At the edge of chaos

pp. 11-37

in: Inna Semetsky, The edusemiotics of images, Rotterdam, SensePublishers, 2013

Abstrakt

The Fool is standing at the edge of the cliff, but with his head high in the clouds the Fool doesn't seem to notice an uneven road or the possibility of falling down. The image portrays the symbolic child within many of us, the archetypal pueraeternus, symbolizing new beginnings, the potentiality of life, novelty itself. The Fool's childlike topological perception of the world, in accordance with Piaget's developmental theory (cf. Merrell, 1997, pp. 335–336), is not restricted by conventional Euclidean geometry; conversely, his world is not conceptualized merely in terms of rigid axioms of propositional logic.