Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of signs and their meanings. In semiotics, the term signs refers not only to literal signs, such as traffic signs, but also to images, words, and other symbols that represent a meaning. The science of semiotics has implications in many fields—including literature, filmmaking, and advertising—and in everyday life.

Background

The word semiotics is derived from the Greek word sēmeion, which means "sign." In Greek, sēmeiōtikos means "observant of signs." The earliest application of semiotics came from Hippocrates, who viewed it as a branch of medicine. Aristotle expanded on the concept of looking at how one thing can represent another or embody a broader idea and created a three-part model for taking a semiotic approach to a sign.

In 1670, English physician Henry Stubbes followed Hippocrates's concept and used the term semiotics to apply to the interpretation of signs and symptoms in medical diagnosis. In 1690, English physician and philosopher John Locke wrote an essay titled "Concerning Human Understanding," in which he suggested that philosophers use semiotic techniques to find connections between knowledge and representation. Throughout the centuries, many others examined the idea of semiotics as it applied to a variety of fields, including psychology, philosophy, religion, and communications.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, Charles Sanders Peirce, an American philosopher best known for his influence on pragmatic thought, promoted semiotics as a way of looking at signs. He noted that the relevance of a sign is determined by another object, which the sign represents, and that the relationship between the two determines how a person will react to the sign. Peirce's consideration of signs took into account that only certain aspects of a sign were the triggers for the person's reaction. For example, when a driver sees a red traffic light, the driver sees the color red as an indication to stop. The size of the light and other features of the stoplight do not factor into the driver's interpretation of the sign.

In the early part of the twentieth century, Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure began lecturing on the role of semiotics in language. According to Saussure, it is the combination of a concept—for example, a barking animal with fur—combined with a specific combination of letters to form a word—d-o-g—that allows a person to read a word and form a mental image to go with it. Saussure called this study semiology.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, several individuals took the ideas forged by Peirce and Saussure and applied them to other fields of study. These included Belgian-French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, French literary critic Roland Barthes, French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, and French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. This trend of expanding the concepts of semiotics to cover other fields would continue throughout the latter portion of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century.

Overview

Peirce's classic semiotic model involves a triangular relationship among a sign, its interpretation, and the person doing the interpreting. He called the three points of this triangle the representamen, the object, and the interpretant. In contemporary terms, the representamen is known as the signifier and the object is called the signified. The representamen is the form representing the sign. This does not have to be a concrete representation. For instance, words are often representamen under Peirce's model. The object is the thing being represented by the representamen, while the interpretant is the sense or understanding of the sign. For instance, the word dog would be a representamen, the barking animal with fur would be the object, and the broad concept of dogs would be an interpretant of the sign.

According to Peirce's model, the representamen can take many forms. For example, a person might arrive at the interpretant of the object as "jet" in several ways. One might see what Peirce called an icon, or visual representation, such as a picture or drawing. Another type of representamen might be what Peirce termed an index, or physical indication made by the object, such as the white contrails left behind as a jet flies or the roar of an engine. Finally, the representamen might be some arbitrary designation that comes to be understood to represent the object, such as the word jet. The significance of semiotics is this: Although the representamen might be a simple child's drawing or the distant sound of an engine, the interpretant—the understanding—of these signs is the same.

Applications

In the twenty-first century, the science of semiotics has expanded to cover a wide range of fields. The study of signs, what they represent, and how they are perceived has influenced how advertisers, marketers, and filmmakers design their content to achieve a specific result or encourage a certain reaction from their audiences. Studying how different people perceive different images and signs is also key in an increasingly global world, because different cultures can have different responses to the same image. For example, Americans consider a handshake as a friendly greeting or as a way to complete a business deal. In other cultures, shaking hands is seen as rude. Therefore, a commercial showing two people shaking hands will be perceived differently in some places because the sign—the handshake—has a different significance.

The fields of anthropology, biology, music, photography, and social science also apply principles of semiotics. In these areas of study, semiotics is more about understanding the relationship among a symbol, its perception, and the reaction it produces than it is about creating a desired result, as is the case in marketing, advertising, and filmmaking. The concepts of semiotics have also continued to be applied to the study of literature as a method of understanding what an author means and how a reader extracts that meaning.

Bibliography

Atkin, Albert. "Peirce's Theory of Signs." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 4 Aug. 2022, plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce-semiotics/. Accessed 13 Nov. 2024.

Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics: The Basics. 4th ed., Routledge, 2022.

"Semiotics." DePaul University, condor.depaul.edu/dsimpson/pers/semiotics.html. Accessed 13 Nov. 2024.

"Semiotics/Semiology." University of California, Los Angeles, 2007, classes.design.ucla.edu/Fall07/154A/resources/alt‗semiotics.pdf. Accessed 13 Nov. 2024.

Streeter, Thomas. "Semiotic Terminology." The University of Vermont, www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/semiotics‗and‗ads/terminology.html. Accessed 13 Nov. 2024.