Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio

Introduction

2023-10-07T16:15:37+02:00

Semiotics of the norm: the case of the Mischlinge in Nazi legislation

2023-10-07T16:15:38+02:00

In this contribution, we address a specific aspect of semantic categorisation through the example of a well-known Nazi racial law. We will see how the Nazi law aimed to construct the identity of Jewish people by separating them from Aryan people. In doing so, it created a threshold between Aryans and Jews, where it placed people defined as Mischlinge. This will first allow us to observe the relationship between semantic categorisation and differentiation. Secondly, we propose that norms can be understood, in a semiotic sense, as processes with rather precise implications. Indeed, we will speak of normative processes because they are generalising, imply territorialisation and the role played by the threshold concept

Giving uptake: theoretical issues and sociopolitical implications

2023-10-07T16:15:39+02:00

In speech act theory, ‘uptake’ traditionally captures the hearer’s understanding of what the speaker is saying and doing with words. Uptake is given pride of place in J.L. Austin’s framework, in which the felicity of illocutionary acts is taken to be partly dependent upon the achievement (or securing) of the audience’s uptake. The aim of this paper is to illuminate the political potential of uptake – to investigate the role of uptake (and uptake failure) in the economy of our social and political lives. I argue that uptake figures as a key ingredient in forms of illocutionary injustice, on the one hand, and of illocutionary resistance, on the other. If I am right, then the notion of uptake has implications reaching far beyond the theoretical arena

The premeditation of catastrophe. Re-imagining Fukushima Dai-ichi

2023-10-07T16:15:40+02:00

This article explores the concept of “premediation” and “partition of the sensible” in the context of the Fukushima disaster, one of the greatest disasters of the 21st century. The notion of premediation, coined by Richard Grusin, refers to a media device that anticipates traumatic futures, managing the subject's affectivity to prevent a “media shock”. On the other hand, the concept of partition of the sensible, introduced by Jacques Rancière, concerns the conflict over the existence and quality of a common scene and the allocation of visibility and invisibility within it. These concepts are crucial for understanding the media discourse surrounding catastrophes. Fukushima serves as a case study due to its historical and cultural significance in Japan, a country with a long history of natural and anthropogenic disasters. By examining the premediation and partitioning of the sensible in relation to Fukushima, the article explores the challenges of imagining a future community and organizing the visible and the invisible in a place burdened with the aftermath of multiple disasters. It also reflects on the temporal aspects of catastrophes, questioning the notion of events as isolated occurrences in time. The article proposes an alternative perspective influenced by Eastern traditions that view catastrophes as inherent aspects of the world, challenging the Western perception of catastrophes as ruptures in linear time. Ultimately, it seeks to reimagine the future by reconfiguring the grammar of visibility and exploring the interplay between past imaginaries and future possibilities.

Towards a semiotics of ideological codes. The case of value-words in the Italian PNRR 2021

2023-10-07T16:15:41+02:00

This paper aims to propose a strategy for the analysis of the semiotic codes that structure the texts of “political communication”. The first part will discuss the theoretical assumptions that define the object of study from the point of view of structural and linguistic-based semiotics. It will deal with the problem of identifying and describing the “units” for the construction of “meaning” and the achievement of the “purposes” that define a communicative process as political. Having affirmed the general semiotic form of this communicative practice and defined the notion of “ideological code”, the second part of the paper will proceed with the exposition of a procedure for the application of these categories to textual analysis. Working on the text of the PNRR2021, we will illustrate how the structure of the ideological code of a text can be reconstructed from the uses of “value-words” and their relationships on the syntagmatic level. The results of this work will show the explicative possibilities and the directions along which it is possible to develop this semiotic viewpoint on political communication.

Troll languages. Phenomenologies and semiotics of a distinctive form of Hate Specch

2023-10-07T16:15:43+02:00

This paper proposes a historical and semiotic reconstruction of the Troll phenomenon, which is part of the social semiospheres and represents one of the forms of Hate Speech in the case of its pragmatic and online variants. It is part of Philosophy of language and has reference to the pragmatic studies by Claudia Bianchi, which deal precisely with Hate Speech. Another reference is to Semiotics regarding Massimo Leone’s study dedicated to Troll’ "communication/non-communication". But the most important reference is a very detailed study of the Troll phenomenon by Whitney Phillips, who deals with media and with online disinformation. Our critical review will allow the reader to orient himself through the web troll phenomenology, which presents sometimes banal, other times complex meanings. Troll are a contemporary version of Tricksters and like them love to break the harmonious and recognized Order of Discourse. In the collective imagination, Tricksters have always had an ethical-political task, while the Troll are almost always animated only by a destructive will. They are able to make many proselytes, in view of an unlimited semiosis with unpredictable outcomes, in the name of an authentic Cancel Culture.

The power of words: the evaluative character of psychiatry

2023-10-07T16:15:44+02:00

In psychiatry, one of the main concerns is to recognize when something, be it an emotional state, a behaviour or a personality trait, is to be placed inside the boundaries of ‘normality’, or when it has to be considered a pathological trait, that needs to be cured. Being a medical discipline, psychiatry has one aspiration: to achieve an objective and impersonal view of abnormal behaviour.

Yet, what does it mean, for a discipline that has to deal with human fragility and suffering, to be ‘objective’? Is mental disorder something we can detect in a impartial, neutral way? This paper aims to stress the relevance, for defining and classifying mental disorders, of both a mentalist vocabulary (Banner 2013, Broome, Bortolotti 2009) and the reference to cultural, social, moral and evaluative rules (Olbert, Gala 2015). My claim is that, when it comes to psychiatry, it is very hard to divide the objective and the evaluative component.

Studies on the use of irony: an affinity selector mechanism

2023-10-07T16:15:45+02:00

Even if pragmatics has studied irony in depth, there is surprisingly little agreement not only to
its functions but also to its basic definition. Irony appears to be the result of different
linguistics acts (refusing, echoing, pretending, alluding), that in any case serve the speaker’s
goal to highlight an incongruity between some previous expectations and the current
situation. However, there seems to be something else that characterizes irony so as to render
it unique, something that makes it even more distinctively different from other figures of
speech, from other rhetorical strategies or structural devices.
The paper proposes a wider vision of investigation that takes into account the fact that irony
is a relational strategy in the sense that it operates not only between meanings (said and
unsaid) but also between people. Irony, far from being only a way of communicating a
proposition, is a sophisticated interaction that takes place between highly social beings. To be
understood, it requires contextual and metacommunicative elements, and also mutual
attribution of knowledge, intentions and affective states between speaker and listener.
Defining what the ironic linguistic meaning is, allows us to understand just only one aspect of
this complex phenomenon, but it doesn’t allow us to understand that irony is an attitude, a
way of doing things in order to create a relationship, of inclusion as much as exclusion, with
others. Understanding the social aspects of irony is a challenge for pragmatics, that allows us
to have an approach not only limited to understanding disparity between literal and figurative
meaning but which investigates irony as a social phenomenon that brings together several
different cognitive social abilities.

Chomsky and Lakoff: from cognition to language and politics, and back

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The paper aims to compare two distant yet close conceptions of politics and political communication, that of Noam Chomsky, which matured since the second half of the last century, and that of George Lakoff, which came into vogue between the 1990s and 2000s. Chomsky and Lakoff are the heroes of the Linguistics Wars which redefined the physiognomy of US linguistics and cognitive science and also personify, each in his way, the figure of a public intellectual. Nevertheless, dealing with politics and communication, both fail to untangle the link between cognition, language, and propaganda: Chomsky moves, albeit contradictory, from heaven to earth, i.e., from the scientific investigation of language and mind to the non-scientific realm of historical events, whose analysis is entrusted to the citizen endowed with a Cartesian common-sense; Lakoff takes, instead, the reverse path, outlining a political mind that embrains the ideologies and consequently proposing cognitive activism which aims at reframing people’s brain. Both approaches flow into an outdated, reductionist communication model, entailed in both first and second-generation cognitive science, which does not ponder the complexity of political and communicative practices enacted by semiotic-political animals.

Text generators beyond "textuality". The case of journalism

2023-10-07T16:15:49+02:00

The recent hype caused by the use of ChatGPT for text generation, including academic, calls into question the point of view of the language sciences for a discussion on new textual forms generated through Large Language Models , such as BERT, GPT-3 (which ChatGPT is based on) and GPT-4. In this article we propose to consider textuality using journalism as observation point. In fact, in the last decade, the world of information has started to make use of text generator tools and language models. The aim of this article is to launch the debate on how textual criteria can be applied to texts generated by Deep Learning systems that operate on Natural Language Processing. The starting point of our proposal is the textual criteria identified by De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981). Although the main aspects of the criteria of textuality have already been tested by the advent of Web 2.0, the development of Artificial Intelligence has determined several systems that have changed the scenario of journalism. The most obvious case, experienced for about a decade, concerns the use of Large Language Models and text generators for writing journalistic articles of different types, from reports to breaking news. Through examples of journalistic texts produced by generative Artificial Intelligence, we will try to emphasize the need for the revision of certain categories of philosophy of language and communication theory.

Gender differences in storytelling

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Charles Darwin was the first to argue that natural selection affects not only biological structures but also cognitive functions. Evolutionary psychology later showed how this influence involves every aspect of mental activity. The impact of selective pressures is also evident in the human capacity for storytelling. But not all narratives are the same. They, in fact, have different functions from both the individual and social perspectives. There is also an interesting gender difference in human storytelling capacity. Tracing and describing the gender differences present in narratives could be a starting point from which to highlight how the different sexual psychologies underlying our narrative instincts might influence the representation of women and men in the real world.

Between iterability and assujettissement: performativity in Foucault, Butler and Derrida

2023-10-07T16:15:52+02:00

The focus of this paper is the relationship between language and subjectivity in the thoughts of Foucault, Butler and Derrida. Starting from Foucault’s reflection that thematises the inextricable relationship between power and language, showing how language is not only an instrument of power but power itself in its operation on the identity structures of the subject, Butler’s thought will be approached. The American philosopher takes up Foucault’s research and develops it by relating it to Austin’s reflection on linguistic performativity. The performativity to which Butler refers, however, is decisively characterised by the deconstructive reading that Derrida makes on the English philosopher’s theory through the concepts of iterability and citationality. These concepts are decisive for the linguistic strategy of resistance to the normalising discourses of power proposed by Butler. Starting from this interpretative strand of performativity, I will conclude by pointing out the unsolved problematics in Butler’s strategy and I will try to indicate a possible way to overcome them, while attempting to trace unexpected points of proximity between Foucault’s and Derrida’s reflections on power and its linguistic dimension.

In the name of the father and mother. A semiological reflection on the identity function of the surname and on the new selection and assignment criteria in Italy

2023-10-07T16:15:53+02:00

In Italy, since 27 April 2022, the Constitutional Court has made it mandatory for children to have the surnames of both parents, but above all it has established for the first time the right to attribute only that of the mother. The reasons for the sentence in question refer to the identity of the minor which, in the opinion of the judges, resides in the surnames of the two parents. But what is meant by identity? And what is a name (and a surname)? Is it the natural unity between the surname and its bearer or a conventional relationship based on understanding a Sinn and identifying a Bedeutung? The subject of this article intertwines a question of linguistic logic with a series of problems concerning the right to name offspring. The contribution proposed here intends to reflect on the aforementioned plot, paying particular attention to the semiotic configuration of the relationship between identity, name and referent/individual.

The Name of the Sphinx. A semiotic contribution to the debate on the term 'schizophrenia'

2023-10-07T16:15:54+02:00

Schizophrenia is regarded as one of the greatest mysteries in the entire realm of human knowledge, to the extent that it is described as the ‘sphinx of psychiatry’ (Borgna 1995). Concerns have been raised about the clinical emptiness and stigmatizing connotations associated with the term, leading to calls for its replacement with a less problematic definition. By examining the paradigmatic case of Japan and other Asian countries, where a name change has been introduced, this paper will demonstrate some limitations of the proposed replacement. Subsequently, the article will frame these limitations through a semiotic approach, illustrating how the validity of the opposition between the term schizophrenia and its substitutes relies on a relational difference that is not exclusive but participatory in nature (Paolucci 2010). It will then be shown how the issue related to the name schizophrenia is not about the denomination of the diagnostic entity, but rather about the meaning and values determined by cultural logic. While introducing a new label may offer short-term benefits, it is essential to consider the coexistence of both old and new terms within the cultural landscape to ensure a fruitful debate on this matter.

From the power to discriminate to the power to protect. The word race between Fascist legislation and the Italian Constitution

2023-10-07T16:15:55+02:00

Despite its high frequency in basic Italian vocabulary, the word race, of equine origin and later acquiring typological and biological human meaning, historically conceals a semantic tangle. Its presence in the Italian Constitution was strongly desired by the Constituent Assembly and motivated by the heavy historical, (para)scientific, political, and juridical legacy of colonial and anti-Jewish laws. However, it continues to raise issues that unfold on multiple binomial planes: common and technical language, totalitarian and democratic legislation, exclusive and inclusive power, and deprivation and protection of rights, further implying the relationship between individual and community. Not just in Italy, linguistic and political values embodied by race interdisciplinarily develop from the question of possible synonymy with supposed closely related words. Nevertheless, all four alternative proposals (maintaining, eliminating, replacing, combining) still prove to be a harbinger of further problems, discouraging from siding with one another. This semantic labyrinth is not exempt from revealing the inescapability of race from its intrinsic remembrance value. In this sense, the word pragmatically becomes a consistent deterrent to the denial of civil and political rights now guaranteed by substantive and no longer formal equality.

Linguistic guerrilla warfare 2.0: On the “forms” of online resistance

2023-10-07T16:15:57+02:00

While initially feared to cause linguistic homogenization, the Web has rapidly emerged as a space for language variety and experimentation. In fact, as communication infrastructures have developed around the globe, online communication has progressively moved away from the “anglicizing” model hypothesized by critics, embracing — and increasing — the great linguistic variability of offline exchanges. What is more, the hybridization of orality and writing characterising the Internet has resulted in the emergence of multiple variations of a new language: the Netspeak. Alongside such a creative and playful impulse, a movement of “resistance” to the various systems of control that have been imposed over online communication can be noticed. Consider, for instance, leet (or 1337), a codified form of English characterised by the use of non-alphabetic characters instead of common letters, as well as some phonetic changes, the genesis of which is linked — among other reasons — to the attempt to overcome the control and censorship put in place by the administrators of forums, digital communities and other multi-user computer systems. Another example is the very popular algospeak, which includes alterations similar to the ones found in leet, in addition to the use of synonyms, figurative expressions and other strategies used to deceive algorithmic systems and thus bypass automated controls. This paper deals with the analysis of such phenomena in order to foster the reflection on the impact of new media on today’s communication processes, with particular reference to the crucial issue of the relationship between language and power

Uncertainty, attachment, and narcissism, but most of all vulnerability: the perfect recipe for conspiracy therapy

2023-10-07T16:15:59+02:00

The paper aims to investigate the pervasiveness of conspiracy attitudes from a psychological point of view. Starting from one of the most common and shared definitions of conspiracy theories (a defensive strategy to manage stressful social events), we will first focus on cognitive distortions and then move on to the affective dimension. We will suggest that conspiracy beliefs can be explained by combining affective dynamics that occur on two distinct levels, individual and social. On the first, attachment disorders are predictive of anxious behaviour and existential insecurity. On the second, the need for uniqueness and for recognition/confirmation by the group compensates for narcissistic frustrations and the sense of social exclusion.

The illocutionary aspects of linguistic violence and their effects on the subjectivity in J. Butler.

2023-10-07T16:16:00+02:00

In Excitable Speech, J. Butler, while privileging a “perlocutionary model” of linguistic violence, at the same time operates a profound critique of the classical concept of the illocutionary act. The illocutionary act understood in its classical sense has to do with a dynamics of constitution. The problematic nature of the phenomenological concept of “constitution” concerns the relationship between body and language, that is, it concerns precisely that relationship that is at the heart of the question of linguistic violence, understood as the capacity of language to act on a body, to injure a body. The rejection of the illocutionary model of the linguistic act is probably determined by the destabilizing effect that Butler's own redefinition of the concept of the illocutionary act determines. These destabilizing effects have to do with the shift from the plane of the self, or the subject, governed by will and consciousness, to the plane of the “we”, governed, instead, by relations.

Linguistic competence, communication and dynamics of power. Remarks on the relationship between society and school

2023-10-07T16:16:02+02:00

Linguistic competence is a fundamental part of the scholastic learning, but today there is an important debate in the Italian society about the level of knowledge of young people in this field. Such an issue is similar to the problems concerning the quality of learning on other subjects, but the linguistic skills are characterized by some specifities. They are a channel for pragmatic relations that are imbued of moral and concrete meanings, with crucial entailments concerning the moral life and the actions that materially are carried out. For this reason it is useful to try to analyze the present attitude of young and adult Italians towards their language, not only by means of the reference to cognitive and intellectual skills, but also in terms of concrete and moral relationships. In this paper I rely on Bernstein's sociolinguistic theory and on Bauman's conception of “liquid modernity” to try to develop this point of view.

“Tous paranos ?” Notes on a possible socio-semiotic extension of paranoid language

2023-10-07T16:16:03+02:00

In this contribution, we will ask in what sense we can hypothesize a paranoid becoming of contemporary social semiosis, or, in other words, an extension of paranoid language beyond its clinical framing. Such paranoid becoming would paradoxically stand as “common” ground to the modes of production of semiotic practices and could, thus, account for the obstacles to communication, manipulative effects, and conflicts generated by such discursive productions. What would be the emblematic features of paranoid language concerning the grip and violence potentially exercisable in public space? What would adopting a social, embodied and complex approach to paranoia entail? To answer these questions, at first, we will try to outline the general framework in which paranoia occurs socially, culturally, and historically, and to understand whether it is possible not to essentialize this pathology. Second, we will summarize some of paranoia's cognitive, linguistic, and semiotic features and see how some recent studies highlight its complexity. Finally, we will try to identify the salient features of the possible paranoid becoming of various socio-semiotic productions of today.

Stories or History? The problem of literary genres

2023-10-07T16:16:05+02:00

The article seeks to examine some theoretical and ethico-political implications of the concept of “literary genre” For an anthropology of narrative, the notion seems crucial in highlighting the historical character of human narratives. The notion could be useful to better understand the institutional and historical assumptions of the way in which «we do things with words». On the other hand, it is important to work on a philosophical archaeology of the term since it seems to have its origins in the Platonic theory of the state and a strict social division of production.

Deliberation and the Extraordinary: The mobilization of fear and hope in divination and conspiracy theories

2023-10-07T16:16:05+02:00

Divination and conspiracy theories are societal phenomena that share at least two features: they both seek out explanations for a peculiar state of the world and perplex most members of our modern occidental societies. In this paper, we will explore these phenomena through the glance of rhetorical deliberation, with a particular focus on the impact of fear and hope on the process. Doing so, we hope to achieve a better understanding of the deliberative genre, especially for what concerns the role of the emotions of fear and hope in persuasion.

Rhetoric as a foucauldian dispositive: on the interweaving of knowledge and power

2023-10-07T16:16:06+02:00

In order to better determine the conceptual space in which rhetoric could emerge, I use the Foucauldian notion of ‘dispositive’. In this way, rhetoric, even before being a technique, can be considered as one of the theoretical perspectives from which, at its origins, the Western tradition addressed the problematic relationship between power and knowledge. Starting from the Foucauldian interpretation of Oedipus Rex, I try to outline part of the context within which the rhetorical perspective found its original place.

The linguistic side of ressentiment

2023-10-07T16:16:51+02:00

This article moves from the idea that ressentiment is a characteristic passion of the present time. In what follows, we will try to trace a brief anatomy of it (§§ 1-3) through some classics of literature (philosophical and non-philosophical): Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, Scheler’s Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen, but also Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. We will then emphasize (§§ 4-5) the central role played by language and practices of self-narrative. Finally (§ 5), we will try to provide some additional footholds to the initial thesis through an in-depth examination of a typical figure of ressentiment characteristic of our times, the victim, focusing especially on the rhetorical advantages that victim mythology produces.

The intermediary bodies of technopolitics: from the logic of representative to the logic of representation

2023-10-07T16:16:52+02:00

On December 15, 2016, Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook had surpassed his initial
conception of a technology that information flows through" and was compelled to declare it as a new kind
of platform for public discourse. The introduction of computer and digital systems into democratic life has
transformed the dynamics of political discourse, representing a paradigm shift in the mediated participation
in public life. Technopolitics, understood as the evolution of mechanisms for delegating sovereignty through
technological systems of representation (like representative democracy), constitutes the field in which we
examine the complexities of mediating political positions through digital media. The objective of this essay
is to identify the semiotic mechanisms underlying participation in public discourse mediated by digital
platforms. At the core of democracy lies a consensus-building mechanism that involves delegation of power
to representatives: what happens when that consensus is constructed through digital platforms? What logics
guide the construction of political discourse in these contexts?

Louis Marin, power and representation: a matter of semiotic efficacy

2023-10-07T16:16:53+02:00

Power of representation, representation of power. It is with this formula, proper to the rhetorical figure of the chiasm, that Louis Marin frames the relationship between power and representation in their reversibility. In Marin’s aesthetic-political theory, power is read as a reserve of unspent force in signs through the representational device. The aim of our contribution will be to dwell on this relationship and on the central role that studies on enunciation and linguistic acts have played in framing this problem in terms of the efficacy of the sign. It is this relationship between performative utterances and the exercise of power that we will try to account for.

The ism-aggression. When a suffix Is equivalent to physical aggression

2023-10-07T16:16:55+02:00

The aim of this paper is to analyze the phenomenon of the what we could call Ism-Aggression in the Italian contest regard the use of some particular word such as fascist, comunist, sovereignist, nazionalist, populist, sexist, racist, specist, conspirationist accomplished through an instrumentally detaching of the terms from their own historical and political background and a surreptitious exploiting of the mechanism of the polarization and the ingroup/outgroup dynamics in order to generate a verbal aggression that is similar to a physical aggression. The Ism-Aggression generates epistemic and discursive injustice combining esercitive and verdictive authoritative speech acts, but it masks the explicit aggression of a manifest hate speech becoming a very effective rhetoric tool in the mediatic and Internet comunicative environment. The ism-aggression terms don’t overpass the counterpart test as one cannot substitute the word fascist with conservative and communist with socialist as one cannot otherwise substitute the italian slur terrone with southern. The ism-aggression term has not a counterpart because it works like an insult, like a slur.