How we learn our cultural codes is not very well understood, and not something we can go into in this introductory course. There is thus a strong impetus for its members to acquire this communication system. Our thoughts are more private, inaccessible. Things, words and actions seem more REAL . In semiological terms, the manifest level consists of signs which signify something else.
Signs are things embodying concepts .
Altogether, culture may be seen as a vast number of signs, not independent of one another, but existing in relationship to one another in a structured symbolic code. We might go on, as Pierce did, to distinguish different kinds of relationships between signifiers and the signified. Or see greater complexity to the relationship, as Barthes has, in distinguishing between a sign's denotation and its potentially large range of connotations, depending on our life's experience. Of course we don't do culture or learn culture by using semiotic analysis. However, just as we might want to understand the material world better through chemistry, semiology gives us the means to understand the world of culture and communication.