FORTHCOMING: 'ON MINIMUM SIGNIFICATION'

Forthcoming (October 2026):  "On ‘Minimum Signification’:  The Semiosphere, John Deely, and the Chorus." 

In-person paper presentation to the Semiotic Society of America annual conference, Pittsburgh, 14-18 October 2026 [forthcoming].

Abstract -- In a context of rhetorical, conceptual, and existential limits, a heuristic approach to inquiry is necessary, both as individuals and as a collective.  Within such a heuristic, this presentation briefly explores the question of “minimum signification”.  This exploration of minimum signification is inspired and informed by the wider discussion of the semiosphere among thinkers in semiotics; the work of John Deely, particularly as articulated in Paul Cobley’s John Deely reader; and, also, those thinkers more widely that consider semiosis as including not only the living, bio-psycho-social world but also the non-living, physico-spatio-temporal world.  In particular, I am interested in Deely’s idea that “relations constitute reality” – or, otherwise, his “relational realism”, especially as this intersects with rhetorics of information, for example in the thinking of Eddington, Simondon, Bateson, and Floridi, among others.  Left for another time is the question of how we get from minimum signification to “maximum signification”.
 
Keywords:  rhetorics, signification, semiosphere, Deely, relation, information