Re-Thinking the Place of Semiotics in Psychology... 111locate their contributions within an explicitly hermeneutic or antiscience or post-science
framework. For example, when introducing psychosemiotics, Smith (2001) discusses the
division between the causal approach of mainstream cognitive science and the meaning-based
approach of cultural psychology, and he aligns psychosemiotics with the latter. Recall that the
relevance of postmodern conceptions of psychology as a human science was one of the three
central themes in the Theory & Psychology special issue. Smythe & Jorna (1998) observe that
the appropriateness of the natural science approach in psychology is increasingly being
questioned. According to Shank (1998), scientific methods are "not so much wrong as 'played
out' ... they have grown stale from decades of constant use" (p. 856). Therefore, he asserts, the
"Age of Science" is winding down and the "Age of Meaning" is picking up. This is consistent
with the widespread antirealism at the core of that ―quiet methodological revolution‖ (Denzin
& Lincoln, 1994, p. ix) which has seen the reinvigoration of qualitative research methods.
Across the entire field of qualitative approaches it is typically held that meaning is the central
focus, that qualitative methods provide ―not truth but perspective‖ (Ruckdeschel, 1985, p.
19), and that anyone who chooses qualitative over quantitative methods does so because they
have an a priori ideological or philosophical commitment to antirealism (cf. Bryman, 1988;
Lincoln & Guba, 2000; Potter, 1996).
For the mainstream psychological researcher, who certainly does not feel that scientific
methods have been "played out" and "grown stale", but whose anti-theoretical stance includes
the devaluing of skills in conceptual analysis, and whose metatheoretical confusion involves
significant lapses from explicit commitments to realism and to science, these mixed messages
would be difficult to resolve. So, too, would it be difficult for the mainstream researcher to
assess critically the flaws and inconsistencies in a movement that wonders "which dialogue"
is to be established between psychology and semiotics. On the one hand, attempts to apply
semiotics to traditional internalist symbol-processing explanations of human cognition
(another of the special issue themes) are offered alongside those that recommend we should
abandon the traditional cognitivist view of mind in favour of an alternative, externalist,
semiotic perspective. On the other hand, the integration movement bemoans the lack of a
semiotic theory of information that can unify externalist and internalist views of mind.
A WAY FORWARD: TAKING REALISM SERIOUSLY
One way forward is to accept mainstream psychology's explicit commitments to realism
and science, show what problems are created by the lapses from those commitments, and then
re-think the place of semiotics from the point of view of a thoroughgoing realism. This way
forward is what I propose to explore in the second section of the present paper.
So, what is meant by a realism that is thoroughgoing? Most philosophers (if not
psychologists) would insist that there are varieties of realism. Indeed, the label is so popular
that it has been appropriated for just about any position; it seems that we can claim to be
"realist" about anything - Platonic universals, ideas and mental representations, higher non-
material realms, causal powers, etc. - insofar as we are claiming that these things "really
exist" or are part of "the structure of reality". Less controversially, the basic realist thesis
regarding the existence of a world independent of human thoughts appears in a number of
different recent conceptions of realism, such as are found in J. D. Greenwood's work