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The theme of the 16th World Congress of the IASS-AIS will be ‘Signs and Realities’, involving the experiential and inferential phenomena that make up the basis of semiotic interpretation and communication. These two categories of objects are mediated by the role of cognising and knowing agents. The notion of an agency is related to the category of the human subject, who plays the role of producer, user, interpreter, cognizer and knower of signs or realities. Taken separately, sign or reality will be approached according to their essential and relational properties. The sign may be considered as an object of static classification or dynamic analysis. On the one hand, practitioners of structuralist-oriented explorations might be interested in the definition of sign with respect to other signifying exponents, making up various kinds of semiotic systems in language and culture, such as index, stimulus, symptom, signal, appeal, or symbol. On the other hand, followers of poststructuralist movements, exposing the dynamic analyses of sign-production systems, possibly may pay attention to multitextual and multivoiced transmedia literacy appearing across multiple communication channels, which go in pairs with the multimodality of semiotic discourses. As to reality itself, regarded in terms of sign systems, it may become an object of semiotics, or seen as a synonym of the world, it may constitute an object of cosmology. In this context, linguists and logicians, who perceive the extralinguistic or extrasemiotic reality as a meaningful object of reference signified by its meaning carrier, might prefer to talk over the relationship between the sign (name) and its reference (named or reality, or designate) dealing with them in terms of denotations and connotations, where the appearance of the sign presupposes the occurrence of observed or inferred scope and content of reality. Moreover, there is a third component which has to be added as an object of semiotic inquiry, namely an interpreting sign, or an interpreting agent, that mediates between the sign and its designated reality. When inferred with reference to multiple meanings, it can include possible worlds. Considered, however, as an object of cosmological studies, reality could also be seen as composed of various kinds of geospheres, where the cultural semiosphere and the noosphere appear in the neighbourhood of the natural biosphere, along with the lithosphere and hydrosphere as parts of planet Earth.
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