Meaning

The word meaning denotes an association between at least two semiotic elements: (1) something that expresses or represents something else, and (2) something that is expressed or represented. Following Ferdinand de Saussure, structuralist semioticians call (1) above a signifier, and (2) a signified, and their unity a sign. Within structuralist perspectives, meaning is often seen as arbitrary. For example, although it is known that the word dog refers to quadrupeds of the canine family whereas the word cat refers to their feline counterparts, any other words or combinations of sounds—such as chien and chat in the French language—can function equally well as long as their use becomes commonly shared. Although most signifiers stand in arbitrary relationships with their signifieds, structuralist theories posit that meanings are generated by complex systems of signification based on formal and abstract rules. These rules give birth to meaning by creating structures of opposition. Thus, for example, one understands the meaning of the word white in association with, and in opposition to, the meaning of the word black. Theoretical perspectives derived from structuralist semiotics, such as the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the social theory of Louis Althusser, and the psychology of Jacques Lacan, tend to view meaning as relatively stable across time, relatively fixed in the deep structures of language and culture, and relatively independent of individual instances of situated speech.

Even though structuralist theories of meaning have been dominant in the social and cultural sciences, over the past 3 decades their hegemony has been considerably weakened by the advent of post- structuralism (which emphasizes polysemy—or the multiplicity of meaning—and the power of interpretation) and the renewed interest in pragmatism. Together with pragmatism and some versions of post- structuralism (like social semiotics and the cultural theory of Michel Foucault and Mikhail Bakhtin), phenomenological, hermeneutic, pragmatist, and [Page 501]constructionist perspectives tend to differ from structural theories of meaning in important ways. From within these perspectives, following the work of semi-oticians like Charles Sanders Peirce, one can understand meaning to be emerging from a triadic relation between an object, a sign vehicle that expresses that object, and the sense that someone makes of this association. Because interpretation is always situated in contexts defined by historical, ideological, economic, spatial, and technological boundaries as well as embodied in social beings, the concept of meaning here takes on more dynamic features. For example, within pragmatism and symbolic interactionism, meaning lies in the response to an act; within phenomenology, meaning originates in the lived experience of being in the world; and within hermeneutic perspectives, meaning arises from awareness of contexts and the dialectical relationships between contexts and texts. Supporters of these perspectives—despite their subtle differences in emphasis—tend to agree that meaning is actively constructed and renegotiated by social agents interacting with one another. Meaning is thus relative, open to interpretive freedom, and transformation; meaning varies across contexts, groups, and instances of speech.