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THE IGNORAMUS PARADOX: THE TIME OF VISUAL SYMBOLISM DOMINATION // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2017. Issue 4 (14). P. 49-64

All epochs creates their own symbols which become sociocultural events. These events occur after the visual symbolism, understood and recognized by people of a particular epoch, was expressed in a discursive form. Each sociocultural time characterizes the predominance of either visual symbolism or verbal symbolism but the forthcoming change of the epochs diagnoses the accent transfer from one symbolism to another. The correspondences between actions of three modern technologies – bioethics, urban planning, and cognitive management – are presented in this paper. These correspondences are established here on the basis of the “ignoramus paradox”. The essence of the paradox is the fate of ignoramus is guaranteed to everyone in the society of knowledge. The paradox manifests the situation in which each professional becomes an expert in a single area of knowledge while staying helpless as an ignoramus in all the rest areas but living in modern society requires a special awareness to navigate in a complex reality. These three modern technologies protect an ignoramus: knowledge management protects the intellectual freedom of specialist; urban planning – the rights of urban communities; bioethics – individuality. On basis of information models, the task of knowledge management in urban planning is specified and a role of verbal symbolism of bioethics in finding the “semiotic attractor” of urban planning was established.

Keywords: the “ignoramus paradox”, bioethics’ symbolism, visual symbolism, urban planning, equifinality, heterotopy

PROJECTIVE CONSULTING ON THE “AXIS OF SYNTACTICS” // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2018. Issue 4 (18). P. 169-185

From the bioethics point of view, the implementation of a matching model and a match model for management under the conditions of goal competition in “markets without money” (Alvin Roth) is discussed. These conditions actualize the development of semiotic tools for management. The circumstances under which the creation of semiotic management is both wisdom, not embodied in methodological procedures, and craft, understood as a technology for replicating mastery, are clarified. A form combining wisdom and craft for semiotic diagnostics of social innovations is suggested. This form is referred to by the authors as projective consulting. The qualification of the proposed consulting as “projective” is an appeal to the fundamentals of projective geometry. The requirements of these fundamentals lead to a discussion of the axes which set the space of goal symbolizing. A modification of the Lotka-Volterra model receives the interpretation of a match between the competing symbolizations of goals, and allows to set an “axis of syntactics” to fix the pace of the code conversion of goals.

Keywords: bioethics, matching, Lotka-Volterra model modification, projective consulting, “axis of syntactics”

MINERVA AND JANUS: SYMBOLS OF WORSHIP OF VISUAL EFFECTS IN MODERN EDUCATION // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2019. Issue 4 (22). P. 172-193

One of the essential features of education is emphasized in the article: a person’s adaptation to the symbolism of social reality. The modern transformation of social reality is accompanied by educational experiments made by leading universities. The combination of social and educational transformations, which is expressed in two experiments, is subjected to semiotic diagnostics. The substantiation of semiotic diagnostics is based on the interpretation of information characteristics as criteria for the self-organization of complex open systems. This substantiation is obtained within the framework of natural philosophy and is overcome based on bioethics, namely, on the interpretation of bioethics as discursive symbolism, in which the approach of interpretation of invariant rules from the perspective of variable and situational personal preferences has been tested. The procedures for semiotic diagnostics include: (1) elucidation of all “symptoms”, that is, the set of signs that are present in the analyzed effect; (2) elucidation of “syndromes”, that is, operators selected to implement the goals of the participants of the analyzed effect; (3) clarification of the goals that form the analyzed effect; (4) juxtaposition of the “anamneses” of the analyzed effects to clarify the precedents (if any) of the studied situation. Procedures show: (1) the semantics of the effect, (2) the syntax of the effect, (3) the pragmatics of the effect, and (4) the “diagnosis” itself. The limits for applying the developed procedures are determined. The requirement to formalize the manifestation of the effect in a four-dimensional space is assigned to the applicability limits. Models of bioethics and paradigms of education exist in such a space. The innovations presented by the Minerva Schools and the project (referred to as Janus in the article) of Stanford University are subjected to semiotic diagnostics. These projects represent an education-travel, exclusive in speed, which connects cultural landscapes with different “climatic” modes of cognitive management. Its purpose is to gain wisdom (rather than knowledge), expressed in acquiring a combination of experience in independent generation of knowledge and experience in the implementation of this knowledge in different socio-cultural contexts. The diagnosis is given in the title of the article.

Keywords: semiotic diagnostics, procedures of semiotic diagnostics, information characteristics, efficiency, self-organization phases, positions of bioethics, visualization technologies in education

BIOETHICS AND SEMIOTICS: INSTEAD OF A FOREWORD // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2021. Issue 3 (29). P. 9-18

The organizational and research circumstances for determining the area of intersection of the two transdisciplinary directions indicated in the title are stated.

Keywords: human construction, limits of interpretations, process philosophy, diagnostics of sociocultural transformations

EDUCATION DIGITALIZATION ASTIGMATISM: PROBLEM SETTING FOR SEMIOTIC DIAGNOSTICS OF CONSEQUENCES // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2023. Issue 3 (37). P. 90-110

The specificity of the task — diagnostics — makes it justified to resort to medical terminology. At the same time, the semiotic nature of this diagnostics justifies an appeal to the etymology of some medical terms, which goes back to ancient myths. Astigmatism is a diagnosis of such a deviation from the norm of vision, one of the symptoms of which is the perception of a circle as an oval. The reason for this deviation from the norm is the syndrome of the defective crystalline lens of the eye, leading to focusing features. Here, a chain of associations may arise, caused by the plots of the myth. In the ancient Greek version, Hestia was the keeper of the hearth, and the hearth was the pivot of the fire which, in the Roman version, was called “focus”. Hestia is present by her name and purpose in yet another medical term: the gestational period. This term denotes (formerly more often, now rarer) the state of pregnancy. This chain of associations serves to set the problem: to find a way to diagnose the consequences of the forced digitalization of teacher education during the pandemic. In other words, the search for an answer to the question: does the stay of a future teacher in the “belly” of a pedagogical university during the gestational period, passing with “complications”, require measures to replenish the norm of a specialist “born” by the university? Or, does digitalization burden the anamnesis of a future teacher? The procedures of the diagnostics themselves are based on the symptom/semantics, syndrome/syntactics, anamnesis/pragmatics correspondence. The listed correspondence is included in the operationalization of the basic concepts of the questionnaires. Two groups are selected for the pilot survey of students. The first group (I) includes the students for whom the period of total digitalization included the entire last year at high school and the first semester at the university. The second group of students (II) consists of those for whom total digitalization occurred during the third and fourth years of the university program. This selection fixes the extreme positions (I and II) in the distribution of digitalization by significant stages in the curriculum. In full-time mode, a survey of lecturers and teachers working with contingents of student groups (I and II) has been conducted on specially formulated points to find out the pros and cons of the digitalization of education; confirmation or refutation of the hypothesis of the authors of the article about the norm deformation. The pilot survey involves 60 students and 12 of their teachers. The article gives a general description of the survey tools. The questionnaire for surveying students combines verbal and visual methods of diagnostics. Teachers record the transformation of the norm, associated with only two aspects: a decrease in the quality of education and student-teacher communication. The relevance of the procedures of the semiotic diagnostics to the search for answers to the research question posed is confirmed by the revealed circumstance which was eluding under the use of different optics when the effects of education digitalization were discussed in the scientific literature. For the first time, the identified defect in the digitalization of education is the gap in student-student communication. This defect has consequences also established on the basis of the application of semiotic diagnostics procedures. Among these consequences, there is the lack of understanding of the essence of teamwork, leadership, professional competition and ethical principles of subject-subject communication. Such an effect of “educating Robinson Crusoe” does not correspond well to the competencies of a teacher. In whose “eye” is there the lens with a distorting defect? Students? Teachers? Operators of digitalization in education? We have found that digitalization in education implemented during the pandemic is subject to astigmatism. The fact that this situation belongs to the past requires two measures. First, the correction of “vision” among graduates. Secondly, the introduction of precise compensatory actions in the environment of distance education.

Keywords: norm, student-student communication deformation, completion of norm

VISUALIZATION OF THE SPECIFICITY OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL WORLDVIEW: DETECTION OF SEMIOTIC OPTIMUM IN THE SELECTION OF ILLUSTRATIVE MATERIAL FOR AN OPEN LECTURE // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2024. Issue 1 (39). P. 143-166

An explanation of two circumstances precedes the presentation of the main content of this article. The first relates to the fact that, with this article, the journal opens a new “Open Lecture” section. The second reveals both the meaning of the words in the section title and the primary purpose of the research, the first results of which are presented in this article. The phrase “open lecture” is the name of one of the procedures (established in the practice of domestic higher education), which is part of the preliminary selection of educators participating in the competition for a lecturer role. This procedure’s name defines the lecture as open to professional criticism: discussion of the content and its structure, the manner of communication between the lecturer and the audience and the likelihood of students achieving educational goals. The originality of the presented research lies in the fact that, firstly, all these components of the discussion are understood from the standpoint of semiotics, respectively, as semantic, syntactic and pragmatic translations. Secondly, these translations are understood as the interconnection of specific stages of the information process. It opens up the possibility of modelling the structure of the lecture content based on the characteristics of information (value, quantity, effectiveness). Thirdly, the stages of the information process are understood as mechanisms of self-organization, which makes it possible to interpret learning results from the standpoint of stimulating a transition (or lack thereof) of the students from simple reception to acceptance. Fourthly, the very formulation of the research problem is the problem of discovering the semiotic optimum in organizing the learning space. One can emphasize that, in this formulation, the problem within the pedagogical theory and practice framework is posed for the first time since the semiotic essence of education remains unnoticed in pedagogical science. The circumstance for implementing the semiotic optimum, assuming that this optimum is discovered, is the educator’s clear understanding of the student’s goals (spectrum and hierarchy of goals) in the classroom rather than the goals of the educator’s activity. Therefore, the subject of the study was chosen to be the first lecture on a subject that is extremely rarely taught at school in domestic education. Thereby, it is a lecture for which the audience may have minimal prejudice. More precisely, there can only be a premonition of the complexity of the subject, the isolation of its content from real life, which reduces the initial goals of students only to mastering ways to overcome this ‘disaster’ in their curriculum. It states the following need for the educator: (a) to have empathy; (b) maintain a balance between complexity of content and simplicity of explanation. Both necessities boil down to finding a measure, an optimal measure. The article justifies that illustrative material for a lecture should (1) serve not as proof but only as an explanation of the lecture statements. The choice of material should (2) be made from various visualizations that are events in intellectual history and also visually express the multi-layered context of known metaphors. In the case of our research, these are illustrations of works by artists from the Bruegel family; this intends (in addition to the mentioned) to demonstrate the metamorphoses of ideas within one philosophical school or tradition. Illustrations must (3) meet the requirement of end-to-end examples throughout the entire course of lectures. The material we have chosen illustrates the following. The contemplation of the world by a genius leads to the extraction of an essential detail unnoticed by others; expressing this detail in abstract form initiates a dialogue; expressing this detail in a relevant form creates grounds for interpretation among many people, which ultimately shapes the worldview of those people. The fact that there is a known case of erasing details from a painting and that the demonstrated artworks received different titles over time illustrates the change in topical emphases. The number of illustrations should (4) meet the condition: no more than one visual demonstration in a fifteen-minute lecture time interval. The article presents results obtained as of now only empirically. Experience shows that compliance with the above conditions ensures the stability of impressions among students and contributes to their understanding (and not just memorization) of the main messages of the lecture.

Keywords: Peter Bruegel the Elder, information processes, effectiveness, education subjects’s goals

Construction of the semiotic optimum in students’ notes (on the example of an open lecture on ethics in a philosophy course) // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2024. Issue 2 (40). P. 120-144

The beginning and end of this article record two literary examples, the meanings of which are conceptually interpretated. The first example – the Unseen University – captures the problem of domestic education caused by ignoring the essence of education. According to the authors, the essence of education is that education systems (of any scale) are self-organizing systems; the mechanisms of their self-organization are information processes (they represent an invariant sequence of stages); each stage of the information process expresses the result of its “work” in a semiotic form. The invariant sequence of stages strictly distributes the characteristics of information by which it is possible to judge the achievement of a “semiotic optimum” (a concept proposed by the authors) in the structure of the educational process at a particular university. These characteristics lead not so much to some kind of pedagogical innovation but rather serve to define the application boundaries for many techniques – those application boundaries that often remain “unseen”. To a first approximation, these characteristics represent the dependences of education results on the interpretation of what the goals of education subjects’ actions express. Therefore, the condition for achieving the semiotic optimum is the effectiveness of managing the goals of the subjects of education. Secondly, the effectiveness condition is the concision of the method of goal achieving. However, in the reality of life, the concision of a method is never a straight line segment connecting the “start” and “finish” points. The characteristics of information are presented in graphical and analytical form, which is not the simplest but the most concise way. A similar method – laconic graphics of conceptual schemes – is chosen to construct a semiotic optimum in lecture notes. The pursuit of this optimum determines the way the lecture itself is prepared. The lecture preparation by an educator is subordinated to the construction of the optimal balance of goals stated in the work program of the discipline, in the curriculum of a particular program, and in the potential range of students’ life aspirations. From the standpoint of the authors’ concept “pedagogical bioethics”, this range of students’ life aspirations should be accepted by the educator in a modality similar to the doctor’s acceptance of the suffering of patients. For this reason, the content of a lecture is not a moralistic sermon but an explanation of the distribution of communicative formats and communicative roles within the scope of a specific idea of morality. The construction of a semiotic optimum in the circumstances of the Unseen University meets the potential of visual semiotics: finding unseen reasons for actual visibility. The second literary example in the article is Hogwarts School since its structure contains a magical instrument – the Sorting Hat – for determining those inclinations and life aspirations of students that students are yet to know how to recognize. The role of the Hat can be played by the optimal relationship between the actual goals of all subjects of education (students and their parents; teachers and developers of training programs; managers of the educational process and potential employers). Hogwarts ghosts serve as a marker of possible errors in recognizing individual goals. With sad irony, the ghosts express possible deviations within the scope of a specific idea of morality. The chosen topic of the lecture most fully corresponds to the research problem: elucidating the potential of the syntax of the goals of the main subjects of education for constructing an optimum in fixing the content of the lecture (translation in synchrony) and the content of the student’s individual work (translation in diachrony), in particular, fixed in students’ notes. It is such notes that can become a textbook created by students for themselves, that is, in awareness of the limits of personal autonomy.

Keywords: Unseen University, Hogwarts ghosts, characteristics of information, communicative formats, pedagogical bioethics

A thought experiment for constructing a semiotic optimum in the classroom (based on the ethics lesson in the philosophy course) // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2024. Issue 3 (41). P. 37-57

The article begins with two literary examples from the works of one author. One example is a quote from Harper Lee's first published book. The content of the quote suggests a way to understand another person (“… climb inside of his skin and walk around in it”). The second example is the title of the author”s last book, Go Set a Watchman, which quotes a biblical exhortation. These examples are interpreted in the context of the lesson topic. The actions expressed by the words climb into, walk around, go, and set are emphasized. These emphases and interpretation illustrate the formulation of the research problem: identifying the conditions under which changing the classroom configuration is effective. The search for relevant ways to solve the problem is based on two circumstances. The first is the interpretation of each idea of morality as an impulse that organizes social structure, in particular, the structure of educational space. The paper focuses on such a semiotic result of ethics as the name “classroom” for one of the types of the room layout for holding parliamentary debates. The second is the concept of semiotic diagnostics (Irina Melik-Gaykazyan), which establishes correspondence between self-organization phases, information process stages and forms of the sign. A relevant methodological solution to the declared problem is a conceptual model of information generation that demonstrates the correspondence between the stages of transformation of two different spaces. In the phase space, scenarios of nonlinear dynamics of the system are competing. In another space, these same scenarios compete in the sizes and configuration of the distribution of their supporters (information carriers). Within the framework of a thought experiment, we present a “point” proposed to be interpreted as a locus of a potential “semiotic optimum”. At this point, there is an intersection of phase trajectories, while the intersecting trajectories refer to alternative scenarios. This optimum point creates an illusion of coincidence of positions; however, it is precisely overcoming this illusion that creates the basis for understanding and mastering different positions. We conclude that the first condition (1), under which a change in the configuration in a classroom is effective, is the need to discuss questions leading to alternative but equally correct given answers. Such a necessity arises during discussions on moral issues and when students master the essence of ethical dilemmas. The model demonstrates its sensitivity to a change in positions (a transition from one distribution to another), which reveals the second condition (2): the necessity of training for proactive socialization. The same sensitivity reveals analogies between the change in the configuration in a classroom and the syntax of ethical positions, between the organizational context and discursive strategies in discussions. The validity of this analogy is confirmed when comparing the author results and the results obtained in research fields of “language and learning”, “language and education”. We find that the problem we have set and the solutions we have proposed are pertinent for fulfilling another condition (3): the necessity of gaining experience in recognizing the ethical differences between educational strategies and acquiring professional skills within them. Configuration examples are provided as an illustration. We conclude that the use of the information generation model serves as a basis for thought experiments when designing lessons which educational goals include compliance with the conditions (1–3). The proposed model enables its role of a constructor for “reproducing” – in real classroom time – of intellectual history fragments in which a change of paradigms took place and specific teachings were created as a continuation of those paradigms; as well as enables also a retrospective tracing of shifts in the meanings of morality ideas on stable and unstable trajectories of social history.

Keywords: conceptual model of information generation, semiotic diagnostics, proactive socialization, learning space configuration, educational strategies