Dialogue and Universalism

Volume 23, Issue 3, 2013

Universal Dialogue

Semiotics of Globalization as a Subject of Philosophical Reflection

Examining dialogue, one may underline its being amicable or not, intellectual (Socratic) or not, useful or useless, plainly transferring message or hinting metamessage, serving social or private goals etc. However, speaking about dialogue in general we speak in terms of semiotics. Considering globalization in general one should adopt the semiotic framework within which globalization is not just a collection of cases, and globalistics (a field of academic research) is not only a catalogue registering it. It will turn globalization into the subject of philosophical interest. The paper presents a specific basis for semiotic investigations. This basis postulates inter alia the fourth part (besides the three standard ones, i.e. syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics), not widely known, called sigmatics, dealing with the construction of adequate ontologies. It can help to explain in a complete way what we observe in the present and to foresee the prospects of the future, including the integrated problems of dialogue, globalization and tolerance which are the main concern of the presented considerations. Some special characteristics of the semiotic research and of globalistics in Russia are displayed in two Appendixes.