On Wednesday, 7 May 2025, The Research Institute of the University of Bucharest (ICUB) invites you to the presentation “Technology without Nature and Mind without Reason: towards a semiotic theory of technology”, delivered by Alin Olteanu.
The event will begin at 12:30 and will take place exclusively online, on Google Meet Platform, at this link.
Further details at e-mail: events@icub.unibuc.ro.
Alin Olteanu is Associate Professor at the Institute of Language Sciences of Shanghai International Studies University. He is a leading scholar in the semiotic approaches to education and literacies.
In the present, he is visiting professor at the Social Sciences Section of the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest (ICUB).
His visiting project at ICUB, “Putting imagination back in imaginary: a cognitive and sociotechnical theory of affordances” stems from Alin’s interest in how ongoing digitalization is extending cognition, pluralizing social representation modalities and thus producing new social imaginaries. This is a theoretical effort to bridge cognitive and social sciences by reflecting on the relation between the imagination, as a cognitive capacity to virtually entertain possible worlds, and imaginaries, as social constructions afforded through technical infrastructures. To pursue this, Alin is interested in creating a hub for the study of technological futures at ICUB.
About the presentation
Within the event, Alin Olteanu will present his ICUB project, Putting imagination back in imaginary: A cognitive and sociotechnical theory of affordances. He considers that bridging the theoretical gap between the cognitive concept of imagination and the social (and technical) concept of imaginary is the crux of developing a semiotic theory of technology. The project aims to bring these two together under an encompassing semiotic framework, which Alin Olteanu finds instrumental in supporting the Mind-Technology Thesis (Clowes et al. 2018; Fuller 2022), namely that mind and technology are continuous processes. Specifically, this enables construing technology as the mind’s outworking itself into its next state.
According to Alin Olteanu, the Mind-Technology Thesis is a compelling project to eschew a still enduring dualist substance ontology heritage in philosophy of mind. While in the current technological revolution the humanities and social sciences are becoming discourses on technology, semiotics, linguistics, discourse studies and, in general, the study of meaning fail to develop systematic approaches to technology. This is due both to the strongly analytical tradition in philosophy of technology and lingering classical humanism in the study of meaning, both which have fueled dualist ontologies.
Both these lines of inquiry, which have now reached a dead-end, are rooted in academic glottocentric culture (language-centrism; Sebeok 2001, Petrilli 2014), also a main source for contemporary crises, given its underpinning of anthropocentric sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff, Kim 2015). Such imaginaries ushered the human industries and societies that unbalanced the Holocene into the Anthropocene. Alin Olteanu unravels the fallacies of such imaginaries by adopting C. S. Peirce’s pragmatic semiotics, where the mind’s work is construed as semiosis, instead of Reason. As he explains, the state-of-the-art cognitive semiotics (Paolucci 2021) can take a major step in liberating contemporary societies from imaginaries that foster unsustainability. Particularly, supporting current externalist accounts of mind (Clark, Chalmers 1998), this semiotic view deems the European Romantic concept of Nature misleading, as foundational for modern sociotechnical imaginaries that are both unsustainable and discriminating.
The crux of his argument lies in disentangling cognition and meaning-making as distinct phenomena, which the notion of Reason confuses. In the semiotic vein he suggests, reasoning is deemed conditional (modal) and situated, as assessing possible not futures, not actual presents (Pietarinen, Beni 2022). This indicates that all mind-work, even in the absence of perception and cognition, is enabled by organism’s capacity to simulate, which in the case of complex animals takes a cognitive form, as imagination.
In this presentation, Alin Olteanu will unfurl his argument step by step, explaining what he has developed so far, what are his next undertakings and how this is mapped in publications.
References
Clark, A., Chalmers, D. 1998. The extended mind. Analysis 58(1): 7-19.
Clowes, R., W., Gärtner, K., Hipólito, I. Eds. The mind-technology problem: Investigating minds, selves and 21st Century artefacts, pp. 275-321. Springer.
Jasanoff, Sheila; Kim, Sang-Hyun. (2015). Eds. Dreamscapes of modernity: Sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power. University of Chicago Press.
Fuller, S. 2022. The mind technology problem. Postdigital Science and Education 4:247–252.
Paolucci, C. 2021. Cognitive semiotics: Integrating signs, minds, meaning and cognition. Cham: Springer.
Petrilli, S. 2014. The critique of glottocentrism. Chinese Semiotic Studies 10(1): 25-41.
Pietarinen, A-.V., Beni, M. D. 2021. Active inference and abduction. Biosemiotics 14: 499-517.
Sebeok, T.A. (2001). Global semiotics. Indiana University Press.
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