We explain what semiotics is, its origin and what the semiotic function is. Also, examples and their relationship with semiology.
What is semiotics?
It is called semiotics or semiology (depending on the academic perspective) to the science derived from philosophy, which is dedicated to the study of systems of communication within the societies human. It can be defined in general as the science that studies the signs of human communication (semiosis).
As we will see later, semiotics is a new science, but of ancient history, often understood as a "Theory of Meaning", that is, an attempt to scientifically understand the capacity of the human being to construct signs, that is, to handle and construct different idioms.
However, there are those who consider semiotics as a meta-science, since it is at the same time a science in itself, and a tool for studying other fields of scientific knowledge, always starting from their respective signs or languages.
A key concept to understand semiotics is semiosis, understood as the creation of meaning from the use of signs of some kind, as long as the latter are interpretable in the mind of the person who receives or reads them. Thus, according to traditional semiotics, all semiosis, that is, all signification, involves three different instances:
- An object to represent, which belongs to the order of the reality (concrete or abstract).
- A sign that represents him, called represent and that it replaces it in its absence (that is: when I read "stone", I do not have the stone in my hand, but the word in my mouth).
- An interpretant that is capable of rescuing the reference to the object from the sign it receives.
Origin of semiotics
The name of semiotics comes from the Greek semenion ("Sign"), and was coined by the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704). However, it already existed in certain scientific fields, such as the medical one, in which it was used more or less as synonymous from diagnosis, that is, as the interpretation of the signs that a disease causes in the human body.
The latter is due, in part, to the fact that human interest in signs and meaning date back to ancient times in the history of the species. The heritage of philosophers such as Plato (c. 427-347 BC), Aristotle (384-322 BC), and later medieval thinkers was very important to the founding of semiotics.
One of its precursors was the American philosopher Charles Peirce (1839-1914), who baptized it as Semiotic: "the doctrine causi-necessary or formal of the signs ”. Initially, it was a discipline linked to the linguistics.
However, important thinkers of the discipline such as the Italian Umberto Eco (1932-2016) believe that the roots of semiotics were already in the treatises of most of the great thinkers of the Western tradition.
Semiotic function
In psychology, the semiotic function or symbolic function is the ability of the human brain to form signs, developed according to the theories of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) from the age of two, at the beginning of the preoperative intelligence period.
Piaget describes this function as the possibility of evoking absent meanings, be they events, objects or relationships, from the construction of signs, that is, of differentiated signifiers.
In other words, it is about the function that allows the human brain to work with signs, that is, to build gestures, symbols or resources that refer to a specific reference that is absent at the moment, but that is evoked through the resource of the language.
Semiotics and Semiology
The terms semiotics and semiology are considered more or less synonymous, especially since in 1969 the International Association of Semiology, meeting in Caracas, Venezuela, chose to use the term semiotics to prevent confusions. This is because each term comes from a separate academic history: the French that speaks of semotique, and the Anglo-Saxon who talks about semiology.
Examples of semiotics
Semiotics as a discipline is applied in numerous fields of knowledge, thus giving rise to applied forms, which serve as examples of semiosis:
- Medical or clinical semiotics, which focuses on the study, classification and recognition of the signs that the disease leaves in the patient's body.
- Musical semiotics, which studies the signs of conventional representation of the language of the music, such as scores and internal structures.
- Semiotics computing or computational, which is dedicated to the study of the types of signs created in the framework of artificial languages, such as computer codes and programming languages.
- Social semiotics, which attempts to study the functioning of signs in the framework of society, without ignoring the human and subjective elements that, on the other hand, are ignored by a linguistic perspective.
- Visual semiotics, which exclusively studies the interpretation of images, Photographs and other strictly visual readings of reality.