Conclusion: Balancing Semiotics
At the round table on ‘Translation’ of the 11th World Congress of Semiotics on Global Semiotics, held in 2012 at Nanjing, China, a charge was made that semiotics had been long on discourse but short on application and practice. To which the chair, Susan Petrilli, responded by pointing out that semio-ethics, which she and Augusto Ponzio encouraged through their publications, has and would continue to correct that imbalance. In this paper, I have made the case that design theory, which implies the design of thomistic signs of consolation and which leads to some rather significant practical implications and applications, should enjoy a welcome intellectual reception by semio-ethics as scholarly expressions of the same. Such reception of design theory by semio-ethics would then mean that, true to what Petrilli said, semiotics can, through semio-ethical studies qua design theory, address the said imbalance, and answer that charge somewhat.
Acknowledgements
Aspects of this paper were presented at the Word Congress of Semiotics on Global Semiotics (Round Table on Translation) in October 2012 in Nanjing, China. I am thankful to my panel members, esp. Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio, for their comments and encouragement. A later version was read at the “Quodlibetal Questions on Education: Design in/as/and Education” Colloquium at IOE London in June 2013, where I was a Visiting Academic. Thanks to Blackfriars Hall, Oxford for giving me access to their library for research as a Visiting Research Scholar.
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[1] In this paper I understand cultural atheism or naturalism as a thesis, and thus as having implications that can be refuted, or shown, modus tollens, to be self-refuting; compare Michael Rea (2002; 2007) who takes naturalism to be a ‘stance’ or ‘research programme’ with no specific refutable thesis but which can be shown to be at dissonance.