Basics of Semiotics

1. Basics of Semiotics Ole Togeby Scandinavian Institute Aarhus University

2. Semiotics • also called  Semiology, the study of signs and sign-using behaviour. It was defined by one of its founders, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, as the study of “the life of signs within society.” Although the word was used in this sense in the 17th century by the English philosopher John Locke, the idea of semiotics as an interdisciplinary mode for examining phenomena in different fields emerged only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the independent work of Saussure and of the American philosopher CharlesSanders Peirce.

3. I. Sign definitions

4. Structuralist concept of sign Expression form Expression substance Content Substance Content form

5. Peirce’s definition of a sign • "A sign 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, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. • [A sign] stands for [its] object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the [sign].

6. Peirce on signs • A Sign is a Cognizable that, on the one hand, is so determined (i.e., specialized, bestimmt) by something other than itself, called its Object [...], while, on the other hand, it so determines some actual or potential Mind, the determination whereof I term the Interpretant created by the Sign, that that Interpreting Mind is therein determined mediately by the Object." (A Letter to William James, EP 2:492, 1909)

7. Objects determine their signs • Just as Peirce thought signs could be classified according to whether their sign-vehicles function in virtue of qualities, existential facts, or conventions and laws, he thought signs were similarly classifiable according to how their object functioned in signification. Recall that, for Peirce, objects "determine" their signs. That is to say, the nature of the object constrains the nature of the sign in terms of what successful signification requires.

8. Icon, index and symbol • Peirce's categorization of signs into three main types: • (1) an icon, which resembles its referent (such as a road sign for falling rocks); • (2) an index, which is associated with its referent (as smoke is a sign of fire); and • (3) a symbol, which is related to its referent only by convention (as with words or traffic signals). • Peirce also demonstrated that a sign can never have a definite meaning, for the meaning must be continuously qualified.

9. Qualitative, physical and conventional • Again, Peirce thought the nature of these constraints fell into three broad classes: • qualitative, • existential or physical, • conventional and law-like. • If the constraints of successful signification require that the sign reflect qualitative features of the object, then the sign is an icon. • If the constraints of successful signification require that the sign utilize some existential or physical connection between it and its object, then the sign is an index. • If successful signification of the object requires that the sign utilize some convention, habit, or social rule or law that connects it with its object, then the sign is a symbol.

10. Representamen, interpretant, object, ground • "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, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. • The sign stands for something, its object. • It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen. "Idea" is here to be understood in a sort of Platonic sense, very familiar in everyday talk; I mean in that sense in which we say that one man catches another man's idea, in which we say that when a man recalls what he was thinking of at some previous time, he recalls the same idea, and in which when a man continues to think anything, say for a tenth of a second, in so far as the thought continues to agree with itself during that time, that is to have a like content, it is the same idea, and is not at each instant of the interval a new idea. (A Fragment, CP 2.228, c. 1897)

11. A model of Peirce’s sign indirect determination equivalent with Determines stands for in that respect

12. Traffic light • Lad os tage et bedragerisk let eksempel: trafiklyset viser rødt: Det røde lys er repræsentamen, objektet det henviser til, er muligheden for at der kommer biler på tværs, interpretanten er det nye tegn der danner sig i mig, bilisten, og som lyder: “Jeg må hellere bremse” - og tegnets grund er det forhold, at der henvises til de andre biler alene i den egenskab at de kunne køre på tværs nu og her, ikke til deres mærke, farve, ejere, stand osv.,der kunne være genstand for et andet tegn (Peirce 1994, 17). • The traffic light shows red.: The red light is representamen, the object that it refers to, is the possibillity of crossing cars, the interpretant is the new sign which is formed in me, the car driver, and which says: ”I have to stop” – and the ground of the sign is the fact that the other cars are only referred to with respect to their crossing my lane right now, not to their colour, owners or condition etc. • Peirce, Ch.S. 1994: Semiotik og pragmatisme, på dansk ved Lars Andersen, udg. af Anne Marie Dinesen og Frederik Stjernfelt, København: Samlerens Bogklub

13. Trafic light 2 • Alternative explanation (OT): • The red light (representamen) for the car driver stands for the thought processes’I have to stop’ (interpretant) because ’it is necessary to stop’ (to prevents collision) (the object), grounded on the fact that it is placed at a crossroads (the ground). • If the red light had been placed in the window of a brothel, it would have had the object ’The brothel is open’, and if it had been placed at a theater, it would have meant (had the object) ’house full’. It is only with respect to cars approaching a crossroads that the red light means ’STOP!’

14. Semiosis • "It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All dynamical action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects (whether they react equally upon each other, or one is agent and the other patient, entirely or partially) or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between pairs. But by "semiosis" I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a coöperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs." ('Pragmatism', EP 2:411, 1907)

15. Semiosis It is necessary to stop Red light I have to stop : - determines

16. Continous semiosis stopping prevents red light I have the car other cars collision to stop stops crossing External sign for the other external internal Sign sign

17. II. An alternative view • Definition: • A sign is an external representation of something.

18. Communication defined • 1. Linguistic communication is defined as an event in time in which the individual, manifest, linguistic acts of one person count as common latent thoughts of all the participants in a focussed gathering in a speech community. The act is individual, manifest and divisible, the the thoughts are common, latent and indivisible • The rules of language are rules for the count-as-relation between act (form) and thought (meaning) on a background. • How can actions in a sequence count as approximately the same thoughts for all the participants? That is the topic of linguistic investigation.

19. Dretske’s definition of representation • A representation is something that for someone indicates something other than it self, something which it is designed to indicate. Dretske 1995 side 2-3. • Representations can be • external representations, which are produced signs • intenal representations, which are not manifest, but latent mental models • but in both cases designed, signs by a designer, thoughts by evolution. • Mental representations can be devided into • perceptual representations [PR] • cognitive representation [CR] • A sign is an external representation of something

20. External representations = signs • External representations = signs • are characterized by (what is sometimes called intentionality): • salience • attention • meaning • collectivity

21. Salience No salience no sign salient marks = signs

22. Attention • Communication is defined as an event in time in which the individual, manifest acts of one person (or traces thereof) count as common latent thoughts of all the participants in a focussed gathering in a community. The form (manifest act) is individual, manifest and divisible, the meaning (the thoughts) is common, latent and indivisible. • Communication only takes place when the manifest acts are perceived by the audience in a focussed gathering, i.e. all parties focus on the same element in the situation, both auditory and visually.

23. Meaning • Meaning is the thoughts that sign acts give rise to, and which can be misleading because they are regulated by common rules. • Meaning of signs is latent, individual, but ”the same” in two or more minds, indivisible, and directed towards something other than it self. Meaning is the essential part of what is called intentionality.

24. Collectivity • In my view all these efforts to reduce collective intentionality to individual intentionality fail. Collective intentionality is a biological primitive phenomenon that cannot be reduced to or eliminated in favor of something else. Every attempt at reducing ”We intentionality” to “I intentionality” that I have seen is subject to counterexamples. • John R. Searle (1995) 1996: The Construction of Social Reality, London: Penguin Books p. 24.

25. Collectivity • Abstract: We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with others and unique forms of representation for doing so. The result of participating in these activities is species-unique forms of cultural cognition and evolution, enabling everything from the creation and use of linguistic symbols to the construction of social norms and individual beliefs to the establishment of social institutions. • Michal Tomasello, Malinda Carpenter, Josep nCall, Tanya Behne, and Henrike Moll: “Understanding and sharing intentions: The origin of cultural cognition” in Bahavioral and Brain Sciences (2005) 28, 675-735.

26. Peirce’s indexes are not signs • If a sign are defined as an external representation, Peirce’s inxes are not signs, but only causal events interpreted by an observer. Signs have to ”stand for” approximately the same each time, and for each observer. • The index a column of smoke can one day mean ’fire’, the next ’the direction of the wind’, the next again ’Now it is time for dinner’. • That is not a sign, but just indvidual thought processes. • But a weathercock is a sign, because it is designed to represent the wind direction.

27. Divisibility of the external sign • The external sign can always be divided into parts either in time (verbal texts), or in space (pictures). • The interpretation, the internal representation, is always one indivisible Gestalt. Forsiden på Klaus Rifbjerg 1963: Portræt

28. Divisibility of the linguistic act • 2. The form is divisible • The linguistic form (the individual manifest actions) is as all physical processes divisible: • A: - Do you come now? We shall eat. • B: - I’m trying to!

30. Indivisibility of consciousness • 3. Consciousness is indivisible • The meaning (the common thoughts in the individual minds) is indivisible. Thoughts make up one unit, both across sense modalities and time. Sense impressions from all the senses: visual, auditive, olfactory and tactile impressions form together one united consciousness, a so called Gestalt of the actual situation. One of the features of consciousness is the feeling of being a self, the same self from the earliest days one can remember to the present day. • Thoughts are always experienced as a figure on a ground which is seen in this example of “Rubins vase” (Gade 1997, 178); you can see two black profiles facing each other on a white background, or you can see a white vase on a black background; you can skip in the twinkling of an eye from one to the other, but you cannot se both of them at the same time.

31. Figure and ground • What comes from reality to the mind as a category, and what remains background when a human being perceives a situation? In reality there are countless differences; which differences form the borderline between figure and ground, and which differences do not? With a concise formulation: only the differences that make a difference come from the landscape to the map (Bateson 1970) ) that means the differences associated with interests, needs and desires of a living organism. In their consciousness human beings organize the single parts of their impressions according to their function in the whole, the figure of which is associated with their needs and desires. You see the duck if you are going to feed ducks, and the rabbit if you trade in fur.

32. To see something as something • On this picture from Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein 1958 , II - XI ) you see the figure either as a duck looking to the left, or as a rabbit looking to the right, you can skip between them, but you cannot see them both at the same time. Physically it is nothing but printing ink on a piece of paper; it is only in my mind, and in your mind that the drawn line is recognised as a rabbit or a duck. The same hold for real ducks and rabbits. In the real world they are individuals, only in the mind of someone (a human being or some other animal) they belong the categories of ducks and rabbits. By the category or concept we synthesize all the sense impressions into one mental unit. Some categories synthesize parts or traits separated in time, categories like ‘situation’, ‘event’ and ‘life’.

33. A taxonomy of signs External phenomena (indexes)

34. Elements in the picture sign situation Portræt malet 1719 af Balthasar Denner. Det hænger nu på Frederiksborgmuseet. Maleriet er siden 1882 reproduceret på tændstiksæskerne fra H.E.Gosh & Co.

35. Pictures are interpreted as sign units. (1) Pictures are interpreted functionally, i.e. top down. (2) Pictures are designed to have resemblance with their object (3) Pictures are sense specific (vision). (4) Pictures are expositions in space. (5) Pictures have semantic likeness with their object. Texts are interpreted as articulated signs. (1) Texts are interpreted both compositionally, i.e. bottom up, and functionally, i.e. top down. (2) Texts are conventionally different from their objects (3) Texts are not sense specific, but conceptual. (4) Texts are statements about time. (5) Texts have syntactic truth value in relation to their object. Pictures and verbal texts

36. FunctionalityTop down interpretation • Here are two strokes But as part of a whole it is two eyes

37. FunctionalityTop down interpretation • And if the whole changes, the eyes changes from beeing glad to being sour.

38. Compositionality and functionality • Meningen med teksten ”PAS PÅ – BØRN” er bestemt ved kompositionalitet (summen af meningen med delene og måden de er kombineret på): passe på means ’be carefull with’ eller ’ be on one's guard against’, bydeformen betyder ’at det er noget du’et skal gøre’, og barn betyder ’person under 13 år’. Sætningen kan derfor betyde ’vær vagtsom over for personer under 13’. Meningen med teksten er også bestemt ved funktionalitet; når det er et vejskilt, er betydningen af pas på nok snarere ’vær forsigtig’, og børn er nok snarere en nominalsætning end et objekt, og betyder: ’der leger måske børn på vejen’.

39. Types of signs

40. Linguistic meaning • 4. Linguistic meaning is shared meaning • Like other forms of consciousness linguistic meaning is indivisible, organized with a figure on a ground, a figure under aspectual shape. But while consciousness normally is a gestalt which represents the things and events in the world that cause the sense impressions, linguistic meaning is representating something totally different from the events in the world that cause the impressions. • The fundamental fact about language is that it is a means by which people share their thoughts with each other. (The word transfer is not the proper word in this connection; when I transfer money to you, I’ll not have the money any more, but when I share my thoughts with you, I’ll still have my thoughts, even after you have understood them.) To learn language is to learn how to mean. So language is also a means to mean, a medium for thoughts.

42. The situation of communication (Sc) causes (physically and biologically) (notation: ' →’) a thought in the mind of the interlocutors; they perceive the situation and take the utterance of the speaker (U) as the figure against the background of the participants, and the whole setting. This utterance act counts as (notation =>) a thought (T) directed towards (intentionally referring to and designating) (notation: ←) the situation referred to (Sr), because it has the linguistic community and the situation of communication as common background (notation '[ ... ]B’ ). It can be stated in one formula (Togeby 2003, § 10): • Sc → [U => (T ← Sr )]B.

43. Sc → [U => (T ← Sr )]B. • Sc → [U => (T ← Sr )]B. • The relation of intentional reference and designation has a notation (←), which is the mirror image of notation of causation (→) because the thought that the utterance counts as, has as its referent an event that could have caused the same thought by sense impressions. When the witch tells the soldier about the dog on the chest he gets the same image in his head, as he gets when he later in fact climbs down in the tree, opens the door and stands face to face with the dog. It is what Searle calls causal reflexivity (Searle 1983).

44. The logical layers of communication • An utterance functions in many levels simultaneously, a theory originally formulated by Austin in his book How To Do Things With Words (1975). The fact that the witch convinces the soldier that he can get rid of the dog by setting it on her apron although it is big, is called the perlocutionary act. The fact that her utterance counts as a prediction about the future as part of an instruction, and not as a fairy tale about monsters in the underground, is called the illocutionary act. The fact that she is able to get him understand and imagine the propositional content of the true sentence, viz. that down in the tree in the possible future he will see that big dog sitting on the chest in the first room, is called the rhetic act, and her designating a 'chest’ and a 'dog’, and her predicating that the latter sits on the former, is called the phatic act. The rhetic and phatic acts are possible only because she performs the phonetic acts of pronouncing sounds that are identified as linguistic phonemes.

45. The logical layers of communication • On all five levels we see this mechanism that a physical token counts as a timeless type: a phone counts as a phoneme, a morph counts as a morpheme, a sentence counts as a proposition, a set of connected sentences counts as a text or a speech act, and speech acts count as moves in a social interaction. • Normally phonology is not part of sentence grammar. In functional grammar the sentence is thus described as having four different functions or types of meaning: the conceptual meaning on the phatic level, the propositional meaning on the rhetic level, the textual function on the illocutionary level, and the interactional function on the perlocutionary level.

46. The logical layers of communication

47. Types of meaning • In the mind of the communicators the conceptual meaning is the figure against the background of propositional meaning; the propositional meaning has the textual (informational) message as its background, and the message has the interaction as its setting. So the meaning of a text uttered in a situation is like a Chinese nest of boxes with one type of meaning as the figure against the background of the next type of meaning:

48. Types of meaning

49. Types of meaning • In the mind of the communicators the conceptual meaning is the figure against the background of propositional meaning; the propositional meaning has the textual (informational) message as its background, and the message has the interaction as its setting. So the meaning of a text uttered in a situation is like a Chinese nest of boxes with one type of meaning as the figure against the background of the next type of meaning:

50. 7. The count-as mechanism • The count-as mechanism ( [ U => T]B makes raw, individual physical behaviour into intentional common thought (i.e. directed towards the same situation talked about). Intentional phenomena, such as beliefs and desires, are representations of something external to the mind in which they occur, representations that are common for many minds in the sense that they refer to the same things outside the minds, provided that the bearers of the minds belong to the same speech community. So the count-as mechanism (Searle 1995) only works against the background of a situation of joint activities and a speech community (shaded areas):