Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Many people in the semiotics community believe that their subject can provide the basis for a unification of knowledge between the humanities and the sciences. In practice, however, the results of these projects by semioticians are often too hazy and abstract to do what their proponents claim. A more specific approach that considers Giorgio Agamben’s study of signatures and their relationship to semiotics can provide a suggestive foundation for uniting various aspects of knowledge. For him “the sign signifies because it carries a signature that necessarily predetermines its interpretation and distributes its use and efficacy according to rules, practices and percepts that it is our task to recognize”. Signatures can hence provide a context, structured by norms and descriptions, in which signs (as carriers of meaning) can operate. One of Agamben’s aims is to situate his approach to signatures squarely in what can be considered the humanities, particularly historical and cultural analysis. Yet, the idea of signatures can be applied to other domains, more specifically that of computer and information science. In these fields the term “signature” is used to define functions and their parameters. This extension of the meaning of “signature” can be applied further to the definition of knowledge ontologies in computational and information theoretic domains. In addition, digital signatures are ways to build “trust” in a machine environment. Hence, an investigation of the concept of “signature” might yield insights concerning the relationship between the human and computational sciences and ultimately to machines.