Re-Thinking the Place of Semiotics in Psychology... 105instrumentalism which, despite widespread misunderstanding, is actually antirealist (cf.
Friedman, 1991, 1999; Hibberd, 2005). As a result, for example, psychology's measurement
and data-analytic practices are at odds with the realism of the sciences that it wishes to
emulate (Gigerenzer, 1987; Grayson, 1988, 1998; Michell, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2009a,
2009b; Rosnow & Rosenthal, 1989). Similarly, despite explicit commitment to realism,
psychology's establishment position of cognitive/neuroscientific experimentalism adheres to
the antirealist "crypto-Cartesian" representationism and mind/brain dualism (Bennett &
Hacker, 2003) of the information-processing view of mind, and this is widely accepted by the
metatheoretically unreflective majority across other areas in psychology (Mackay & Petocz,
in press [a]).
The upshot is that psychology's combination of scientific practicalism and
metatheoretical confusion reinforces the science/meaning divide to which psychology has
long subscribed, and keeps psychology segregated from the type of theoretical discussion and
logical analysis of meaning that would reveal not only the relevance and importance of
meaning systems but also the possibility of an objective scientific investigation of semiotic
phenomena.
The View that Semiotics is Wedded to Ideologies Opposed to
Scientific Realism
The third reason for psychology's negative attitude towards semiotics relates to
psychology's perception of semiotics as being inextricably wedded to ideologies and
philosophical positions that are opposed to the empirical realism of the scientific approach.
For mainstream psychologists, the very term "semiotics" is associated with the postmodernist
wave in the social sciences, which they consider to have little to offer, and much to obfuscate,
attempts to pursue an objective, rigorous scientific investigation of mind and behaviour.
There is no doubt that this perception of semiotics is largely accurate, and that semiotics
itself has contributed to psychology's perception. What is not accurate, as I shall soon discuss,
is the perception that semiotics cannot be extricated. But the greater part of the semiotic
literature, whether dealing with semiotics as a subject area or semiotics as a method, is indeed
shot through with antirealist and antiscientific philosophical and ideological pronouncements.
As a subject area, semiotics became heavily imbued with French linguistic structuralist
and post-structuralist ideas, which were largely a resurrection of earlier idealist, relativist and
constructivist strands of philosophy. In terms of antirealism, it is particularly the signified that
is targeted, while there exists a kind of cult of the signifier, which elevates it to a position of
primacy, such that it is the signifier that produces the signification. Realism and naturalism
(in the sense that whatever the signifier is about must be grounded in reality) are dismissed as
the unjustified "presumption of innocence". Instead, it is proclaimed, the critical semiotic
revolution "frees the sign from its subservience to the 'reality' (or presence) which it was
supposed to serve" (Hawkes, 1977, p. 149), for "the world we inhabit is not one of 'facts' but
of signs about facts which we encode and decode ceaselessly from system to system" (p.
122). Thus, every signified turns out to be yet another signifier, in an endless process known
as the "semiotic circle".
As a critical method, semiotics became popular in the social sciences in the latter half of
the twentieth century, in alliance with other modern and postmodern movements (e.g., post-