Sign Crossroads in Global Perspective. Semioethics and Responsibility

This book testifies to the potential scope of the development of the study of signs and communication crossing over different sections of human knowledge (the natural sciences no less than the social sciences and the human sciences) in todays’ context of global communication and the problems it presents. Moreover, in addition to scientific competencies and specializations, it also addresses all those involved and inevitably interested in today's situation of global communication, from the massmedial dimension to relations on the work place, in the professional sphere and in private life. This book also provides several illustrations of how and why the science of signs is unique thanks to its inherently interdisciplinary perspective. As such, it critiques the tendency to overspecialization in the sciences to the extent that it threatens to fragment intellectual culture. Without belying the need of specialization for progress in science, this book contributes to a better understanding of what all intellectual pursuits share in common through their dependency upon signs and the action of signs. It is committed to a critique of all forms of sectorialization and separatism, of arrogant individualism, in a social system, that of globalization, that instead calls for participation, involvement, and critique which only a global science of signs, semiotics precisely, can adequately provide.