Colin Koopman identifies a longstanding tension between experiential givenism and linguisticism in forms of pragmatism, and offers semiotics as a candidate for resolving this. In this paper, I offer a pansemiotic account that construes the universe as events, and experience as implication in events. This process account resonates strongly with…

While Peirce is a seminal figure for contemporary semiotic philosophers, it is axiomatic of a fully semiotic perspective that no philosopher or philosophy (semiotics included) can provide any final answer, as signs are always interpreted and the context of interpretation always varies. Semiosis is evolutionary: it may or may not be construed as…

Primary and secondary school teachers in the London area discuss their understanding and operationalising of the concept of ability as applied to their students. Combining elements of achievement and potential, 'ability' is not clearly and consistently defined by teachers and is, strictly speaking, not a necessary concept since other terms account…

This paper aims to explain how semiotics and constructivism can collaborate in an educational epistemology by developing a joint approach to prescientific conceptions. Empirical data and findings of constructivist research are interpreted in the light of Peirce's semiotics. Peirce's semiotics is an anti-psychologistic logic (CP 2.252; CP 4.551; W…

Cartesian mind-body dualism, while often explicitly denied, has left a legacy of conceptions that remain highly influential in education. I argue that trends in both analytic and continental philosophy of language point towards a post-Cartesian settlement in which the distinction between "signs" and "signals" is collapsed, and which thus construes…

In this essay, Andrew Stables and Stephen Gough explore some of the implications for educational policy and practice of a view of living (and, therefore, of learning) as semiotic engagement. Such a view, Stables and Gough argue, has the potential to displace or circumvent essentially Cartesian models currently dominant within learning theory…