1 // Language – Literature – the Arts: A Cognitive-Semiotic Interface / Ed. by Elżbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska, Olga Vorobyova. – Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2017. Series Title: Text Meaning Context: Cracow Studies in English Language, Literature and Culture TCIN: 52369702 ISBN: 9783631660867 Store Item Number (DPCI): 248-45-1591 Olena I. Morozova V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University TRANSPARENCY ACROSS SEMIOTIC MODES: AN ECOLOGICAL STANCE 1. Introduction The word transparency conflates disparate notions, such as a property of a substance, a behavioural characteristic of a person, a quality of a phenomenal state, a feature of an organization, a trait of a work of art, etc. Accordingly, discussions of transparency range through science, engineering, business, and humanities (Art-Azbuka 2005; Brin 1998; Florenskij 1993; Metzinger 2003; Podoroga 1995; Rowe and Slutsky 1982; Vattimo 1992, etc.). Therefore, the notion of transparency can surely claim a transdisciplinary status. Is it only the shared vocabulary that marks connections between various displays of transparency in disparate spheres? Are there any general statements that one can make about ‘semiotic modes’ 1 of transparency in terms of cognitive processes? In search of answers to these questions, I focus here on three areas in which the term ‘transparent’ is used more often: natural sciences, visual arts, and linguistics. Exploring the ways we think about transparency in these spheres, I take an ‘ecological stance’, seeking, in particular, to enhance the potential of the ecological view of cognition. According to the latter, mental entities (meanings, concepts, images, aesthetic experiences, etc.) are viewed as dynamic, embodied, situationally embedded, and distributed. The ecological view of cognition stands in contrast to a more familiar assumption of present-day semantics according to which conceptual entities are discrete ‘chunks’ of knowledge stored in memory and activated in discourse. 1 The term ‘mode’ is taken here to refer to a set of socially and culturally shaped resources for making meaning, such as writing and still image on the page, sound and moving image on the screen, speech, gesture, gaze, posture in embodied interaction, etc. (“Mode”2012, IS).