100 Agnes Petocz
INTRODUCTION: THE PSYCHOLOGY-SEMIOTICS INTERFACE
Ask a mainstream psychological researcher whether psychology would benefit from a
closer integration with semiotics, and the response is likely to be either "What's semiotics?"
or "You must be joking; our science has no place for postmodernist gobbledegook".^1
Yet, given the nature of the overlapping content in the fields of psychology and
semiotics, we might reasonably expect to find not just a close relationship between the two,
but a kind of symbiosis, where each contributes to the support of the other and neither can
flourish alone.
Although the definition of psychology has varied in accordance with intellectual fashions,
psychology today is typically defined as the scientific investigation of human behaviour and
mental life. Contemporary psychologists would nevertheless accept two well-known ancient
characterisations of the human being, namely, animal politicum (a community-living
creature) and animal rationale (a creature capable of reason). These characterisations are the
foundations of social and cognitive psychology respectively. The linguistic turn of the
twentieth century, culminating in delayed assimilation to an evolutionary perspective, brought
a third characterisation: the human being is also animal symbolicum (Cassirer, 1944), the
symbolic species (Deacon, 1997) - a creature which has evolved to produce, use, and often be
dominated by, signs and symbols. It is true that other animals engage in various forms of
communication and sign-use. But humans stand apart with respect to the size and complexity
of what has been termed their semiosphere (Lotman, 1984/2005). This domain includes not
only instinctive forms of communication and the signs and signals of the natural environment,
but also the humanly-created network of symbols, signifying systems, and symbolic forms of
interaction which become part of the fabric of social, cognitive, motivational and emotional
life.
Semiotic phenomena are found in almost every area of psychology. To begin with, there
is the brain‘s supposed internal symbolic processing that, within the long-dominant
information-processing paradigm, is held to underlie all mental activity (cf. Bechtel &
Abrahamsen, 1991; Bickhard, 1996; Billman, 1998). This has led to the claim that semiosis is
a sine qua non of human cognition and, therefore, the central concern of the cognitive
sciences (e.g., Langer, 1942; Smith, 2001). Aside from this, there are all the manifestations of
what Piaget (1966) described as the general semiotic or symbolic function (e.g., language,
logical notation, conventional systems of knowledge representation for electronic devices and
human/computer interfaces, non-verbal forms of communication, meaningful associations in
perception, learning, attention and memory, the signs and symbols employed in art, music and
literature, and the forms of symbolic interaction and ritual in social and group behaviour,
including cross-cultural practices). Then there is the concern in personality, clinical and
abnormal psychology with individual differences and patterns of breakdown in the ability to
process language, symbols, signs, metaphors, and communicative intentions. Finally, there
are the more controversial spontaneous productions of dreams, art, fantasies,
psychopathology, and so on. Therefore, given that semiotic phenomena comprise a substantial
part of the content of psychology's traditional component areas, and given that the aim of
(^1) These, in fact, are responses that I did receive when I conducted a brief informal survey in my own Department -
although, typically, postgraduate students gave the first response and more seasoned academics variations on
the second.