Re-Thinking the Place of Semiotics in Psychology... 137Obviously, as Michell (2001) notes, there are an infinite number of possible alternatives
to quantitative structure, and so the mainstream psychological researcher, no less than the
student of psychology, should be prepared to explore novel empirical structures and
appropriate ways of investigating them. Indeed, psychology's methodological expansion and
increased sophistication will be limited only by the imagination and skills of its researchers.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
According to Geertz (1973/2003), following Max Weber: "man is an animal suspended in
webs of significance he himself has spun" (p. 145). I have argued that what seems to be the
problem in recent attempts at semiotics-psychology integration is not the genuine problem,
and that we must re-think the place of semiotics in psychology. The "dialogue" to be
established between semiotics and psychology will not be any of the three possibilities
entertained by those who complain of lack of progress; it will not be that of symbol-
processing explanations of human cognition, nor that of locating psychology within
postmodernist conceptions of the human sciences. Much less will it be the unification of these
two, as envisaged by Deacon and others who bemoan the lack of a unifying semiotic theory
of information. Instead, successful integration will come by taking seriously mainstream
psychology's explicit commitments to realism and to science, and exploring the possibilities
from within a thoroughgoing realism. The resulting semiotics-psychology integration offers
clarification (in identifying the irreducible triadic relation of meaning), redirection (in
extricating the legitimate concerns of the field of information representation), both
clarification and redirection (in applying the Peircean distinctions to problems in information
representation research), unification (in using iconicity as the bridge between conceptual
metaphor and nonconventional symbolism), and expansion (in promoting increased
methodological flexibility and sophistication). No doubt this is just a start, and there are many
other areas of application to be explored along with attention to novel nonquantitative
structures and methods for investigating them. To return to the question I posed at the outset,
I hope I have shown that there are compelling reasons for mainstream psychologists to now
actively embrace a closer integration with semiotics.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the reviewer, Philip Bell, and to Tamas Pataki, both of whom provided
valuable comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank the members of the Sydney
Theoretical Psychology Group, especially Li-mei Chew, Simon Boag, Megan McDonald,
Doris McIlwain, Terry McMullen, Joel Michell, Mark Milic, and Glenn Newbery for their
helpful feedback during discussion of this paper at our last meeting.
Reviewed by: Philip Bell, Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,
University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.