Semiotics

“While the Saussurean semiotic is dyadic (sign/syntax, signal/semantics), the Peircean semiotic is triadic (sign, object, interpretant), being conceived of as philosophical logic studied in terms of signs that are not always linguistic or artificial. The Peircean semiotic addresses not only the external communication mechanism, as per Saussure, but the internal representation machine, investigating not just sign processes, or modes of inference, but the whole inquiry process in general. Peircean semiotics further subdivides each of the three triadic elements into three sub-types. For example, signs can be icons, indices and symbols.”

“Thomas Sebeok assimilated “semiology” to “semiotics” as a part to a whole,[19] and was involved in choosing the name Semiotica for the first international journal devoted to the study of signs.”

“The estimative powers of animals interpret the environment as sensed to form a “meaningful world” of objects, but the objects of this world (or “Umwelt”, in Jakob von Uexküll’s term,[20]) consist exclusively of objects related to the animal as desirable (+), undesirable (–), or “safe to ignore” (0). In contrast to this, human understanding adds to the animal Umwelt a relation of self-identity within objects which transforms objects experienced into things as well as +, –, 0 objects.[21] Thus the generically animal objective world as Umwelt, becomes a species-specifically human objective world or Lebenswelt, wherein linguistic communication, rooted in the biologically underdetermined Innenwelt of human animals, makes possible the further dimension of cultural organization within the otherwise merely social organization of animals whose powers of observation may deal only with directly sensible instances of objectivity. This further point, that human culture depends upon language understood first of all not as communication, but as the biologically underdetermined aspect or feature of the human animal’s Innenwelt, was originally clearly identified by Thomas A. Sebeok.[22] Sebeok also played the central role in bringing Peirce’s work to the center of the semiotic stage in the twentieth century,[23] first with his expansion of the human use of signs (“anthroposemiosis”) to include also the generically animal sign-usage (“zoösemiosis”),[24] then with his further expansion of semiosis (based initially on the work of Martin Krampen,[25] but taking advantage of Peirce’s point that an interpretant, as the third item within a sign relation, “need not be mental”[26]) to include the vegetative world (“phytosemiosis”).”

“Peirce’s distinction of an interpretant from an interpreter, with the further qualification that the former need not be “of a mental mode of being”—not his demonstration that sign relations are perforce irreducibly triadic, as is commonly assumed in his following so far as the followers continue the modern tradition of ignoring the Latin Age of philosophy’s history—was his most revolutionary move and most seminal contribution to the doctrine of signs. Peirce’s “interpretant” notion opened the way to understanding an action of signs beyond the realm of animal life (study of “phytosemiosis” + “zoösemiosis” + “anthroposemiosis” = biosemiotics), which was his first advance beyond Latin Age semiotics.”

“Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), a noted logician who founded philosophical pragmatism, defined semiosis as an irreducibly triadic process wherein something, as an object, logically determines or influences something as a sign to determine or influence something as an interpretation or interpretant, itself a sign, thus leading to further interpretants.[29] Semiosis is logically structured to perpetuate itself. The object may be quality, fact, rule, or even fictional (Hamlet), and may be (1) immediate to the sign, the object as represented in the sign, or (2) dynamic, the object as it really is, on which the immediate object is founded. The interpretant may be (1) immediate to the sign, all that the sign immediately expresses, such as a word’s usual meaning; or (2) dynamic, such as a state of agitation; or (3) final or normal, the ultimate ramifications of the sign about its object, to which inquiry taken far enough would be destined and with which any interpretant, at most, may coincide.[30] His semiotic[31] covered not only artificial, linguistic, and symbolic signs, but also semblances such as kindred sensible qualities, and indices such as reactions. He came c. 1903[32] to classify any sign by three interdependent trichotomies, intersecting to form ten (rather than 27) classes of sign.[33] Signs also enter into various kinds of meaningful combinations; Peirce covered both semantic and syntactical issues in his speculative grammar. He regarded formal semiotic as logic per se and part of philosophy; as also encompassing study of arguments (hypothetical, deductive, and inductive) and inquiry’s methods including pragmatism; and as allied to, but distinct from logic’s pure mathematics. In addition to pragmatism, Peirce provided a definition of the term “sign” as: “A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea.” Peirce called the sign a representamen, in order to bring out the fact that a sign is something that “represents” something else in order to suggest it (that is, “re-present” it) in some way.[34] For a summary of Peirce’s contributions to semiotics, see Liszka (1996) or Atkin (2006).”

“Saussure’s insistence on the arbitrariness of the sign also has influenced later philosophers and theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillard.”

“Saussure believed that dismantling signs was a real science, for in doing so we come to an empirical understanding of how humans synthesize physical stimuli into words and other abstract concepts.”

“Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) studied the sign processes in animals. He used the German word for “environment”, Umwelt, to describe the individual’s subjective world, and he invented the concept of functional circle (Funktionskreis) as a general model of sign processes. In his Theory of Meaning (Bedeutungslehre, 1940), he described the semiotic approach to biology, thus establishing the field that now is called biosemiotics.”

“Valentin Voloshinov (1895–1936) was a Soviet-Russian linguist, whose work has been influential in the field of literary theory and Marxist theory of ideology. Written in the late 1920s in the USSR, Voloshinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (tr.: Marksizm i Filosofiya Yazyka) developed a counter-Saussurean linguistics, which situated language use in social process rather than in an entirely decontexualized Saussurean langue.”

“Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965) developed a formalist approach to Saussure’s structuralist theories. His best known work is Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, which was expanded in Résumé of the Theory of Language, a formal development of glossematics, his scientific calculus of language.”

“Charles W. Morris (1901–1979). In his 1938 Foundations of the Theory of Signs, he defined semiotics as grouping the triad syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Syntax studies the interrelation of the signs, without regard to meaning. Semantics studies the relation between the signs and the objects to which they apply. Pragmatics studies the relation between the sign system and its human (or animal) user.”

“Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917–1992) developed a structural version of semiotics named, “generative semiotics”, trying to shift the focus of discipline from signs to systems of signification. His theories develop the ideas of Saussure, Hjelmslev, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.”

“Thomas A. Sebeok (1920–2001), a student of Charles W. Morris, was a prolific and wide-ranging American semiotician. Although he insisted that animals are not capable of language, he expanded the purview of semiotics to include non-human signaling and communication systems, thus raising some of the issues addressed by philosophy of mind and coining the term zoosemiotics. Sebeok insisted that all communication was made possible by the relationship between an organism and the environment in which it lives. He also posed the equation between semiosis (the activity of interpreting signs) and life”

“Umberto Eco (1932–present) made a wider audience aware of semiotics by various publications, most notably A Theory of Semiotics and his novel, The Name of the Rose, which includes applied semiotic operations. His most important contributions to the field bear on interpretation, encyclopedia, and model reader. He also has criticized in several works (A theory of semiotics, La struttura assente, Le signe, La production de signes) the “iconism” or “iconic signs” (taken from Peirce’s most famous triadic relation, based on indexes, icons, and symbols), to which he purposes four modes of sign production: recognition, ostension, replica, and invention.”

“The Mu Group (Groupe µ) (founded 1967) developed a structural version of rhetorics, and the visual semiotics.”

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