Concept

Sign (semiotics)

Overview

In semiotics, a sign is anything that communicates a meaning that is not the sign itself to the interpreter of the sign. The meaning can be intentional, as when a word is uttered with a specific meaning, or unintentional, as when a symptom is taken as a sign of a particular medical condition. Signs can communicate through any of the senses, visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or taste.

Two major theories describe the way signs acquire the ability to transfer information. Both theories understand the defining property of the sign as a relation between a number of elements. In semiology, the tradition of semiotics developed by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), the sign relation is dyadic, consisting only of a form of the sign (the signifier) and its meaning (the signified). Saussure saw this relation as being essentially arbitrary (the principle of semiotic arbitrariness), motivated only by social convention. Saussure's theory has been particularly influential in the study of linguistic signs. The other major semiotic theory, developed by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), defines the sign as a triadic relation as "something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity.” This means that a sign is a relation between the sign vehicle (the specific physical form of the sign), a sign object (the aspect of the world that the sign carries meaning about) and an interpretant (the meaning of the sign as understood by an interpreter). According to Peirce, signs can be divided by the type of relation that holds the sign relation together as either icons, indices or symbols. Icons are those signs that signify by means of similarity between sign vehicle and sign object (e.g. a portrait or map), indices are those that signify by means of a direct relation of contiguity or causality between sign vehicle and sign object (e.g. a symptom), and symbols are those that signify through a law or arbitrary social convention.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Sign (semiotics) is discussed.

Again, among the twelve signs, six are called masculine and diurnal, and six feminine and nocturnal. They are arranged in alternate order, one after the other, as the day is followed by the night, and as the male is coupled with the female.
Ptolemy, Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos
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The signs + (plus), - (minus), = (equal to), > (‘larger than’, in etymology signifying ‘gives’ or ‘has given’), < (‘smaller than’, in etymology signifying ‘derived from’), are now often used in printing ordinary scientific works, and not in those only which are mathematical or arithmetical. In such instances +, -, =, >, <, should in the matter of spacing be treated as words are treated. For instance, in—…
Oxford University Press, Rules for compositors and readers at the University Press, Oxford
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§ 459. The intuition—in its natural phase a something given and given in space—acquires, when employed as a sign, the peculiar characteristic of existing only as superseded and sublimated. Such is the negativity of intelligence; and thus the truer phase of the intuition used as a sign is existence in _time_ (but its existence vanishes in the moment of being), and if we consider the rest of its external psychical…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
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So if the ants, for instance, have a language, the signs which compose it must be very limited in number, and each of them, once the species is formed, must remain invariably attached to a certain object or a certain operation: the sign is adherent to the thing signified. In human society, on the contrary, fabrication and action are of variable form, and, moreover, each individual must learn his part, because he is…
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
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Bearing in mind the intimate connection of meanings and signs (or language), we may note in more detail what language does (1) for specific meanings, and (2) for the organization of meanings. I. Individual Meanings. A verbal sign (_a_) selects, detaches, a meaning from what is otherwise a vague flux and blur (see p. 121); (_b_) it retains, registers, stores that meaning; and (_c_) applies it, when needed, to the…
John Dewey, How We Think
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Sign (semiotics)

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Sign (semiotics)

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