It is easy to minimize the importance of symbols in culture. Art tends to focus on existential symbolism, leap-frogging over the ways in which we interpret symbols constantly, in the form of letters, ...

How does one person actually communicate to another person? In fact all communication follows from shared symbolic codes in the brain. Thoughts are never directly communicated between people. All ...

What allows humans to infer “a notion of structure” (Otto Jespersen) when using language, art, music, and mathematics? All of these domains have their own unique representational units (words, notes), ...

Whether in advertising, art, or architecture, our lives are swarmed with symbols whose meanings have developed and varied over time and place. While a decorative owl presiding over the Library of ...