110 Agnes Petocz
will it lie in the focus on the more recent "externalist" concept of mind and an extension into
cultural and social themes? If the latter, how is that to be accommodated within a science that
rejects postmodernist approaches? As Smythe & Jorna (1998) conclude in response to the
special issue papers:
The role that semiotics might play in the continuing evolution of the cognitive sciences
and the human sciences remains unclear. In particular, it is not clear how to situate
semiotics in relation to postmodernist approaches in discursive, narrative and cultural
psychology, or with respect to contemporary developments in connectionism and
neuroscience. (pp. 728-9)Alternatively, will the dialogue between semiotics and psychology provide the long-
awaited unification of both internalist and externalist approaches to mind? If so, then it still
seems a long way off, since "the unifying conception of sign, symbol or representation that
one looks to the field of semiotics to provide remains elusive" (Smythe & Jorna, 1998, p.
729). This disappointment is echoed more recently by Deacon (2007):
A scientifically adequate theory of semiotic processes must ultimately be founded on a
theory of information that can unify the physical, biological, cognitive, and
computational uses of the concept. Unfortunately, no such unification exists, and more
importantly, the causal status of informational content remains ambiguous as a result. (p.
123, emphasis added)The second complaint is that, in general, mainstream psychological researchers - those at
the coal-face, so to speak, appear to remain unaware not only of developments in semiotics
but also of the recent work in psychology-semiotics integration. In particular, cognitive
theory, the heartland of mainstream psychological research "remains largely uninformed by
developments in the field of semiotics" (Smythe & Jorna, 1998, p. 724).
It is my contention that what lies behind these complaints and is responsible for the hold-
up is a set of confusions that reflect the continuing implicit influence of the reasons for
psychology's neglect of semiotics that I outlined earlier. Moreover, unless these are
addressed, attempts at psychology-semiotics integration will not succeed, and will continue to
be hampered by misperceptions concerning the sources of the hold-up.
The complaint that psychologists remain unaware of developments in semiotics is, of
course, justified. Psychology's combination of scientific practicalism and metatheoretical
confusion explains why most of the integrative work, being contained in journals and books
devoted to theoretical and philosophical psychology, and rarely appearing in the mainstream
experimental journals, will not be read by mainstream psychologists or psychological
practitioners. But there are further repercussions. Where and when the integrative work does
come to the attention of the mainstream, psychology remains ill-equipped to deal with
confusions which infiltrate the integration attempts themselves.
Consider psychology's subscription to the science/meaning divide, and the view that
semiotics lies on the "meaning" side of that divide and is inextricably wedded to ideologies
opposed to scientific empirical realism. Some proponents of psychology-semiotics integration
place emphasis on science, insisting that the aim is to "gain scientific knowledge about these
often still unexplored phenomena, found increasingly important by the scientific community‖
(Andreassen et al., 2007, p. 4). But many proponents of psychology-semiotics integration