Kay L. O'Halloran

The centrality of language and other semiotic means in the structuring of ideas and ordering of human thought lies at the heart of this immensely ambitious book. O’Halloran opens the discussion with two historically significant instances when words appeared to have represented and constructed visions, and aligned thinking in particular ways: ‘Success is right. What does not succeed is wrong’ and ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’. The first was reported to be the guiding principle of the pro-Nazi generals; the second was a statement made by President Bush after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The point being made here is that propositions such as these, expressed in natural language, can and do impact on (millions of) people's perception and action. This is in line with a Hallidayan perspective which informs much of O’Halloran's epistemological position in this work. This perspective is then further elaborated to include other semiotic resources, as exemplified by a collection of Second World War photographs depicting contrasting images of an injured Russian soldier and German officers. It is pointed out that these photographs construct a contextual account of the participants at the fall of Berlin carrying messages of actions, experiences, emotional and physical states that is ‘impossible to exactly reproduce in narrative form’ (p. 5). The point here is that different semiotic resources such as language and visual images provide different affordances for meaning making and meaning giving.

Action (physics) · Epistemology · German · Linguistics · Meaning (existential) · Narrative · Semiotics · Sociology · Vision · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Cognitive Science and Education Research · Image Retrieval and Classification Techniques · Philosophy