In recent years, many marketing, cultural, and brand consulting firms have begun incorporating semiotics into their practices. Unfortunately, the theory behind this practical extension has taken root in poisoned soil. As one of these consulting firms states:
Semiotics is an investigation into how meaning is created and how meaning is communicated. Its origins lie in the academic study of how signs and symbols (visual and linguistic) create meaning.
There are two problems with this definition, and one key ambiguity: first, it is problematic to say that meaning is “created”; second, it is problematic to restrict semiotics’ study to “visual and linguistic” “signs and symbols”; third, it is ambiguous as to what is meant by “meaning”. These inaccurate significations have produced an effete practical semiotics.
Signs and Symbols
We see these words paired often. But what distinguishes a sign from a symbol? What is a sign? Across all approaches to semiotics, it is recognized that the realization of a sign requires a relation: namely, the relation between what we normally call the sign (the sign-vehicle or representamen) and that which it signifies (the object, significate, or signand). But in the richer philosophical founding given it by the American polymath Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), semiotics recognizes that the sign, in fact, requires three key factors: not only the representamen and significate, but also the interpretant. The interpretant is that to whom or to which the representamen signifies the object. Without this crucial third factor, nothing ever is signified in actuality, and therefore nothing ever is actually a sign.
What about a symbol? Ordinarily, symbols are understood (or explained) as non-linguistic representations of suprasensible objects. For example, we tend to think of religious and political symbols: the crucifix as a symbol of Catholicism or a flag as the symbol of a country. While C.S. Peirce himself had many sophisticated and insightful thoughts on what constitutes a symbol—which would take us down the rabbit holes of scholarship, textual exegesis, and many fine-grained distinctions—we can see that these examples of symbols, in fact, function as sign-vehicles. Symbols, in other words, function to establish a particular kind of sign-relation. They are one among many other kinds of sign-vehicle.
The common distinction of “signs and symbols”, as though one or the other pertains to the visual and the other to the linguistic (often ambiguously divided!) misses a crucial element to what we might call semiotic awareness. Put simply: while all animals make use of signs, only human beings are aware that we make use of signs. This awareness comes to the fore through our linguistic capacities. Even our specifically-human visual significations, in other words, unfold in the context of language—what we can call the post-linguistic context.
Semiotics and Meaning
This linguistically-perfused semiotic awareness brings me to the second problem: namely, the notion that “meaning is created”. This phrase has become, unfortunately, quite common in the past century. Like many phrases that seem simple on the surface, it subtly signifies a whole metaphysics. “Meaning” is obviously important to us. We live our lives in pursuit of the meaningful. But do we create meaning when we create sign-relations?
Answers to this question tend toward two opposed extremes: either that 1) “meaning” is wholly independent of our action—something that we find or discover but never create, except deceptively; or that 2) “meaning” is wholly the product of our own activity, and that the universe in itself is entirely meaningless. Of the two positions, the latter proves both more destructive and disruptive to human living—for it leads to radically incoherent conclusions, and to people living based on arbitrary beliefs and principles irresoluble to reality. But both positions are inadequate. Although we do not create meaning ex nihilo (“out of nothing”), there most certainly elements of human experience that come into being only by our own mental operations.
The relationship between semiotics and meaning, in other words, is much more complicated! For meaning enters into our experience not only through language and the post-linguistic, but through our senses and our perceptual cognition, and takes up residence even in our biological, pre-conscious bodily structures. There exists a kind of meaning even in our genetic inheritance. Importantly, however—nota bene!—the diversity of meanings we encounter, in order that they form any kind of meaningful unity, must be ultimately resolved to a source of meaning which is mind-independent. There are two important reasons for this claim: first, all our experience begins from and is initiated by the mind-independent (such that the meanings we do create are always derivative in some way from meanings we do not create); and second, the root of our creative capacity is in the freedom of our wills—which, if this were left to be the ultimate basis of meaning, would result in human experience being naught but a struggle of wills.
Unique to semiotics, if conceived as resolving to a mind-independent unity, is that it can be applied to the discovery and exposition of meaning not only in each instance it is found—from the individual acts of a bacterium to the transmission of religious belief and cultural development—but across these diverse phenomena. It is, as John Deely (1942–2017) was fond of saying, an inherently interdisciplinary study. In other words, by studying one object semiotically, we leave ourselves open to considering its relations to every other object. The meaning of any given sign relates to the entire universe of meaning.
Practical Applications of Semiotics
When it comes to the practical application of semiotics, therefore, no limits can be found: for anything at all can be studied and analyzed semiotically. This universality can make it seem overwhelming. As such, the easiest application has been to those signs which perfuse our environment today most readily: marketing. The commercialization of all things in the digital age—a consequence of being able to sell anything, anywhere, anytime—means that we are always “branding” ourselves and our content (even if only in the marketplace of attention… which can be quite valuable, as Facebook taught us).
But, although semiotics may be applied quite usefully in analyzing and revising our marketing, reducing the praxis of semiotics to this very narrow focus blinds us to its many potential applications. (There is a parallel, here, to the way in which “rhetoric” likewise becomes abused.) I want to provide here an outline of some further practical applications for semiotic thinking, which I will explore in future posts. As we continue through these diverse practical applications, we will “build out” an explanation of their theoretical basis in the divisions and functions of sign-relation types, and especially the diversity of sign-vehicles through which these relations are primarily affected.
Ethics of communication.
…the woof and warp of all thought and all research is symbols, and the life of thought and science is the life inherent in symbols; so that it is wrong to say that a good language is important to good thought, merely; for it is the essence of it.
C.S. Peirce 1903: “The Ethics of Terminology” in The Essential Peirce, vol.2: 263.
Among the many provocative suggestions of Peirce is this notion of an “ethics of terminology”. By this, specifically, he meant the development of vocabularies well-suited to each science, as well as to philosophy in general: vocabularies distinct from common speech, for the sake of precision and advancement in understanding, so as to avoid confusions in our practice of communicating difficult concepts.
A worthy goal not yet realized, we could furthermore extend this ethical conception into the whole of communication. An ethics, as I understand it, consists not in any system of rules for making moral calculations, but rather the total way of holding oneself from conscious beliefs in relation to behavior. Today, in our communication-saturated world, it seems that too few of us have developed conscious beliefs about how we behave in our reception and provision of communications. As a consequence, we maltreat others, ourselves, and the objects we intend to signify through unvirtuous habits of communication. Semiotics, with its analysis of how, what, and to whom we signify, can help us develop a proper self-holding with respect to our communication.
Conceiving and implementing digital systems.
It does not take much time experimenting with digital technologies to realize they are both, and at one and the same time, incredibly powerful and horribly designed. Social media platforms exemplify this: we see how quickly false messages can spread—especially when they are salacious—and how ineptly distributed are any subsequent corrections. Thinking more carefully, first, about how digital technologies impact human psychology, and second, about the right way of relating an object through a digital representamen to interpretants, we can improve the humanity of our currently inhumane digital environments.
Simultaneously, we can think with greater precision and clarity about the very construction of those digital environments themselves. The codification and de-codification of information in the current paradigms relies upon a presupposition of efficiency—stemming from a presupposition of the information-processing paradigm developed by Nyquist, Harvey, Shannon, and others—which, although it has an easy utility, sacrifices much in the flexibility of our constructions.
Understanding media.
Television, music, books, movies, video games, live streams, and more—the multimedia panopticon holds our senses captive. As a particular subset of the ethics of communication, attending to the semiosic conveyances of these media can help us understand the cultures in which we live, and how they are changing. Semiotic reflection upon our media, however, can also help us understand how to create them in a way suited not only to gaining attention, but to conveying through them the important truths.
Particularly important, but often ignored, media and the felt pressures of the culture it creates influence the practices of businesses (of every size), resulting in an unthinking conformity that overlays everything with inauthenticity.
Architecture and spatial design.
No stranger to academic semiotics, architecture and spatial design have nevertheless often fallen into the arbitrarily, “meaning-creating” camp of its study. This lapse has resulted in poor design, of buildings and spaces alike. Discovering the integration of signifiers in a built environment, including its relation to the human person and to the natural environments, can assist us to re-shape the corporeal world in a way that befits all parts, rather than simply what conforms to our plans.
As we progress through these diverse semiotic praxes, we will explore the theoretical background in C.S. Peirce, Scholastic philosophy, and the work of the late American semiotic philosopher, John Deely, among other contributors to the discipline.
Continuum Philosophical Insight 