讲座题目： Reconciling information and meaning through a concept of translation: pragmatic semiotic perspective

讲座召集人: 徐宏颖博士

讲座嘉宾：Alin Olteanu教授 上海外国语大学

参会信息：2025年4月29日 16:00–17:30

线上参会：腾讯会议号- 989-100-642（限100人，入会要求：实名+单位）

线下参会：大连海事大学外国语学院悦享书屋

嘉宾简介：

Alin Olteanu现为上海外国语大学语言科学研究院教授，符号学研究领域青年领军人物，研究兴趣涵盖符号学方法在教育和读写能力领域的应用。他拥有丰富的国际经验，曾在德国、英国、爱沙尼亚、丹麦多个国家的高校开展研究项目，并在数智教育、读写能力、多元文化主义、认知和技术等领域发表了大量著作（SSCI收录论文30余篇，主编著作10余部）。目前，他尤其关注持续的数字化如何拓展认知、实现社会表征模式多元化以及催生新的想象。此外，Olteanu教授还担任国际认知符号学协会的财务主管及北欧符号学研究协会的组织助理。2022 年至 2024 年期间，他担任国际符号学研究协会执行委员会德国代表。

讲座摘要：

I develop a semiotic argument for emergentism, the thesis that while a system’s complexity emerges from the interactions of its parts, the system is not reducible to the (arithmetic) sum of its parts. For this, I construe the relation of information and meaning through the pragmatic lens of translation, which does not dichotomize these two. Namely, I argue that information is a post hoc consideration stemming from biological organisms’ construction of subjective worlds.

The polarization of information, as quantifiable, and meaning, as escaping analysis, corresponds to the polarization of mechanical reductionism and vitalism, respectively. That is, reducing meaning to a quantification, deemed information or data, accepts that complex phenomena such as intentional states and agency can be explained through the laws of mechanics. On the other hand, supposing that meaning structures do not afford quantified modelling implies an ontological rupture between areas of reality that are strictly governed by mechanical laws and areas of reality that transcend regularity. Either of these positions supposes that reality entails an entirely asemiotic realm (absence of meaning potential). Rather, meaning always contains information and information is always meaningfully situated. Thus, undermining the assumption of asemioticitycontributes to collapsing the vitalism-reductionism dualism.

I agree with Thomas A. Sebeok and Andrew Stables that meaning (semiosis) and life (biology) are co-extensive. In this vein, I adopt a recent concept of translation as energy transfer that involves (potential) meaning, developed by Kobus Marais and originating in the work of Lars Elleström. These theories rely on Charles S. Peirce’s pragmatism, according to which meaning emerges as the work of mind to take habits. That is, organisms, which perform ideation, at the same time disrupt mechanical regulation and navigate back into regularity by developing habits. From this perspective, I argue that translation is always involved in organisms’ modeling of subjective environments. Because they are situated, animals behave conditionally, in terms of what may be the case under supposed conditions. More precisely the work of mind to creative subjective environments is modal because mind is situated. Modality and motivation (intentionality) stem from an agent’s situatedness. In this view, modeling, as the operation by which organisms situate themselves in meaningful worlds, starts off with aim of reducing entropy. As such, the work of mind is to translate itself into its next state, which requires simulating (imagining) itself in a new situatedness.

In this view, what counts as information stems from a situated agents’s hypothesizing about its environment. Simply, in having to guess what might be the case, so to act upon it, animals work with a probabilistic quantification within their modeling.

大连海事大学外国语学院

中华优秀海洋文化外译研究中心

语料库与计量语言学研究团队