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Three Forms Of Semiotics

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There have been several attempts to define semiotics and they all seem to share that semiotics is the scientific study of signs, sign processes like: indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, signification and meaningful communication. Umberto Eco attests that “semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign (Eco 1976, p. 7)”.
Semiotics, rather than dealing with the organization of signs, has to do with how meaning is produced, what makes an utterance meaningful, how it signifies and what precedes it on a deeper level to result in the manifestation of meaning. It is based mainly on the notion that meaning is not inherent in the objects, but is constructed by a competent observer called a subject who can give form …show more content…

All that can fall within the compass of human understanding, being either, first, the nature of things, as they are in themselves, their relations, and their manner of operation: or, secondly, that which man himself ought to do, as a rational and voluntary agent, for the attainment of any end, especially happiness: or, thirdly, the ways and means whereby the knowledge of both the one and the other of these is attained and communicated; I think science may be divided properly into these three sorts (Locke 1999, p. 717)”.

Nevertheless, it was only with the emergence of the theories and works of two seminal characters, viz. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 – 1914) – an American pragmatist philosopher – and Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 – 1913) – the Swiss linguist – and their attempts in the development of a formal theory of semiotics that semiotics began to be considered as a separate field of research.
For Charles S. Peirce, semiotics was a scientific field of study where all signs and sign types could be explained scientifically and hence logically. Like John Locke, Peirce defined semiotics as a doctrine of signs. He later went on to develop a semiotic triad:

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