Semiotics

Re-Thinking the Place of Semiotics in Psychology... 107

resulted in the semiotic separation and appropriation of the subject position from the
psychology or nature of that subject. Although there are three elements in Peirce's definition
of a sign (i.e., the signifier, the signified and the interpretant), Peirce does not clearly and
unequivocally identify the third term, the interpretant, with the person, as we might expect,
and his treatment of that third term lends itself to idealist interpretations which contribute to
the elision of the subject. In semiotics, then, the Augustinian dubito, the Cartesian cogito, and
the Freudian desidero (cf. Lacan, 1973/1977) are replaced by "one, and perhaps only one,
common principle, and that is the principle of scribo, ergo sum. I produce texts, therefore I
am, and to some extent I am the texts that I produce (Scholes, 1982, pp. 3-4). In the jargon of
deconstructionism, there is nothing beyond the text.
To summarise, the third and fourth reasons for psychology's neglect of semiotics combine
to present a picture of semiotics which, while largely accurate, reinforces scientific
psychology's suspicion and hostility. The treatment of the signified as yet another signifier
sits comfortably with the antirealist metatheoretical strands within semiotics of relativism,
idealism and constructivism. And the eclipse of the sign user has contributed to the formalist
trend of semiotics and to its apparent irrelevance to the concerns of psychology.

SIGNS OF CHANGE AND ATTEMPTS TO BRING

SEMIOTICS INTO PSYCHOLOGY

But the climate has begun to change. For the last couple of decades, psychological
approaches have been increasingly characterised by expansion and integration, involving
large-scale attempts to unite hitherto fragmented sub-domains, while also looking beyond
psychology to embrace related disciplines.
To begin with, mainstream cognitive science is ―entering a period of quite dramatic
reconstruction‖ (Wheeler, 2005, p. 6). The recognition that there is ―hot‖ cognition in
addition to ―cold‖ cognition, i.e., that cognition is intimately connected to motivation,
emotion and bodily experience (cf. Westen, 1998) has led to the embodied cognition
movement (e.g., Deary, 2006; Gallagher, 2005; Gibbs, 1994, 2003; Kövecses, 2005) calling
for psychology to ―bring the mind back into the body‖, and then to ―extend‖ the mind beyond
the body. According to Kövecses (2005), the new development known as second generation
cognitive science involves not only the empirical integration of cognitive and developmental
psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, and computer science, but also the
replacement of the mind-as-computer metaphor with the concept of mind as at once embodied
via sensorimotor experiences and extended into the organism‘s environment; hence the rise of
extended mind theories (Clark, 1997; Rowlands, 1999). Wheeler (2005) summarises this new
approach:

Following others, I shall call this new kid on the intellectual block embodied-embedded

cognitive science. In its raw form, the embodied-embedded approach revolves around the

thought that cognitive science needs to put cognition back in the brain, the brain back in

the body, and the body back in the world. (p. 11)

There is also increasing enthusiasm for incorporating an evolutionary perspective, as seen
in areas such as evolutionary psychology (Buss, 2004), affective neuroscience (Panksepp,