Dewey, growth occurs when possibilities open up for an
organism, thereby “enhancing its ability to participate in its environment” (Gouinlock 1972:
238). It is the process of developing habits that allow the organism to interact more spiritedly,
responsively, and openly to arising circumstances. By contrast, a lack of growth limits
possibilities of encounter, as the organism relies on preformed habits that stultify, ossify, and
close it off to novelty… growth is predicated on habits that enable future habit-forming,
whereas the restriction of growth occurs when existing habits monopolize the operational
domain (see, for example, Dewey 1916: 44–48).” Aligning this understanding with Eco’s
poetics of openness (1989[1962]), we can say that this is an aesthetic-oriented philosophy of
education, in the sense that we locate learning in the “habits of feeling” involved in this
perpetual opening to future semiosis (cf. Campbell 2018) revealed to us through aesthetic
encounters.
8 Campbell (2017) has aligned the science of anticipation to edusemiotics in depth.

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252  Alin Olteanu and Cary Campbell

growth simply as being part of the life-process – by simultaneously

“writing(/creating)” and “reading” the signs that make up our Umwelt.
It is important to again note how this edusemiotic (semiotics as education)
perspective differs from the application of semiotic frameworks to education
(semiotics in education, as has been done over the last several decades in
multimodality and social semiotic research). Knowledge-content, information,
data, are only significant if they are integrated with the continuity of experience
and living. While recent social semiotic research has come closer to this view as
well, this school (still) tends to equate knowledge with a concept of text as
sociocultural constructed representation (see Kress 2010: 23–24, 26–27; Marrone
2017: 108). In what regards edusemiotics, Semetsky (in Semetsky and Campbell
2018: 124) again explains:

Take the concept of semiotics in education. More often than not, it still deals with objects –
even those that play a somewhat mediating role such as teaching “aids.”
But edusemiotics purports to deal with signs, taking as its starting point the rejection of
non-contradiction that says: If this is this, it cannot also be that. Logic as semiotics says it
can, because “this” is always becoming “that.” People are also signs: In learning, in
interpreting signs, they grow and become, as Peirce would say, more developed signs. It is
the process of learning and evolving that brings together ens reale (reality) and ens
rationis (our knowledge of reality).

4 Edusemiotics and biosemiotics

Edusemiotics recognizes that living and learning are co-extensive, as both can
be understood as processes of semiotic engagement (Stables 2006), using,
responding, and interpreting (consciously and unconsciously) signs and signals
alike. This recognition in itself re-orients education away from reductionist and
dualist accounts:

The most important aspect of semiotics for the present argument is that it is strongly non-
dualist with respect to mind and body. If living is a process of semiotic engagement, then
what is real is both physical and humanly interpreted: there are not two sorts of reality,
one external and one internal. (Stables and Semetsky 2015: 156)

This follows from an earlier biosemiotic realization that asserts semiosis and life
itself as being co-extensive. This has been the great contribution of Thomas
Sebeok’s (1991, 1994, 2001; Danesi and Sebeok 2000) semiotic project, which as
has been deemed as Sebeok’s thesis by Kull, Emmeche and Hoffmeyer (2011: 2),
and can be expressed as follows: “The phenomenon that distinguishes life

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 A Short Introduction to Edusemiotics  253

forms from inanimate objects is semiosis. This can be defined simply as the
instinctive capacity of all living organisms to produce and understand signs”
(Sebeok 2001: 3).
From its beginning, Sebeok framed biosemiotics as a modeling theory (see
Sebeok 2001: 144). He considered that the best English word for Uexküll’s
Umwelt is model:

All organisms communicate by use of models (Umwelts, or self-worlds, each according to

its species-specific sense organs), from the simplest representations of maneuvers of
approach and withdrawal to the most sophisticated cosmic theories of Newton and
Einstein. (Sebeok 2001: 23)

Hence, if semiosis characterizes biological life – triadic meaning-making

operations consisting in the coupling of puzzle pieces that constitute an
environment (Umwelt) – then learning is continuous in the biological realm, not
interrupted by the emergence of humans and certainly not starting only with
human sociocultural organization. Learning is a matter of adaptation, which
implies that its enhancement through (institutional) education is an evolution
by exaptation. For instance, Gough and Stables argue that in a semiotic
perspective “human survival is taken to depend upon a continuous process of
meaning-making” (2012: 369). This leads to the valuable realization that on
occasions when educational institutions obstruct rather than facilitate the
capacities of individuals or groups to develop more complex and insightful
models of reality, these institutions contradict the rationale for which they
emerged. This is true, of course, if meaning-making “is not to be conceived of as
merely mental response to, and conscious interpretation of physical events, but
is constitutive of all forms of adaptation and progression” (Gough and Stables
2012: 369). This argument explicates why and how edusemiotics naturally
aligned its arguments with biosemiotics.
But the influence extends both ways, as biosemiotics has found inspiration
from educational theories. Since biosemiotics is a theory of environmental
modeling, it has to consider learning processes. Thus, Hoffmeyer (2008, 2015)
found useful the concept of scaffolding, stemming from (socio-)constructivism.
The term is attributed mainly to Bruner (1957, 1960, 1966), who used this term in
the rather narrow purpose of instructional education, to explain that knowledge
is constructed upon existing structures and that teachers need to offer to
students the scaffolding support for the comprehension of loftier notions.
Bruner’s idea has its roots in Vygotsky’s notion of zone of proximal development,
consisting in the difference between what a learner can do on her own and what
she cannot do at all: In-between there are possibilities of learning with the aid

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254  Alin Olteanu and Cary Campbell

of a teacher (see Vygotsky 1978: 85). Hoffmeyer expands the use of the
scaffolding concept in the broader semiotic perspective of learning as
environmental modeling, and not the restrictive educational instruction
perspective:

The network of semiotic interactions by which individual cells, organisms, populations, or

ecological units are controlling their activities can thus be seen as scaffolding devices
assuring that an organism’s activities become tuned to that organism’s needs. (Hoffmeyer
2008: 154)

A brief and insightful definition for semiotic scaffolding provided by Hoffmeyer,

inviting much reflection, is that “semiotic scaffolding is what makes history
matter to an organism (or a cultural system)” (2015: 154).
Thus, concurrently understanding learning-as-semiosis provides an avenue
from which to explore the possibility for “liberating the concept of learning from
the domain of education, and rethinking education as a system or a program
that works in the service of learning” (Olteanu and Campbell 2017). This
orientation suggests a more ecologically and biologically minded approach to
education that resists separating humans from animals, culture from nature,
recognizing that because ‘[l]earning is continuous, occurring in every life form…
any Umwelt has educational potential” (Olteanu 2016: 586).

5 The primacy of iconicity in learning

The basic edusemiotic orientation is based on organism and environment
interaction and complementarity. Unlike analytic philosophy, the tradition from
which the dominant incarnation of philosophy of education stems,
Edusemiotics assumes no dichotomy of concept from image. Hirst and Peters say
this outright: “What is a concept? It obviously is not the same thing as an
image” (2012[1970]: 3). The image (or icon) is primal and foundational to
edusemiotics; which has been informed by “the iconic turn” in recent semiotic
scholarship. Using Peirce’s famous triad of icon–index–symbol, we can say this
move represents a turning away from explicit reliance on symbolic accounts of
learning (a symbol being a sign that signifies its object based on an established
social convention), to recognize more fully the embodied and sensory
foundations of indexicality (a sign that signifies based on direct contiguity) and
iconicity (signs that signify based on perceived similarity/resemblance). This
iconic turn has begun to seriously inform the emerging edusemiotic project, and

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 A Short Introduction to Edusemiotics  255

it has been suggested that “icons are the signs that afford learning, all
signification having an iconic ground” (Olteanu 2015: 76).
The uptake of the iconic turn in edusemiotics endorses the biosemiotic
concept of modeling through scaffolding, as, in this view, learning can be
regarded as diagrammatic reasoning (cf. Legg 2017): “the piecing together of the
semi-autonomous parts of a scaffolding has the character of meaning-bearing
couplings as they support still more complicated versions of the basically
significant perception-action cycle” (Cobley and Stjernfelt 2015: 292). Diagrams
achieved through the piecing together of parts into more comprehensive wholes
further support more complex structures. Thus, learning consists in a discovery
of similarities. This challenges the long tradition of structural and text semiotics
which accounted for learning as stemming from (perceived) difference,
stemming from a more ubiquitous substance dualism inherited from the
modernist paradigm. Stjernfelt considers that the iconic turn, inspired by recent
Peirce scholarship, can rightly be termed a morphological turn, sharing the
view with cognitive linguistics that “continuous models not reducible to algebra
are introduced alongside feature-preserving mappings of such models between
(mental) domains” (2007: 53). By considering the inherent morphology of
meaning and, as such, avoiding a dualistic notion of meaning articulation of
form and content, edusemiotics is aligned to the embodied phenomenology
trend in current philosophy.
The iconic starting point is obvious in normal teaching and learning
relationships, for the simple fact that no two people learn something in the
same way: A saxophone student who knows basic piano will possess a very
different relationship to harmony than one who does not; a physics student
learning about the concept of force who knows how to swim will have a very
different relationship to this knowledge than another student who doesn’t, etc.
Olteanu (2015: 75) clarifies:

What happens when learning is that structures of signification (what needs be

apprehended) have to settle on already existing structures of signification: a learner. In
their interaction, these signs will find their own compatibility and the probability for this
to happen in the same manner in two different cases is too small to be considered.

Of course, sign systems, as they become extended beyond the senses, and
become more abstracted and symbolic, can increasingly lead to error; “semiosis
explains itself through itself,” Eco (1979) reminds us. When we privilege the
concept over the image, when we teach schemata as being disconnected from
lived encounters, we effectively destroy the body in the sign (Danesi 1998), and
rob education of its experiential basis. This is to work against the natural

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256  Alin Olteanu and Cary Campbell

learning flow principle that sees the learning process as a flow “from iconicity to
connotatively and symbolicity, i.e. from concrete, sensory modes of
representation (and knowing) to complex, abstract modes…” (Sebeok and
Danesi 2000: 171).9

6 Conclusion
Edusemiotics returns awareness to the embodied foundations of learning that
precedes both symbolic re-presentation, reductionist reification, and does not
sharply distinguish conscious (epistemic) problem solving from unconscious
and automatic response and feeling (as expressed through the Peircean concept
of abduction, cf. Shank 1998, 2008). Edusemiotics also emphasizes the
continuity of human learning processes with the wider biological (and possibly
physical [according to a pansemiotic perspective]) world, recognizing that all
life forms live and learn through semiotic engagement. Recognizing living as
semiotic engagement also means that for the pragmatic purposes of educational
philosophy, we cannot sharply differentiate between a “mind” that processes
“signs” and a body (in the broadest sense) that responds unthinkingly to
“signals” (Stables and Semetsky 2015: 147). Thus, edusemiotics both dissolves
and expands the boundaries of the human, in the service of realizing the fullest
possibilities of education and learning.

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
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Bionotes
Alin Olteanu
Alin Olteanu (b. 1987) is a post-doctoral researcher at the Kaunas University of Technology,
actively researching in the fields of semiotics and education. He has authored various articles,
as well as the 2015 book Philosophy of education in the semiotics of Charles Peirce: A

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 260  Alin Olteanu and Cary Campbell

cosmology of learning and loving, and is an editor/contributor to the recent Springer volume
Readings in numanities (2018).

Cary Campbell
Cary Campbell (b. 1990) is a music educator and musician residing in Vancouver, Canada. He is
a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University and an educational
researcher for MODAL research group. He studies the relevance of semiotics and the
philosophy of Charles Peirce for conceptualizing the foundations of education. Recent articles
include “Toward a pedagogy of firstness” (2018), “Learning that reflects the living: Aligning
anticipation and edusemiotics” (2017), and “Indexical ways of knowing” (2016). He is also co-
founder and editor of the website/magazine philosophasters.org.

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