Semiotics

Semiotics in History

Semiotics, although a fairly new field, nonetheless has quite a substantial history. The Stoics were the first to explore sign relations. While little is known of their logic per se, it is known that they were interested in mediated and unmediated relationships, and how they varied.

There was also an extensive semiotic presence in Christendom, from its earliest roots through the Middle Ages. St. Augustine in particular was quite interested in the action of signs. He is one of the first thinkers to draw a distinction between natural signs and conventional signs. Natural signs, for Augustine, were those signs that occurred in the world. Such things as footprints (signs of someone walking around) and smoke (as a sign of fire) are natural signs. Conventional signs are those things that are signs because they function as such within culture. Words are conventional signs, and so are red octagons on poles telling people to STOP.

Language and other conventional signs were important topics of inquiry among many medieval thinkers. One important debate was over the nature of names. Did names indicate the presence of universal properties, or were they merely labels? Also, there [Page 807]was quite an extended discussion over what sort of system constituted a language. Human speech was accepted as a language, of course, but what about the barking of dogs? Did a language have to do more than just communicate to be a language? These debates helped form some of the most important questions in contemporary semiotic theory and research.

It is not until we reach the 20th century, however, that we have an explicit formal doctrine of semiotics. Interestingly enough, though, it turns out that there were two independent doctrines of semiotics formed at roughly the same time. The first branch, which we also sometimes call semiology, was born in the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. The second branch was formed in the United States by logician and philosopher Charles Peirce. We will look at each approach in turn.

Semiotics as Language

Saussure was a revolutionary linguist who died in 1913 at an early age. Because of his early demise, he left no systematic treatise of his work. Therefore, his students, in tribute to him, pooled together their class notes to create his Course in General Linguistics. This work served as the basis for the development of his model of semiotics.

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