x Steven C. Hamel
Israeli discursive construction. This approach is semiotically adopted in opposition to many
others that tend to speak of 'discursive constructions' in very general ways. In contrast, regular
causal attributions that constituted 'talking about Israeli school violence' are documented
based on their emergence from within a long term study of three Israeli newspapers. They are
then also explored as they are reflexively interrelated in Israeli cultural terms. That is, they
are considered in terms of how they are supported and/or challenged by Israeli ideological
beliefs. Reflexive relations of constraint, support and opposition are then investigated by
looking at the internal dynamics of the causal propositions that constitute this construction in
relation to others in Israel today. In this way, the general link between regular linguistic
practices and cultural ideology is explored in this particular case study. It is proposed that this
specific case study has implications for the general cross-cultural study of discursive
ideological constructs both practically and methodologically. The study then documents a
second-order, indexical system that links (and strengthens) causal attributions about the
problem of school violence in Israel to a (relative) speaker's/writer's conservative vs. liberal
political identity. The study then closes with a discussion of some of the general
methodological and theoretical implications drawn from this semiotic case study.
Chapter 6 - The general topic of this contribution is semioethics, widely regarded as one
of the most significant developments in semiotics after the turn of the 21st century, and along
with the existential semiotics of Eero Tarasti (2000) a sign of an ethical turn within semiotics.
The term semioethics, which signifies not least the emergence of a sense of global
responsibility, was introduced by Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio in 2003, and Petrilli in
particular is associated with this emerging scholarly field. The semioethics interviews,
conducted by Norwegian-born Tartu semiotician Morten Tønnessen, starts out (in four
separate interview articles) with Professor John Deely, a prominent American scholar known
among other works for The Four Ages of Understanding: The first Postmodern Survey of
Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the 20th Century (Deely 2001a). Deely, a
semiotician as well as a philosopher, has joined Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio in their
endeavour by grounding the notion of semioethics in philosophical terms.
Topics include the responsibility of humankind, individuals and governments, the place
of culture as part of and yet distinct from nature, the semiotic side of modern economic and
technological development, the future prospects of human understanding and morality in the
light of current economic and political developments, and philosophy – the distinction
between ontology and epistemology, and the terminology of rights, included – reviewed in
terms of (Peircean) semiotics. In the course of the interview, Deely relates not only to Peirce
but further to Petrilli, to Thomas Sebeok, to the biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944) and
to phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. The human condition is examined time over again,
drawing on a rich reference material from philosophy as well as from various sciences and
scholarly disciplines.
Chapter 7 - A Four–Level Semiotics Discourse Analysis framework is proposed to
understand meaning making when scientific theories are used as explanatory models in
Science Education contexts such as classrooms. This Discourse Analysis framework is
derived from a semiotics perspective of scientific knowledge being interpreted as signed
information and from functional linguistics approaches as articulated by M.A. K. Halliday
and J. Lemke. Halliday‘s and Lemke‘s approaches to Discourse analysis are organized around
three generalized semiotic meanings that relate to social action, roles of people, and
organization of the text or sign. However, to understand how different signs (referred to as