Sign (semiotics)
Encyclopedia
A sign is understood as a discrete
unit of meaning
in semiotics
. It is defined as "something that stands for something, to someone in some capacity" It includes words, images, gestures, scents, tastes, textures, sounds – essentially all of the ways in which information
can be communicated as a message by any sentient, reasoning mind to another.
The nature of signs has long been discussed in philosophy
. Initially, within linguistics
and later semiotics, there were two general schools of thought: those who proposed that signs are ‘dyadic’ (i.e. having two parts), and those who proposed that signs are interpreted in a recursive pattern of triadic (i.e. three-part) relationships.
(1857–1913), a sign
is composed of the signifier (signifiant
), and the signified (signifié). These cannot be conceptualized as separate entities but rather as a mapping from significant differences in sound to potential (correct) differential denotation. The Saussurean sign exists only at the level of the synchronic system, in which signs are defined by their relative and hierarchical privileges of co-occurrence. It is thus a common misreading of Saussure to take signifiers to be anything one could speak, and signifieds as things in the world. In fact, the relationship of language to parole (or speech-in-context) is and always has been a theoretical problem for linguistics (cf. Roman Jakobson's famous essay "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics" et al.).
A famous thesis by Saussure states that the relationship between a sign and the real-world thing it denotes is an arbitrary one. There is not a natural relationship between a word and the object it refers to, nor is there a causal relationship between the inherent properties of the object and the nature of the sign used to denote it. For example, there is nothing about the physical quality of paper that requires denotation by the phonological sequence ‘paper’. There is, however, what Saussure called ‘relative motivation’: the possibilities of signification of a signifier are constrained by the compositionality of elements in the linguistic system (cf. Emile Benveniste
's paper on the arbitrariness of the sign in the first volume of his papers on general linguistics). In other words, a word is only available to acquire a new meaning if it is identifiably different from all the other words in the language and it has no existing meaning. Structuralism
was later based on this idea that it is only within a given system that one can define the distinction between the levels of system and use, or the semantic "value" of a sign.
and phonology
, Peirce was a somewhat Kant
ian philosopher who distinguished "sign" from "word" as only a particular kind of sign, and characterized the sign as the means to understanding
. He covered not only artificial, linguistic, and symbolic signs, but also all semblances (such as kindred sensible qualities), and all indicators (such as mechanical reactions). He counted as symbols all terms, propositions, and arguments even apart from their expression in particular languages. He held that "all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs". The setting of Peirce's study of signs is philosophical logic, which he defined as formal semiotic, and characterized as a normative field following esthetics and ethics, as more basic than metaphysics, and as the art of devising methods of research. He argued that, since all thought takes time, all thought is in signs, that all thought has the form of inference (even when not conscious and deliberate), and that, as inference, "logic is rooted in the social principle", since inference depends on a standpoint that, in a sense, is unlimited. The result is a theory not of language in particular, but rather of the production of meaning, and it rejects the idea of a static relationship between a sign and that which it represents, its object. Peirce believed that signs are meaningful through recursive relationships that arise in sets of three.
Even when a sign represents by a resemblance or factual connection independent of interpretation, the sign is a sign only insofar as it is at least potentially interpretable by a mind and insofar as the sign is a determination of a mind or at least a quasi-mind, that which functions as if it were a mind, for example in crystals and the work of bees—the focus here is on sign action in general, not on psychology, linguistics, or social studies (fields which Peirce also pursued).
A sign is something which depends on an object in a way that enables (and, in a sense, determines) an interpretation, an interpretant, to depend on the object as the sign depends on the object. The interpretant, then, is a further sign of the object, and thus enables and determines still further interpretations, further interpretant signs. The process, called semiosis
, is irreducibly triadic, Peirce held, and is logically structured to perpetuate itself. It is what defines sign, object, and interpretant in general. As Jean-Jacques Nattiez
(1990: 7) put it, "the process of referring effected by the sign is infinite." (Note also that Peirce used the word "determine" in the sense not of strict determinism, but of effectiveness that can vary like an influence.)
Peirce further characterized the three semiotic elements
as follows:
Peirce explained that signs mediate between their objects and their interpretants in semiosis, the triadic process of determination. In semiosis a first is determined or influenced to be a sign by a second, as its object. The object determines the sign to determine a third as an interpretant. Firstness itself is one of Peirce's three categories of all phenomena
, and is quality of feeling. Firstness is associated with a vague state of mind as feeling and a sense of the possibilities, with neither compulsion nor reflection. In semiosis the mind discerns an appearance or phenomenon, a potential sign. Secondness is reaction or resistance, a category associated with moving from possibility to determinate actuality. Here, through experience outside of and collateral to the given sign or sign system, one recalls or discovers the object to which the sign refers, for example when a sign consists in a chance semblance of an absent but remembered object. It is through one's collateral experience that the object determines the sign to determine an interpretant. Thirdness is representation or mediation, the category associated with signs, generality, rule, continuity, habit-taking, and purpose. Here one forms an interpretant expressing a meaning or ramification of the sign about the object. When a second sign is considered, the initial interpretant may be confirmed, or new possible meanings may be identified. As each new sign is addressed, more interpretants, themselves signs, emerge. It can involve a mind's reading of nature, people, mathematics, anything.
Peirce generalized the communicational idea of utterance and interpretation of a sign, to cover all signs:
According to Nattiez, writing with Jean Molino
, the tripartite definition of sign, object, and interpretant is based on the "trace
" or neutral level
, Saussure's "sound-image" (or "signified", thus Peirce's "representamen"). Thus, "a symbolic form...is not some 'intermediary' in a process of 'communication' that transmits the meaning intended by the author to the audience; it is instead the result of a complex process of creation (the poietic process) that has to do with the form as well as the content of the work; it is also the point of departure for a complex process of reception (the esthesic process that reconstructs a 'message'").
(ibid, p. 17)
Molino's and Nattiez's diagram:
Peirce's theory of the sign therefore offered a powerful analysis of the signification system, its codes, and its processes of inference and learning, because the focus was often on natural or cultural context rather than linguistics which only analyses usage in slow-time whereas, in the real world, there is an often chaotic blur of language and signal exchange during human semiotic interaction. Nevertheless, the implication that triadic relations are structured to perpetuate themselves leads to a level of complexity not usually experienced in the routine of message creation and interpretation. Hence, different ways of expressing the idea have been developed.
by three universal trichotomies dependent on his three categories (quality, fact, habit). He classified any sign:
Because of those classificatory interdependences, the three trichotomies intersect to form ten (rather than 27) classes of signs. There are also various kinds of meaningful combination. Signs can be attached to one another. A photograph is an index with a meaningfully attached icon. Arguments are composed of dicisigns, and dicisigns are composed of rhemes. In order to be embodied, legisigns (types) need sinsigns (tokens) as their individual replicas or instances. A symbol depends as a sign on how it will be interpreted, regardless of resemblance or factual connection to its object; but the symbol's individual embodiment is an index to your experience of the object. A symbol is instanced by a specialized indexical sinsign. A symbol such as a sentence in a language prescribes qualities of appearance for its instances, and is itself a replica of a symbol such as a proposition apart from expression in a particular language. Peirce covered both semantic and syntactical issues in his theoretical grammar, as he sometimes called it. He regarded formal semiotic, as logic, as furthermore 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.
Peirce sometimes referred to the “ground” of a sign. The ground is the pure abstraction of a quality. A sign's ground is the respect in which the sign represents its object, e.g. as in literal and figurative language
. For example, an icon presents a characteristic or quality attributed to an object, while a symbol imputes to an object a quality either presented by an icon or symbolized so as to evoke a mental icon.
Peirce called an icon apart from a label, legend, or other index attached to it, a "hypoicon", and divided the hypoicon into three classes: (a) the image, which depends on a simple quality; (b) the diagram, whose internal relations, mainly dyadic or so taken, represent by analogy the relations in something; and (c) the metaphor, which represents the representative character of a sign by representing a parallelism in something else. A diagram can be geometric, or can consist in an array of algebraic expressions, or even in the common form "All __ is ___" which is subjectable, like any diagram, to logical or mathematical transformations. Peirce held that mathematics is done by diagrammatic thinking — observation of, and experimentation on, diagrams. Peirce developed for deductive logic a system of visual existential graph
s, which continue to be researched today.
(see Roman Jakobson
).
Modern theories deny the Saussurian distinction between signifier and signified, and look for meaning not in the individual signs, but in their context and the framework of potential meanings that could be applied. Such theories assert that language is a collective memory or cultural history of all the different ways in which meaning has been communicated and may, to that extent, be constitutive of all life's experiences (see Louis Hjelmslev
). Hjelmslev did not considered the sign as the smallest semiotic unit, as it is possible to decompose it further; instead, he considered the "internal structure of language" to be a system of figurae, a concept somewhat related to that of figure of speech
, which he considered to be the ultimate semiotic unity.
This implies that speaking is simply one more form of behaviour and changes the focus of attention from the text as language, to the text as a representation
of purpose, a functional version of the author's intention
. But, once the message has been transmitted, the text exists independently.
Hence, although the writers who co-operated to produce this page exist, they can only be represented by the signs actually selected and presented here. The interpretation process in the receiver's mind may attribute meanings completely different from those intended by the senders. Why might this happen? Neither the sender nor the receiver of a text has a perfect grasp of all language. Each individual's relatively small stock of knowledge is the product of personal experience and their attitude to learning. When the audience
receives the message, there will always be an excess of connotational meanings available to be applied to the particular signs in their context (no matter how relatively complete or incomplete their knowledge, the cognitive process is the same).
The first stage in understanding the message is, therefore, to suspend or defer judgement until more information becomes available. At some point, the individual receiver decides which of all the possible meanings represents the best possible "fit". Sometimes, uncertainty may not be resolved so meaning is indefinitely deferred, or a provisional or approximate meaning is allocated. More often, the receiver's desire for closure (see Gestalt psychology
) leads to simple meanings being attributed out of prejudices and without reference to the sender's intentions.
, the notion of sign takes various usages. "Many postmodernist theorists postulate a complete disconnection of the signifier and the signified. An 'empty' or 'floating signifier'
is variously defined as a signifier with a vague, highly variable, unspecifiable or non-existent signified. Such signifiers mean different things to different people: they may stand for many or even any signifieds; they may mean whatever their interpreters want them to mean."
Associations and journals
Discrete
Discrete in science is the opposite of continuous: something that is separate; distinct; individual.Discrete may refer to:*Discrete particle or quantum in physics, for example in quantum theory...
unit of meaning
Meaning (semiotics)
In semiotics, the meaning of a sign is its place in a sign relation, in other words, the set of roles that it occupies within a given sign relation. This statement holds whether sign is taken to mean a sign type or a sign token...
in semiotics
Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
. It is defined as "something that stands for something, to someone in some capacity" It includes words, images, gestures, scents, tastes, textures, sounds – essentially all of the ways in which information
Information
Information in its most restricted technical sense is a message or collection of messages that consists of an ordered sequence of symbols, or it is the meaning that can be interpreted from such a message or collection of messages. Information can be recorded or transmitted. It can be recorded as...
can be communicated as a message by any sentient, reasoning mind to another.
The nature of signs has long been discussed in philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
. Initially, within linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
and later semiotics, there were two general schools of thought: those who proposed that signs are ‘dyadic’ (i.e. having two parts), and those who proposed that signs are interpreted in a recursive pattern of triadic (i.e. three-part) relationships.
Dyadic signs
According to SaussureFerdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
(1857–1913), a sign
Sign
A sign is something that implies a connection between itself and its object. A natural sign bears a causal relation to its object—for instance, thunder is a sign of storm. A conventional sign signifies by agreement, as a full stop signifies the end of a sentence...
is composed of the signifier (signifiant
Sign (semiotics)
A sign is understood as a discrete unit of meaning in semiotics. It is defined as "something that stands for something, to someone in some capacity" It includes words, images, gestures, scents, tastes, textures, sounds – essentially all of the ways in which information can be...
), and the signified (signifié). These cannot be conceptualized as separate entities but rather as a mapping from significant differences in sound to potential (correct) differential denotation. The Saussurean sign exists only at the level of the synchronic system, in which signs are defined by their relative and hierarchical privileges of co-occurrence. It is thus a common misreading of Saussure to take signifiers to be anything one could speak, and signifieds as things in the world. In fact, the relationship of language to parole (or speech-in-context) is and always has been a theoretical problem for linguistics (cf. Roman Jakobson's famous essay "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics" et al.).
A famous thesis by Saussure states that the relationship between a sign and the real-world thing it denotes is an arbitrary one. There is not a natural relationship between a word and the object it refers to, nor is there a causal relationship between the inherent properties of the object and the nature of the sign used to denote it. For example, there is nothing about the physical quality of paper that requires denotation by the phonological sequence ‘paper’. There is, however, what Saussure called ‘relative motivation’: the possibilities of signification of a signifier are constrained by the compositionality of elements in the linguistic system (cf. Emile Benveniste
Émile Benveniste
Émile Benveniste was a French Jewish structural linguist, semiotician, an apprentice of Antoine Meilletand his successor, who, in his later years, became enlightened by the structural view of language through the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, although he was unwilling to grasp it at first, being...
's paper on the arbitrariness of the sign in the first volume of his papers on general linguistics). In other words, a word is only available to acquire a new meaning if it is identifiably different from all the other words in the language and it has no existing meaning. Structuralism
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
was later based on this idea that it is only within a given system that one can define the distinction between the levels of system and use, or the semantic "value" of a sign.
Triadic signs
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) proposed a different theory. Unlike Saussure who approached the conceptual question from a study of linguisticsLinguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
and phonology
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
, Peirce was a somewhat Kant
KANT
KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...
ian philosopher who distinguished "sign" from "word" as only a particular kind of sign, and characterized the sign as the means to understanding
Understanding
Understanding is a psychological process related to an abstract or physical object, such as a person, situation, or message whereby one is able to think about it and use concepts to deal adequately with that object....
. He covered not only artificial, linguistic, and symbolic signs, but also all semblances (such as kindred sensible qualities), and all indicators (such as mechanical reactions). He counted as symbols all terms, propositions, and arguments even apart from their expression in particular languages. He held that "all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs". The setting of Peirce's study of signs is philosophical logic, which he defined as formal semiotic, and characterized as a normative field following esthetics and ethics, as more basic than metaphysics, and as the art of devising methods of research. He argued that, since all thought takes time, all thought is in signs, that all thought has the form of inference (even when not conscious and deliberate), and that, as inference, "logic is rooted in the social principle", since inference depends on a standpoint that, in a sense, is unlimited. The result is a theory not of language in particular, but rather of the production of meaning, and it rejects the idea of a static relationship between a sign and that which it represents, its object. Peirce believed that signs are meaningful through recursive relationships that arise in sets of three.
Even when a sign represents by a resemblance or factual connection independent of interpretation, the sign is a sign only insofar as it is at least potentially interpretable by a mind and insofar as the sign is a determination of a mind or at least a quasi-mind, that which functions as if it were a mind, for example in crystals and the work of bees—the focus here is on sign action in general, not on psychology, linguistics, or social studies (fields which Peirce also pursued).
A sign is something which depends on an object in a way that enables (and, in a sense, determines) an interpretation, an interpretant, to depend on the object as the sign depends on the object. The interpretant, then, is a further sign of the object, and thus enables and determines still further interpretations, further interpretant signs. The process, called semiosis
Semiosis
Semiosis is any form of activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, including the production of meaning. Briefly – semiosis is sign process...
, is irreducibly triadic, Peirce held, and is logically structured to perpetuate itself. It is what defines sign, object, and interpretant in general. As Jean-Jacques Nattiez
Jean-Jacques Nattiez
Jean-Jacques Nattiez, CM, CQ, FRSC is a musical semiologist or semiotician and professor of Musicology at the Université de Montréal...
(1990: 7) put it, "the process of referring effected by the sign is infinite." (Note also that Peirce used the word "determine" in the sense not of strict determinism, but of effectiveness that can vary like an influence.)
Peirce further characterized the three semiotic elements
Semiotic elements and classes of signs (Peirce)
Logician, mathematician, philosopher, and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce began writing on semeiotic, semiotics, or the theory of sign relations in the 1860s, around the time that he devised his system of three categories...
as follows:
- Sign (or representamen): that which represents the denoted object (cf. Saussure's "signifier").
- Object (or semiotic object): that which the sign represents (or as some put it, encodesEncode (semiotics)In semiotics, the process of creating a message for transmission by the addresser to the addressee is called encoding. The act of interpreting the message by the addressee is called decoding.-Discussion:...
). It can be anything thinkable, a law, a fact, or even a possibility (a semiotic object could even be fictional, such as HamletPrince HamletPrince Hamlet is a fictional character, the protagonist in Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. He is the Prince of Denmark, nephew to the usurping Claudius and son of the previous King of Denmark, Old Hamlet. Throughout the play he struggles with whether, and how, to avenge the murder of his father, and...
); those are partial objects; the total object is the universe of discourse, the totality of objects in that world to which one attributes the partial object. For example, perturbation of Pluto's orbit is a sign about Pluto, but not only about Pluto. The object may be- immediate to the sign, the object as represented in the sign, or
- dynamic, the object as it really is, on which the immediate object is founded.
- Interpretant (or interpretant sign): a sign's meaning or ramification as formed into a further sign by interpreting (or, as some put it, decodingDecode (semiotics)In semiotics, the process of interpreting a message sent by the addresser to the addressee is called decoding. Creating a message for transmission by the addresser is called encoding.-Discussion:...
) the sign. The interpretant may be:- immediate to the sign, a kind of possibility, all that the sign is suited to immediately express, for instance a word's usual meaning;
- dynamic, that is, the meaning as formed into an actual effect, for example an individual translation or a state of agitation, or
- final or normal, that is, the ultimate meaning that inquiry taken far enough would be destined to reach. It is a kind of norm or ideal end, with which an actual interpretant may, at most, coincide.
Peirce explained that signs mediate between their objects and their interpretants in semiosis, the triadic process of determination. In semiosis a first is determined or influenced to be a sign by a second, as its object. The object determines the sign to determine a third as an interpretant. Firstness itself is one of Peirce's three categories of all phenomena
Categories (Peirce)
On May 14, 1867, the 27-year-old Charles Sanders Peirce, who eventually founded Pragmatism, presented a paper entitled "On a New List of Categories" to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among other things, this paper outlined a theory of predication involving three universal categories...
, and is quality of feeling. Firstness is associated with a vague state of mind as feeling and a sense of the possibilities, with neither compulsion nor reflection. In semiosis the mind discerns an appearance or phenomenon, a potential sign. Secondness is reaction or resistance, a category associated with moving from possibility to determinate actuality. Here, through experience outside of and collateral to the given sign or sign system, one recalls or discovers the object to which the sign refers, for example when a sign consists in a chance semblance of an absent but remembered object. It is through one's collateral experience that the object determines the sign to determine an interpretant. Thirdness is representation or mediation, the category associated with signs, generality, rule, continuity, habit-taking, and purpose. Here one forms an interpretant expressing a meaning or ramification of the sign about the object. When a second sign is considered, the initial interpretant may be confirmed, or new possible meanings may be identified. As each new sign is addressed, more interpretants, themselves signs, emerge. It can involve a mind's reading of nature, people, mathematics, anything.
Peirce generalized the communicational idea of utterance and interpretation of a sign, to cover all signs:
According to Nattiez, writing with Jean Molino
Jean Molino
Jean Molino is professeur ordinaire at the University of Lausanne and a semiologist. His students include Jean-Jacques Nattiez.-Bibliography:*Musical Fact and the Semiology of Music, trans. J. A. Underwood, Music Analysis 9/2 : 113-156....
, the tripartite definition of sign, object, and interpretant is based on the "trace
Trace (semiology)
The trace in semiotics is a concept developed by Jacques Derrida in Writing and Difference to denote the history that a sign carries with it as the result of its use through time. Words like "black", for example, carry the trace of all their previous uses with them, making them sensitive, loaded...
" or neutral level
Neutral level
In a semiotics the neutral level of a sign is the "trace" left behind, the physical or material creation or remains of esthesic and poietic processes, levels, and analyses of symbolic forms...
, Saussure's "sound-image" (or "signified", thus Peirce's "representamen"). Thus, "a symbolic form...is not some 'intermediary' in a process of 'communication' that transmits the meaning intended by the author to the audience; it is instead the result of a complex process of creation (the poietic process) that has to do with the form as well as the content of the work; it is also the point of departure for a complex process of reception (the esthesic process that reconstructs a 'message'").
(ibid, p. 17)
Molino's and Nattiez's diagram:
| Poietic Process | Esthesic Process | |||
| "Producer" | → | Trace | ← | Receiver |
-
-
- (Nattiez 1990, p. 17)
-
Peirce's theory of the sign therefore offered a powerful analysis of the signification system, its codes, and its processes of inference and learning, because the focus was often on natural or cultural context rather than linguistics which only analyses usage in slow-time whereas, in the real world, there is an often chaotic blur of language and signal exchange during human semiotic interaction. Nevertheless, the implication that triadic relations are structured to perpetuate themselves leads to a level of complexity not usually experienced in the routine of message creation and interpretation. Hence, different ways of expressing the idea have been developed.
Classes of triadic signs
By 1903 Peirce came to classify signsSemiotic elements and classes of signs (Peirce)
Logician, mathematician, philosopher, and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce began writing on semeiotic, semiotics, or the theory of sign relations in the 1860s, around the time that he devised his system of three categories...
by three universal trichotomies dependent on his three categories (quality, fact, habit). He classified any sign:
- by what stands as the sign — either (qualisign, also called a tone) a quality — or (sinsign, also called token) an individual fact — or (legisign, also called type) a rule, a habit;
- by how the sign stands for its object — either (icon) by its own quality, such that it resembles the object, regardless of factual connection and of interpretive rule of reference — or (index) by factual connection to its object, regardless of resemblance and of interpretive rule of reference — or (symbol) by rule or habit of interpreted reference to its object, regardless of resemblance and of factual connection; and
- by how the sign stands for its object to its interpretant — either (rheme, also called seme, such as a term) as regards quality or possibility, as if the sign were a qualisign, though it can be qualisign, sinsign, or legisign — or (dicisign, also called pheme, such as a proposition) as regards fact, as if the sign were an index, though it can be index or symbol — or (argument, also called delome) as regards rule or habit. This is the trichotomy of all signs as building blocks in an inference process.
- Any qualisign is an icon. Sinsigns include some icons and some indices. Legisigns include some icons, some indices, and all symbols.
- Any icon is a rheme. Indices (be they sinsigns or legisigns) include some rhemes and some dicisigns. Symbols include some rhemes, some dicisigns, and all arguments.
Because of those classificatory interdependences, the three trichotomies intersect to form ten (rather than 27) classes of signs. There are also various kinds of meaningful combination. Signs can be attached to one another. A photograph is an index with a meaningfully attached icon. Arguments are composed of dicisigns, and dicisigns are composed of rhemes. In order to be embodied, legisigns (types) need sinsigns (tokens) as their individual replicas or instances. A symbol depends as a sign on how it will be interpreted, regardless of resemblance or factual connection to its object; but the symbol's individual embodiment is an index to your experience of the object. A symbol is instanced by a specialized indexical sinsign. A symbol such as a sentence in a language prescribes qualities of appearance for its instances, and is itself a replica of a symbol such as a proposition apart from expression in a particular language. Peirce covered both semantic and syntactical issues in his theoretical grammar, as he sometimes called it. He regarded formal semiotic, as logic, as furthermore encompassing study of arguments (hypothetical
Abductive reasoning
Abduction is a kind of logical inference described by Charles Sanders Peirce as "guessing". The term refers to the process of arriving at an explanatory hypothesis. Peirce said that to abduce a hypothetical explanation a from an observed surprising circumstance b is to surmise that a may be true...
, deductive
Deductive reasoning
Deductive reasoning, also called deductive logic, is reasoning which constructs or evaluates deductive arguments. Deductive arguments are attempts to show that a conclusion necessarily follows from a set of premises or hypothesis...
, and inductive
Inductive reasoning
Inductive reasoning, also known as induction or inductive logic, is a kind of reasoning that constructs or evaluates propositions that are abstractions of observations. It is commonly construed as a form of reasoning that makes generalizations based on individual instances...
) and inquiry's methods including pragmatism
Pragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice...
; and as allied to but distinct from logic's pure mathematics.
Peirce sometimes referred to the “ground” of a sign. The ground is the pure abstraction of a quality. A sign's ground is the respect in which the sign represents its object, e.g. as in literal and figurative language
Literal and figurative language
Literal and figurative language is a distinction in traditional systems for analyzing language. Literal language refers to words that do not deviate from their defined meaning. Figurative language refers to words, and groups of words, that exaggerate or alter the usual meanings of the component...
. For example, an icon presents a characteristic or quality attributed to an object, while a symbol imputes to an object a quality either presented by an icon or symbolized so as to evoke a mental icon.
Peirce called an icon apart from a label, legend, or other index attached to it, a "hypoicon", and divided the hypoicon into three classes: (a) the image, which depends on a simple quality; (b) the diagram, whose internal relations, mainly dyadic or so taken, represent by analogy the relations in something; and (c) the metaphor, which represents the representative character of a sign by representing a parallelism in something else. A diagram can be geometric, or can consist in an array of algebraic expressions, or even in the common form "All __ is ___" which is subjectable, like any diagram, to logical or mathematical transformations. Peirce held that mathematics is done by diagrammatic thinking — observation of, and experimentation on, diagrams. Peirce developed for deductive logic a system of visual existential graph
Existential graph
An existential graph is a type of diagrammatic or visual notation for logical expressions, proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce, who wrote on graphical logic as early as 1882, and continued to develop the method until his death in 1914.-The graphs:...
s, which continue to be researched today.
20th century theories
It is now agreed that the effectiveness of the acts that may convert the message into text (including speaking, writing, drawing, music and physical movements) depends upon the knowledge of the sender. If the sender is not familiar with the current language, its codes and its culture then he or she will not be able to say anything at all, whether as a visitor in a different language area or because of a medical condition such as aphasiaAphasia
Aphasia is an impairment of language ability. This class of language disorder ranges from having difficulty remembering words to being completely unable to speak, read, or write....
(see Roman Jakobson
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century...
).
Modern theories deny the Saussurian distinction between signifier and signified, and look for meaning not in the individual signs, but in their context and the framework of potential meanings that could be applied. Such theories assert that language is a collective memory or cultural history of all the different ways in which meaning has been communicated and may, to that extent, be constitutive of all life's experiences (see Louis Hjelmslev
Louis Hjelmslev
Louis Hjelmslev was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family , Hjelmslev studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague and Paris...
). Hjelmslev did not considered the sign as the smallest semiotic unit, as it is possible to decompose it further; instead, he considered the "internal structure of language" to be a system of figurae, a concept somewhat related to that of figure of speech
Figure of speech
A figure of speech is the use of a word or words diverging from its usual meaning. It can also be a special repetition, arrangement or omission of words with literal meaning, or a phrase with a specialized meaning not based on the literal meaning of the words in it, as in idiom, metaphor, simile,...
, which he considered to be the ultimate semiotic unity.
This implies that speaking is simply one more form of behaviour and changes the focus of attention from the text as language, to the text as a representation
Knowledge representation
Knowledge representation is an area of artificial intelligence research aimed at representing knowledge in symbols to facilitate inferencing from those knowledge elements, creating new elements of knowledge...
of purpose, a functional version of the author's intention
Authorial intentionality
In literary theory and aesthetics, authorial intent refers to an author's intent as it is encoded in his or her work.-Literary theory:In literary studies, the question of the validity of the methods of determining authorial intent has been debated since the early twentieth century. New Criticism,...
. But, once the message has been transmitted, the text exists independently.
Hence, although the writers who co-operated to produce this page exist, they can only be represented by the signs actually selected and presented here. The interpretation process in the receiver's mind may attribute meanings completely different from those intended by the senders. Why might this happen? Neither the sender nor the receiver of a text has a perfect grasp of all language. Each individual's relatively small stock of knowledge is the product of personal experience and their attitude to learning. When the audience
Audience
An audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, literature , theatre, music or academics in any medium...
receives the message, there will always be an excess of connotational meanings available to be applied to the particular signs in their context (no matter how relatively complete or incomplete their knowledge, the cognitive process is the same).
The first stage in understanding the message is, therefore, to suspend or defer judgement until more information becomes available. At some point, the individual receiver decides which of all the possible meanings represents the best possible "fit". Sometimes, uncertainty may not be resolved so meaning is indefinitely deferred, or a provisional or approximate meaning is allocated. More often, the receiver's desire for closure (see Gestalt psychology
Gestalt psychology
Gestalt psychology or gestaltism is a theory of mind and brain of the Berlin School; the operational principle of gestalt psychology is that the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies...
) leads to simple meanings being attributed out of prejudices and without reference to the sender's intentions.
Postmodern theory
Within critical theoryCritical theory
Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...
, the notion of sign takes various usages. "Many postmodernist theorists postulate a complete disconnection of the signifier and the signified. An 'empty' or 'floating signifier'
Floating signifier
Floating signifiers or empty signifiers is a term used in semiotics to denote signifiers without referents, such as a word that doesn't point to any actual object or agreed upon meaning.-Origin and definition:...
is variously defined as a signifier with a vague, highly variable, unspecifiable or non-existent signified. Such signifiers mean different things to different people: they may stand for many or even any signifieds; they may mean whatever their interpreters want them to mean."
See also
- Grapheme
- Semantic
- SemeioticSemeioticSemeiotic is a spelling variant of a word used by Charles Sanders Peirce, likewise as "Semiotic," "Semiotics", and "Semeotic", to refer to his philosophical logic, which he cast as the study of signs, or semiotic. Some, not all, Peircean scholars have used "semeiotic" to refer to distinctly...
- semiotic triangle
- Sign (linguistics)Sign (linguistics)There are many models of the linguistic sign . A classic model is the one by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. According to him, language is made up of signs and every sign has two sides : the signifier , the "shape" of a word, its phonic component, i.e...
- Sign relationSign relationA sign relation is the basic construct in the theory of signs, also known as semeiotic or semiotics, as developed by Charles Sanders Peirce.-Anthesis:...
- Triadic relationTriadic relationIn mathematics, a ternary relation or triadic relation is a finitary relation in which the number of places in the relation is three. Ternary relations may also be referred to as 3-adic, 3-ary, 3-dimensional, or 3-place....
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Associations and journals