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Julie Rea Harper

PTSD: A situated look at the semiotic process and role of individual umwelts in human existence/function

When someone is trying to teach us mathematics, he will not begin by assuring us that he knows that a + b = b + a.

?Wittgenstein (1969)

 

Wittgenstein reminds us that the avenue toward belief isn’t through logic alone. We do not know those things that we have only reasoning to support. We feel sure of those things which by experience, and belief have come to exist within us, with an ‘absence of doubt.’ To consider the impact of knowing on behavior, it could be said that we act, from what we know.

The purpose of this paper is to consider how we come to know on a multi-model level, as exemplified by both a semiotic theory base and a situated example of how the notion of an individual Umwelt can house particular ‘knowledge’ and act upon it.

PTSD, or Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, is a diagnosis, which can be given when individuals suffer negative and long lasting effects that stem from traumatic experience.

Semiotica, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 0037-1998
Volume: 2005, 10/2005
Pages: 377 - 385

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