ABSTRACT
To think ‘globally’, we must accept global notions of society, subjectivity, language, and semiosis, evidently developed in science-based frameworks when possible. This chapter gives a general, global ecological account of human society, what it extracts from and expels back into nature. The stratified critical realist model serves as a general, global frame for characterization of the human life-world, its experiential strata, and its domains. Principles of authority, power, and truth depend on an eco-ontological perspective, considering how signs and meaning unfold into a stable typology, including performative, epistemic, and affective modes. Both sign types and language use anchor these modes as semantic formats. Discourse structures, including narrative, argumentative, and descriptive formats, ground possible forms of knowledge: history, philosophy, science – complementary to art and religion, whose structural origin must be sought in the psyche. Instead of opposing psyche and life-world, we demonstrate how psycho-semiotic study must directly relate to eco-semiotic study, because the mind is itself shaped by the semiotic world evolving together during 50.000 years of modernity. Ethics, aesthetics, and critical thinking must now converge, given contemporary threats, to defend the global, planetary habitat and humanity.
