Semiotics

Re-Thinking the Place of Semiotics in Psychology... 109

Jorna and van Heusden argue that the increasing demands of internet, intranet and other

kinds of digital and electronic communication, information-gathering and information-

presenting devices require an adequate psychology of information handling. They assert

that, from a semiotic point of view, signs are all around us. In one way or another, these

artifacts will influence our future psychological research agendas and by this they may

lead, to a certain degree, to reformulations of current research questions. An information

psychology, a psychology of sign handling, is necessary to scientifically cope with the

ever-increasing semiotic world around us. (Smythe & Jorna, 1998, p. 726)

The themes of the special issue have continued to occupy those who are attempting to
promote the recent psychology-semiotics integration. For example, Garfield (2000)
distinguishes two different meanings of "meaning": natural indicative signs on the one hand,
and conventional semiotic devices on the other. He argues that cognitive science needs both
and must therefore find a way to combine them, for "if among our cognitive states are the
propositional attitudes, then we are the subject of meaningful states, states which share the
semantic properties of linguistic phenomena" (p. 421).^6 The new discipline psychosemiotics
(e.g., Smith, 2001, 2005) similarly places semiosis at the heart of cognition, with an emphasis
on its biological and evolutionary basis, and identifies its field as the study of how we learn,
understand and use the signs of culture. A related new discipline cognitive semiotics (Brandt,
2004) is also dedicated to the analysis of meaning within a broader framework for the study
of language and thought, gesture and culture, discourse and text, art and symbolisation in
general. Promoting this new discipline, a recently created (2007) journal Cognitive Semiotics
is explicitly devoted to integrating methods and theories developed in cognitive science with
those developed in semiotics and the humanities. Advertising the journal as the "first of its
kind", the general introduction offers its readers "the opportunity to engage with ideas from
the European and American traditions of cognitive science and semiotics, and to follow
developments in the study of meaning – both in a cognitive and in a semiotic sense – as they
unfold internationally" (Andreassen, Brandt & Vang, 2007, p. 3).
With all this recent activity, it might seem that the movement to integrate semiotics and
psychology is flourishing. But appearances, as we know, can be deceiving.

FAILURES IN SEMIOTICS-PSYCHOLOGY INTEGRATION:

WHAT SEEMS TO BE THE PROBLEM?

So far, the proponents of the various attempts to integrate psychology and semiotics
consider themselves to have had only limited success. Their dissatisfaction crystallises into
two major complaints. The first is that it is still not clear which "dialogue" is to be established
between semiotics and psychology. Will the relevance of semiotics lie in the "internalist"
application to cognitive processing of semiotic categories via a revival of the Lockean
"image-like" or "sub-linguistic" approach to mental representations (Holenstein, 2008)? Or

(^6) Garfield argues that the indicative sign grounds the conventional semiotic device. In applying the combination of
the two to the notion of mental representation, his position illustrates the move to centre stage of so-called
"naturalism" in psychosemantics, i.e., the attempt to naturalise "indicator semantics" by applying the
philosophy of language and its core problem of meaning to the philosophy of mind and its core problem of
intentionality.