Semiotics

Re-Thinking the Place of Semiotics in Psychology... 135

Hammersley (1996, p. 174) does not require the "full range ... of philosophical assumptions"
(p. 174); it requires only realism.
To sumarise so far, two preliminary steps have been taken. The first step, keeping faith
with mainstream psychology's explicit commitment to realism, uses that realism to expose the
scientific inappropriateness of mainstream psychology's exclusive and distorted
preoccupation with quantitative methods. The second step uses realism to extricate qualitative
methods from their typical antirealist and antiscientific metatheoretical contexts,
simultaneously solving the major "crisis" of those methods. Once it is accepted that
quantitative and qualitative methods are equally legitimate within a realist science, albeit
determined empirically by the nature of the subject matter under investigation, the way is
prepared for further increased methodological sophistication within mainstream psychology.
The empirical determination of specific methods - what qualitative researchers, and those
supporting the pragmatism of mixed methods call the "dictatorship of the research question"^23
(Tashakkori & Teddlie, 2003, p. 679) - extends beyond the recognition that nonquantitative
methods are scientifically appropriate into the determination of which particular
nonquantitative method is to be used. And clarity and rigour are just as possible here as they
are in the case of quantitative methods, for qualitative variables and systems will also have
some kind of structure, such that they can be investigated mathematically. As Michell
reminds us, the concept of quantity is not coextensive with mathematics:

If mathematics is thought of as the science of abstract structure, and it is recognised that

quantitative structures constitute but one species of abstract structure, then it can be seen

that some structures studied in mathematics (e.g., logical structures, network structures,

language structures are nonquantitative. (Michell, 2001, p. 212)

Since it is not a foregone conclusion that psychological attributes will be found to be

quantitative, the student of psychometrics must also know something of alternatives to

quantitative structure, such as the various set-theoretical, graph-theoretical, algebraic,

logical, and grammatical structures. Of course, there are an infinite number of possible

alternatives and, so, above all, the student should learn to explore novel, empirical

structures. (Michell, 2001, p. 216)

Once semiotics is brought into the realist psychology picture, methodological expansion
and variety become the order of the day. It is reasonable to expect that, given the triadic
signifying relation, and its embedded cognitive relation, semiotic structures in general will
include a mixture of more specific causal, logical, semantic, and categorial structures. And
which specific structures are involved will also depend on which category of meaning (in
terms of my earlier classification) is involved, and what particular question concerning them
is at issue.
There is no doubt that qualitative research is centrally concerned with meaning. The
reinvigoration of qualitative methods has been associated with a ―meaning revolution‖. Recall
Shank‘s claim that the ―Age of Science‖ is winding down and the ―Age of Meaning‖ is
picking up. Across the entire range of qualitative approaches, the talk is not of "quality" but
of "meaning". To illustrate, Pidgeon (1996) identifies the qualitative focus as "the meaning of

(^23) The choice of the word ―dictatorship‖ is significant, for it echoes the widespread postmodernist conflation of the
concepts of truth and objectivity with the ideology of political oppression, and, hence, the conflation of realists
with authoritarians.