Semiotics

In: Semiotics: Theory and Applications ISBN: 978-1-61728-992-7
Editors: Steven C. Hamel ©2011 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 4

RE-THINKING THE PLACE OF SEMIOTICS IN

PSYCHOLOGY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR

PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Agnes Petocz*

University of Western Sydney, Australia

ABSTRACT

The fields of semiotics and psychology overlap to such an extent that it seems

impossible for either to flourish alone. Yet their relationship has been one largely of

mutual neglect or hostility. Mainstream psychology's negative attitude towards semiotics

can be attributed to four interrelated factors: psychology's subscription to the

science/meaning divide; psychology's combination of scientific practicalism and

metatheoretical confusion; the view that semiotics is inextricably wedded to ideologies

opposed to scientific realism; and the view that semiotics has little concern with the sign

user. These factors help to explain why recent attempts at semiotics-psychology

rapprochement have met with mixed success, and why so little of that work has filtered

through to mainstream scientific psychology and its research programs. A solution lies in

taking seriously psychology's explicit (but sometimes faltering) commitment to realism.

Within a coherent realist framework, integrating semiotics with psychology offers a

number of contributions to mainstream psychological research, the most salient of which

are: clarifying the irreducible tripartite relational nature of meaning; extricating the

legitimate concerns of representation in the information sciences from incoherent

epistemological representationism; applying the Peircean distinctions between different

types of sign (viz. icon, index, and symbol) to solve problems in information

representation research; using iconicity as the bridge between conceptual metaphor and

nonconventional symbolic phenomena; and promoting increased methodological

sophistication by underscoring the scientific legitimacy of nonquantitative methods.

• Address for correspondence: Dr Agnes Petocz, School of Psychology, University of Western Sydney –
  Bankstown, Locked Bag 1797, South Penrith DC NSW 1797, Australia, Email:[email protected] ,
  Phone:(+612) 9772 6624, Fax:(+612) 9772 6757