Semiotics: A totem pole has faces with many different meanings What is Semiotics?
Semiotics is a theory of communication, interpretation, and literacy. Semiotics explores how humans use and interpret signs and symbols to communicate, to learn, and to develop knowledge.
Semiotics is the study of symbolic thinking; it explores how humans use and interpret signs and symbols to communicate, to learn, and to develop knowledge.
- Semiotics presumes speech and writing are code systems—linguistic and sound systems, networks of constructed relations. From the perspective of semiotics, writing or speaking are acts of signification.
Common Semiotic Systems
- audio
- audio sounds
- design
- facial gestures
- linguistic
- music
- visual.
Key Concepts: Communication; Symbolic Thinking; Textual Research; Textual Analysis; Symbol Analyst.
History
Semiotics has a robust intellectual history. Since antiquity, philosophers and linguists have theorized about the nature of signs, interpretation, and meaning, including Cicero, Augustine, Locke, Peirce (Raposa 2003).
Augustine is sometimes credited as the founder of semiotics, the study of signs. In De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine wrote
- “a sign is a thing which causes us to think of something beyond the impression the thing itself makes upon the senses
- “all instruction is either about things or about signs; but things are learnt by means of signs” (Meier-Oeser, Stephan)
Others point to Ferdinand de Saussure as the father of semiotics. In his lectures to his students at University of Geneva between 1906 to 1911, Ferdinand de Saussure theorized that signs are (1) a signifier (i.e., a word or symbol) and (2) a signified (i.e., an underlying meaning associated with the signifier.
Charles Sanders Peirce explored the role of signs in interpretation. He theorized signs can be categorized in three ways: (1) an icon; (2) an index; (3) a symbol.
| icon | An icon physically resembles the signified. Example: a photograph |
| index | An index somehow suggests, references, or indicates the signified in three possible ways: Track, Symptoms, Designations (Peirce qtd. in Huening 2020). (1) Tracks tend to have cause/effect relationships: the scent of cigarette smoke, a runner’s footprint on the beach. (2) Symptom: a fever may suggest an infection; a column of smoke, fire; a thermometer, the temperate. (3) Designation: a pointed finger, the word this, finger at you |
| symbol | Symbols are arbitrary. Their usage is guided by convention. For example, alphabetical language is a social historical convention. “Any ordinary word, as ‘give,’ ‘bird,’ ‘marriage,’ is an example of a symbol” (Peirce 114). |
Recommended Reading
- Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler
