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These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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Semiotics: Signs and
Messages Semiotics provides a
different perspective to study the nature and origin of language. Semiotics, founded in the
1940s by the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev, had two important precursors in the US philosophers Charles Peirce(whose writings were
rediscovered only in the 1930s) and Charles Morris(who in 1938 had formalized a
theory of signs). Peircereduced all human knowledge to
the idea of sign and identified three different kinds of signs: the index (a
sign which bears a causal relation with its referent); the icon (which bears a
relation of similarity with its referent); and the symbol (whose relation with
its referent is purely conventional). For example, the flag of a sporting team
is a symbol, while a photograph of the team is an icon. Movies often make use of
indexes: ashes burning in an ashtray mean that someone was recently in the
room, and clouds looming on the horizon mean it is about to rain. Most of the
words that we use are symbols, because they are conventional signs referring to
objects. Morris defined the
disciplines that study language according to the roles played by signs. Syntax
studies the relation between signs and signs (as in the is an article,
meaning is a noun, of is a preposition, etc.). Semantics studies the
relation between signs and objects (Piero is a writer means that somebody
whose name is Piero writes books). Finally, Pragmatics studies the relation
between signs, objects and users (the sentence Piero is a writer may have
been uttered to correct somebody who said that Piero is a carpenter). The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussureintroduced the dualism of signifier (the word actually uttered)
and the signified (the mental concept). ("Semiology" usually refers
to the Saussure-an tradition, whereas "semiotics" refers to the
Peirce-an tradition. Semiotics, as opposed to Semiology, is the study of all
signs). The Argentine semiotician
Luis Prietostudied signs, in particular, as means of communication. For example,
the Braille alphabet and traffic signs are signs used to communicate. A code
is a set of symbols (the alphabet) and a set of rules (the grammar). The
code relates a system of expressions to a set of contents. A message is a set of symbols of the
alphabet that has been ordered according to the rules of the grammar. This is a
powerful generalization: language turns out to be only a particular case of
communication. A sentence can be reduced to a process of encoding (by the
speaker) and decoding (by the listener). The Hungarian linguist
Thomas Sebeokviews semiotics as a branch of communication theory that studies
messages, whether emitted by objects (such as machines) or animals or humans.
In agreement with Ren Thom, Sebeok thinks that human sign behavior has nothing special that can
distinguish it from animal sign behavior or even from the behavior of inanimate
matter. The Canadian neuropsychologist Merlin Donaldspeculated on how the human
mind developed. He argued that at the beginning there was only episodic
thinking: early hominids could only remember and think about episodes. Later,
they learned how to communicate and then they learned how to build narratives.
Symbolic thinking came last. Based on this scenario, the Danish semiotician
Jesper Hoffmeyerdrew his own conclusions: in
the beginning there were stories, and then, little by little, individual words
rose out of them. Which implies that language is fundamentally narrative in
nature; that language is corporeal, has to do with motor-based behavior; and
that the unit of communication among animals is the whole message, not the
word. Hoffmeyerintroduced the concept of
"semiosphere", the semiotic equivalent of the atmosphere and the
biosphere that incorporates all forms of communication, from smells to waves:
all signs of life. Every living organism must adapt to its semiosphere or die.
At all levels, life must be viewed as a network of sign processes. The very
reason for evolution is death: since organisms cannot survive in the physical
sense they must survive in the semiotic sense, i.e. by making copies of
themselves. "Heredity is semiotic survival". Rene' Thom, the French mathematician who invented catastrophe theory, aimed to
"geometrize thought and language". Thomwas envisioning a Physics of
meaning, of significant form, which he called "Semiophysics". Following in this
generalization of signs, James Fetzer(Signs and Minds, 1988) even
argued in favor of extending Newelland Simons theory to signs: the mind not as a processor of symbols, but as a
processor of signs. Back to the beginning of the chapter "The History of Language: Why We Speak" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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