What is it about?
This paper shows how rethinking the Peircean doctrine of signs by way of separating representation from mediation in semiosis can provide a more general model with six fundamental types of sign action: perceiving, acting, interpreting, expressing, sensing, and reacting. The sixfold model can serve as a common framework for analysing the very different kinds of sign action that we find in human discourse, animal behaviour, scientific inquiry, social systems, AIs, bacteria, robots, and automatized technologies.
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Why is it important?
The world we live in cannot be understood without a workable theory of signs. Signs convey meaning. Whatever conveys meaning is a sign. Sign action is a meaning process as opposed to a physical process which has no place for meaning. Semiotics, the theory of triadic signs that was founded by Charles S. Peirce more than a century ago, promises to deliver a general theory of meaning, an abstract and formal theory of signs and sign action, but it has not yet delivered a sufficiently comprehensive and consistent theory, or so I claim. Therefore we need to ask anew: How do signs act?
Perspectives
Semiotics, the theory of signs, may seem like a niche area of little interest. In my perspective, semiotics is a fundamental theory of meaning, and meaning is an essential aspect of our world, which is equally important as matter and energy in explaining the workings of life, technology, and culture. However, meaning is (deliberately) excluded in physics and other foundational natural sciences and therefore often left out in accounts of how our world works. And though there are many different accounts of meaning in the human and social sciences, there is as yet no adequate theory of meaning as a foundational aspect of our world. We need to investigate, on the deepest level, how meaning actually works in this world of ours. I think the best approach to do this is to develop our understanding of how signs act, and this paper is the first step in clearing and opening up the way to a comprehensive theory of sign action. In that connnection, I would like to thank an anonymous peer reviewer of the article for the helpful and encouraging comment that this is “a brilliant paper” that “provides a 'workable' framework” for semiotics.
Hugo F. Alrøe
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The six types of sign action, Semiotica, June 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/sem-2024-0112.
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