Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
SIGN SYSTEMS, CODES,
AND SEMIOTICS
with the signified. At the same time an American
mathematician, scientist, pragmatist philosopher
and logician Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
described three types of signs: icons, indexes
and symbols, which allow communication. As
discussed by Marcello Barbieri (2010), the iconic,
indexical and symbolic processes can be also
described in animals. A sign becomes an icon
when there is similarity between it and an object.
Figure 2 presents my student's work from a
Computer Art Class. A tree became a strong icon
existing in our nature- and computing-related
iconography - the use of images as symbols. Our
biology-inspired imagination compelled us to
shape a widely used data structure as a hierarchical
tree with linked nodes, starting from a root node,
that resembles a living tree.
We can recognize an object as a tree because
its features are common with other trees. That
means we perform pattern recognition to assign an
object to a particular mental category. When there
is a physical link with an object, a sign becomes
an index. Indexes allow humans and animals to
infer the existence of something, for example learn
about correlation existing between dark clouds and
rain, find out that a pheromone is an index of a
mating partner, and the smell of smoke is an index
of fire. We can possibly consider links on the web
pages as indexes, when a specially marked word
refers to a related piece of information somewhere
else on the Internet. A sign can also be a symbol
when there is a conventional link is established
between a sign and an object, often without any
The core of the domain of semiotics stems from
philosophy and psychology, starting from Plato,
Aristotle, Augustine, and then the medieval scho-
lastic thought. In his paper “Eight Historical
Paradigms of Cultural Studies and Their Semiotic
Explication” Roland Posner (2009) described how
the reinvention of humanities was motivated in the
past and at present “by trying to account for new
types of signs and sign processes that had become
necessary for a successful life in its time,” from the
Greek cities of the 5
th
century BC to now, when
“in the context of globalization at the turn of the
third millennium, many European universities are
now re-organizing the humanities into faculties of
cultural studies grouped around
media studies.
”
A Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-
1915) devised his model of semiology and laid a
scientific foundation for structuralist methodol-
ogy of semiotics by introducing his core concepts
of the sign, signifier, signified, and referent. De
Saussure (1915) assumed a position that reality
does not exist before language defines it. Hence,
all signs are arbitrary; they have meaning because
a community has agreed upon what they signify,
not because they have some intrinsic meaning.
According to de Saussure's first dyadic model,
a two-part model of the sign is composed of a
'signifier' - the form that the sign takes and a
'signified' - the concept it represents. Thus the
sign results from the association of the signifier
Figure 2. Steffanie Sperry, “The Meaning of Tree” (© 2012, S. Sperry. Used with permission)
