Technology as Creativity: A Review of Anna Demina and Alexander Nesterov‘s Semiotic Theory of Creativity

The philosophy of technology has long suffered from a consequentialist bias, focusing on the effects and risks of technology rather than on its essence. Technical creativity, in particular, remains underexplored compared to artistic creativity, often being reduced to applied science or accidental invention. This review examines the monograph Semiotic Theory of Creativity: The Problem of the New in Technology and Art by Anna Demina and Alexander Nesterov which attempts to construct a universal theoretical model of creativity applicable to both technical and artistic domains. The authors of the monograph synthesize the three-act theory of technical creativity by Pyotr Engelmeyer, the concept of form-giving forces by Friedrich Dessauer, and the ontological model of general semiotics (Frege, Peirce, Morris). They correlate the three dimensions of semiosis (pragmatics, syntactics, semantics) with the three levels of cognition (sensory perception, understanding, reason) and introduce a fourth dimension related to the material expression of signs. The reviewed book offers a systematic analysis of the epistemological problems of creativity. It defines creativity as a process of novelty generation through the transformation of pragmatic, semantic, or syntactic rules of semiosis, resulting in new objects at the level of sensory perception, new things at the level of understanding, and new ideas at the level of reason. The authors identify nine possible ways of novelty emergence in technical and artistic creativity, using science fiction as illustrative material. The monograph represents a significant contribution to the philosophy of technology, breaking with both existentialist alarmism and Marxist reductionism. While the choice of science fiction as empirical material may be debatable, and some parts of the text serve a ritual rather than analytical function, the work provides a much-needed, operationalizable framework for understanding technical creativity. It is a substantial, necessary, and important publication that opens new directions for research.