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SIGNS AND THINGS

While semiotics is often encountered in the form of textual analysis, there is far more to semiotics than this. Indeed, one cannot engage in the semiotic study of how meanings are made in texts and cultural  practices without adopting a philosophical stance in relation to the nature of signs, representation and reality. We have already seen how the Saussurean and Peircean models of the sign have different philo sophical implications. For those who adopt the stance that reality always involves representation and that signs are involved in the construction of reality, semiotics is unavoidably a form of philos ophy. No semiotician or philosopher would be so naïve as to treat signs such as words as if they were the things for which they stand, but as we shall see, this occurs at least sometimes in the psycho logical phenomenology of everyday life and in the uncritical framework of casual discourse.

6 0 SEMIOTICS: THE BASICS

NAMING THINGS

To semioticians, a defining feature of signs is that they are treated by their users as ‘standing for’ or representing other things. Jonathan Swift’s satirical account of the fictional academicians of Lagado outlined their proposal to abolish words altogether, and to carry around bundles of objects whenever they wanted to communicate. This highlights problems with the simplistic notion of signs being direct substitutes for physical things in the world around us. The academicians adopted the philosophical stance of naïve realism in assuming that words simply mirror objects in an external world.  They believed that ‘words are only names for things’, a stance involving the assumption that ‘things’ necessarily exist independently of language prior to them being ‘labelled’ with words. According to this position there is a one-to-one correspondence between word and referent (sometimes called language–world isomorphism), and language is simply a nomenclature – an item-by-item naming of things in the world. Saussure felt that this was ‘the superficial view taken by the general public’ (Saussure 1983, 16, 65).

Within the lexicon of a language, it is true that most of the words are ‘lexical words’ (or nouns) which refer to ‘things’, but most of these things are abstract concepts rather than physical objects  in the world. Only ‘proper nouns’ have specific referents in the everyday world, and only some of these refer to a unique entity (e.g. Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch – the name of a Welsh village). Even proper names are not specific as they are imagined to be: for instance, a reference to ‘Charles Sanders Peirce’ begs questions such as ‘Peirce at what date?’, ‘Peirce as a philosopher or in some other role?’ or even ‘whose Peirce?’ (e.g. ‘Jakobson’s Peirce’?) Perhaps I should now hesitate to attribute to Peirce the observation that ‘a symbol . . . cannot indicate any partic ular thing; it denotes a kind of thing’ (Peirce 1931–58, 2.301; my emphasis). The communicative function of a fully functioning language requires the scope of reference to move beyond the partic ularity of the individual instance. While each leaf, cloud or smile is different from all others, effective communication requires general categories or ‘universals’. Anyone who has attempted to communicate with people who do not share their language will be familiar with the limitations of simply pointing to things. You can’t point to ‘mind’, ‘culture’ or ‘history’; these are not ‘things’ at all. The vast majority of lexical words in a language exist on a high level of abstraction and refer to classes of things (such as ‘buildings’) or to concepts (such as ‘construction’). Language depends on categorization, but as soon as we group instances into classes (tokens into types), we lose any one-to-one correspondence of word and thing (if by ‘things’ we mean specific objects). Furthermore, other than lexical words, the remaining elements of the lexicon of a language consist of ‘func tion words’ (or grammatical words, such as ‘only’ and ‘under’) which do not refer to objects in the world at all. The lexicon of a language consists of many kinds of signs other than nouns. Clearly, language cannot be reduced to the naming of objects.

The less naïve realists might note at this point that words do not necessarily name only physical things which exist in an objec tive material world but may also label imaginary things and also concepts. Peirce’s referent, for instance, is not limited to things which exist in the physical world. However, as Saussure noted, the notion of words as labels for concepts ‘assumes that ideas exist indepen dently of words’ (Saussure 1983, 65), and for him, ‘no ideas are established in advance . . . before the introduction of linguistic struc ture’ (ibid., 110; cf. 114–15, 118). It remains a rationalist and ‘nomenclaturist’ stance on language when words are seen as ‘labels’ for pre-existing ideas as well as for physical objects. It is reduc tionist: reducing language to the purely referential function of naming things. When we use language, its various kinds of signs relate to each other in complex ways which make nonsense of the reduction of language to a nomenclature. Referentiality may be a function of language but it is only one of its functions.

A radical response to realists is that things do not exist inde pendently of the sign-systems that we use; reality is created by the media which seem simply to represent it. Language does not simply name pre-existing categories; categories do not exist in ‘the world’ (where are the boundaries of a cloud or when does a smile begin?). We may acknowledge the cautionary remarks of John Lyons, that such an emphasis on reality as invariably perceptually seamless may be an exaggeration. Lyons speculates that ‘most of the phenomenal world, as we perceive it, is not an undifferentiated continuum’; and our referential categories do seem to bear some relationship to certain features which seem to be inherently salient (Lyons 1977, 247; my emphasis; cf. ibid., 260). In support of this caveat, we may note that the Gestalt psychologists reported a universal human tendency to separate a salient figure from what the viewer relegates to the (back)ground. However, such observations clearly do not demon strate that the lexical structure of language reflects the structure of an external reality. As Saussure noted, if words were simply a nomen clature for a pre-existing set of things in the world, translation from one language to another would be easy (Saussure 1983, 114–15) whereas in fact languages differ in how they categorize the world – the signifieds in one language do not neatly correspond to those in another. Within a language, many words may refer to ‘the same thing’ but reflect different evaluations of it (one person’s ‘hovel’ is another person’s ‘home’). Furthermore, what is signified by a word is subject to historical change. In this sense, reality or the world is created by the language we use: this argument insists on the primacy of the signifier. Even if we do not adopt the radical stance that the real world is a product of our sign-systems, we must still acknowledge that there are many things in the experiential world for which we have no words and that most words do not correspond to objects in the known world at all. Thus, all words are abstractions, and there is no direct correspondence between words and things in the world.

REFERENTIALITY

Saussure’s model of the sign involves no direct reference to reality outside the sign. This was not a denial of extralinguistic reality as such but a reflection of his understanding of his own role as a lin guist. Saussure accepted that in most scientific disciplines the ‘objects of study’ were ‘given in advance’ and existed independently of the observer’s ‘point of view’. However, he stressed that in linguistics, by contrast, ‘it is the viewpoint adopted which creates the object’ (Saussure 1983, 8). While such a statement might go without com ment in a discipline with an acknowledged self-sufficiency (such as