Re-Thinking the Place of Semiotics in Psychology... 101psychology is to investigate and explain human behaviour and mental life, we might ask how
psychology could so much as get by, let alone expect to make good progress, without
attending to the human semiosphere.
Semiotics, on the other hand, has been regarded as both a subject area and a method. As a
subject area, it is typically defined as the science of signs, or, more broadly, as the field of
inquiry devoted to signs, symbols and signifying systems. As a method, it is concerned with
the revelation and interpretation of anything that can be regarded as indicative or
communicative code or text; to approach something semiotically is to treat it as text to be
interpreted. With roots in classical rhetoric, mediaeval scholasticism and British empiricism,
modern semiotics has been shaped by the work of such diverse thinkers as Peirce, Saussure,
Carnap, Jakobson, Hjelmslev, Morris, Sebeok and Eco. In the semiotic literature there are
many different definitions and classifications of signs and symbols (e.g., Alston, 1967;
Bertalanffy, 1965; Eco, 1973, 1976; Hawkes, 1977; Langer, 1942; Morris, 1946; Peirce,
1932; Sapir, 1959; Saussure, 1916/1983; Skorupski, 1976). Although Saussure's aim was to
mark out a separate domain for linguistics, he nevertheless admitted (albeit somewhat
grudgingly) that linguistics was "only one branch" of a general field of semiology
(semiologie) which "would be part of social psychology" (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 33), and,
thereby, part of general psychology. Consistent with this recognition of psychology, Charles
Peirce, the American "founder" of semiotics, defined the genus sign (itself divisible into the
species icon, index and symbol) as "something that stands to somebody for something in some
respect or capacity" (1932, 2.228, emphasis added). This definition brings something's
relation to a person into the definition of a sign and, hence, into the field of semiotics. If a
person is a necessary part of signification, it would seem reasonable to expect the
psychological (cognitive, motivational, etc.) aspects of that person to be relevant to our
understanding of semiotic phenomena.^2 We might then ask whether semiotics, in turn, could
flourish without psychology.
Thus, psychology and semiotics appear to need each other. Yet, despite promising
beginnings, for most of the last century the two disciplines have remained apart, their
relationship characterised by a mixture of mutual neglect, suspicion, or even outright
hostility.
In this paper, I am concerned largely with one side of this relation - with the view from
the perspective of mainstream psychology.^3 The paper is divided into two sections. In the first
section, I begin by considering four reasons why psychology has neglected semiotics. I then
discuss how those reasons are still hampering psychology in the face of recent attempts to
promote integration with semiotics, how they help to explain why the integration attempts
have met with only mixed success, and why so little of that work has filtered through to
mainstream psychology and its research programs. In the second section of the paper, I offer a
way forward by taking seriously psychology's explicit (but often faltering) commitment to
realism. I outline briefly what that would entail, and then show how it clears the way for a
(^2) Of course, as will become clear later, semiotic phenomena do not all require equal attention to the psychology of
the person; rather, a sliding scale of relevance is involved (i.e., the fact of convention reduces the relevance of
the person, whereas in nonconventional forms of semiosis the psychology of the person is crucial).
(^3) Even so, as Milic (2008) has argued recently, it is "safe to say that the neglect of psychology in the field of
semiotics is even greater than the neglect of semiotics in the field of psychology" (p. 134). And, as will
become clear later in the discussion, exactly why this is so contributes to psychology's reciprocal rejection of
semiotics.