Diálogo y Valoración
How can one summarize the result of more than two decades of reflection and five years of systematic scientific research?
It all began with a question: What are equality and freedom? Where do they come from?
Language underlies all human activity. Our thinking is itself a linguistic and semiotic process. Wittgenstein argued that the limits of our language are the limits of our world. But then, how can we explain the fact that we often need to create new words to express new concepts?
And doesn't each new text expand the world a little further? Every word, every text—but also every song, every cultural product, whether verbal or otherwise—is an action upon the world. A new reality. This is the foundation of pragmatics.
We usually understand "dialogue" as a conversation, whether formal or friendly. As for "valuation," it seems almost carved in stone that we must understand it as subjective judgments about ethics and aesthetics. The classics spoke of three spheres of value: the good, the beautiful, and the true. But the landscape of dialogue and valuation is far richer and more complex.
Today, we know that every text is a dialogue—even those traditionally considered monologues—because each text responds to previous utterances and addresses a new interlocutor: an interlocutor who may be physically present or distant, an actual person or an idealized audience, or even an idealized version of the self. The structure of language is dialogical. Even our thinking is dialogical—an internal dialogue. Our very consciousness is born from dialogue: consciousness of the self before an other who is not the self.
And we also know that all language—our thinking and our consciousness—is value-laden. We are constantly measuring reality: ethical, aesthetic, and epistemic valuations, but also functional, transformational, and more.
Values are neither objective nor subjective—they are interactive or interactional: they emerge and are reproduced through communicative and semiotic interaction.
In Dialogue and Valuation, while seeking the meaning of equality and freedom, I encountered the fundamental norms of any communicative act: similarity and autonomy. Without the similarity and autonomy of interlocutors, communication would not be possible. This is the core of what I call the "axiological hypothesis." I have formally tested this hypothesis in six texts by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, spanning various genres—from the founding article of neuroscience to a science fiction story, a collection of aphorisms, and even a technical photography treatise. Informally, I’ve even observed it in the label on a bottle of bleach from a well-known brand.
An example of the axiological hypothesis is this very text, written for an absent interlocutor, by an author who is also absent at the moment a fellow human being—by virtue of their autonomy—engages in reading it.
Finally, I would like to thank the editorial team of Revista Latina de Comunicación Social for the opportunity, and the challenge, of presenting Dialogue and Valuation in a concise format.
BIOGRAPHY
José M. Ramírez holds a PhD in Language Science and is a semiotician. Since 2022, he has been an independent researcher at Factoría de la Lengua. He currently develops the humanist pragmatic model, applicable to any type of text or cultural product. A specialist in systemic functional linguistics, critical discourse analysis, and social semiotics, his articles have been published in journals such as SIGNA and Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica. In July 2023, he presented the axiological hypothesis at the 20th World Congress of the International Association of Applied Linguistics in Lyon, France. This hypothesis describes for the first time the sphere of value in dialogue and the semiotic origin of value principles underlying humanism, liberal democracy, and international law.
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*The RLCS Reading Corner was created as part of a transfer activity of the CONCILIUM group (931.791) of the Complutense University of Madrid, “Validation of models of communication, neurocommunication, business, social networks and gender”.
