U

Unconscious

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is easily one of the most influential people of the XX century. Although lots of his ideas have been denied in the years after his death, as being pseudo-scientific, Freud has surely shaped the way, we people think of ourselves. One of his...

Umwelt

From German, most often translated as Environment. Jakob Johann von Uexküll, a biologist whose work helps enormously and directly for the development of semiotics, used this term to name the environment which any organism is capable of perceiving. So, Umwelt is not...

Universal

A predicative for an infinite number of individual entities. For example, people. Since the times of Plato the term was an arena for numerous conflicts.   See: General Nominalism Realism

Unmotivated

Synonym of relative; meaning such that misses internal connection or natural fundament. According to Ferdinand de Saussure and a number of other semioticians, influenced by him, the sign exists on the basis of an arbitrary connection between, for example, sound and...

Usage/use

Refers to the manner in which language (specifically) is used. Ludwig Wittgenstein in his late works shares the statement "In most cases, the meaning of a word is its use". Only (or mainly) by learning how words and expressions are used, can we know what they actually...

Utterer

Uterrer is a term, used by Charles Sanders Peirce and other semioticians. The term is used to signify the manufcaturer of signs (for example, diagram, text, discourse. That way, the uterrer shouldn't be considered just as the one who is speaking but in a much broader...

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Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It encompasses the analysis of every aspect of language, as well as the methods for studying and modeling them. The traditional areas of linguistic analysis include phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics,...

Phenomenology

A term used by Charles S. Peirce to denote a discipline of philosophy. The term is also used to denote an important movement in modern philosophy, identified with such thinkers as Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Roman Ingarden. It could be said that this...

Feminism

Feminism is an ideology, that, like other ideologies uses reductionism to explain complex issues like, for example, the one that the feminists most commonly cite - the rights to equal pay. Like most ideologies, the feministic too has its roots in somewhat reasonable...

Rationalism

Rationalism in a very general sense means devotion to reason; in a narrower sense, it refers to the doctrine that reason itself has the ability to know reality. In a general sense, then, the rationalist is a defender and advocate of reason. Rationalism is often used...

Intertextuality

Intertextuality is a term introduced by Julia Kristeva and widely accepted by literary theorists to denote the complex way in which a text relates to other texts. Just as there is no sign separate from other signs, there is no text separate from other texts. In...



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