Mihai Nadin. Understanding prehistoric images in the post-historic age: a cognitive project, in Semiotica, 100:2-4, 1994. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 387-405 B. Campbell. Humankind Emerging. Toronto: Little, Brown & Co.,1985.
W. Davis. The origins of image making, in Current Anthropology, 27 (1986). pp. 193-215.
Luigi Bottin. Contributi della Tradizione Greco-Latina e
Arabo-Latina al Testo della Rhetorica di Aristotele. Padova:
Antenore, 1977.
Marc Fumaroli. L'Age de l'Éloquence: Rhétorique et 'Res
Literaria' de la Renaissance au Seuil de l'Époque Classique.
Geneva: Droz and Paris: Champion, 1980.
William M.A. Grimaldi. Aristotle, Rhetoric: A Commentary. New
York: Fordham University Press, 1980- 1988.
Rhetoric is generally seen as the ability to persuade. Using many kinds of signs (language, images, sounds, gestures, etc.), rhetoric is connected to the pragmatic context. In ancient Greece and Rome, as well as in China and India, rhetoric was considered an art and practiced for its own sake. Some consider rhetoric as one of the sources of semiotics (together with logic, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of language (cf. Tzvetan Todorov, Théorie du Symbole, Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1977). Gestures are a part of rhetoric. Quintillian, in De institutione oratoria, dealt with the lex gestus (law of gesture). In the Renaissance, the code of gesture was studied in detail. In our days of illiterate rhetoric based on stereotypes and increasingly compressed messages, gestures gain a special status indicative of the power of non-literacy-based ceremonies. The rhetoric of advertisement pervades human interaction.
George Boole (1815-1864) conceived of a logical calculus, in An
Investigation of the Laws of Thought on which are founded the
Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (London, 1854),
which eventually became the basis for digital computation.
Howard Rheingold.Virtual Reality. New York: Summit Books, 1991.
Rheingold offers a description that can substitute for a definition: "Imagine a wraparound television with programs, including three-dimensional sound, and solid objects that you can pick up and manipulate, even feel with your fingers and hands. Imagine immersing yourself in an artificial world and actively exploring it, rather than peering at it from a fixed perspective through a flat screen in a movie theater, on a television set, or on a computer display. Imagine that you are the creator as well as the consumer of your artificial experience, with the power to use a gesture or a word to remold the world you see and hear and feel" (p. 16).
In an Internet interview with Rheingold, Sherry Turkel points out that computers and networks are objects- to-think-with for a networked era. She predicts, "I believe that against all odds and against most current expectations, we are going to see a rebirth of psychoanalytic thinking" (cf. Brainstorms, http://www.well.com, 1996).