Transdisciplinarity in semiotics

Abstract

Semiotics is a transdisciplinary project by its very nature and from its very beginning. I will not, however, enter into a detailed discussion of the very subtle questions concerning the concept of transdisciplinarity, which should be posed in ontological-epistemological and methodological terms. In this article, however, I will attempt to evoke the positions or postures of contemporary semioticians who have devoted themselves to the development of the theoretical foundations of this science of meaning and communication, i.e., semiotics. Indeed, the central purpose of this work is to demonstrate the transdisciplinary nature of contemporary semiotics in three stages. First, I will demonstrate the status of semiotics as a transdisciplinary project by exploring the positions of some representative semioticians on the transdisciplinary nature of this discipline. Secondly, I would like to present a selection of my collective and individual projects and works, carried out over the last two decades, which can prove the transdisciplinarity of semiotics. I would say that I have accomplished a certain transdisciplinarity thanks to the semiotic spirit without knowing it, like Mr. Jourdan. Thirdly, with a view to creating new research programs in the sense of Latatos (Latatos, 1978), or exploring new fields in the sense of Kant (Kant, 1995), I would like to consider an epistemological renewal of semiotics by laying the groundwork for the five axes: spatiality, agentivity, temporality, narrativity, and sociality. It goes without saying that these axes are intimately connected. Three major events such as the Anthropocene, the Covid-19 pandemic, and artificial intelligence, have inspired me to reconceptualize the epistemological foundations of the semiotics of the future.