Computational Semiotics

Jean-Guy Meunier

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350166639
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Can semiotics and computers be compatible? Can computation advance semiotics by enhancing the scientific basis of the theory of signs? Coupling semiotics, a philosophical and phenomenological tradition concerned with theories of signs, with computation, a formal discipline, may seem controversial and paradoxical. Computational Semiotics tackles these controversies head-on and attempts to bridge this gap. Showing how semiotics can build the same type of conceptual, formal, and computational models as other scientific projects, this book opens up a rich domain of inquiry toward the formal understanding of semiotic artifacts and processes. Examining how pairing semiotics with computation can bring more methodological rigor and logical consistency to the epistemic quest for the forms and functions of meaning, without compromising the important interpretive dynamics of semiotics, this book offers a new cutting-edge, model-driven theory to the field.

1

The complexity of semiotics

Man has, as it were, discovered a new method of adapting himself to his environment. Between the receptor system and the effector system, which are to be found in all animal species, we find in man a third link which we may describe as the symbolic system. This new acquisition transforms the whole of human life. As compared with the other animals man lives not merely in a broader reality; he lives, so to speak, in a new dimension of reality.

(Cassirer 1944: 92)

Introduction

In classical semiotics, one of the main human cognitive abilities is the use of signals and symbols to deal with one’s environment, one’s peers and oneself. And in contemporary semiotics, manipulating signals or symbols is a capability inherent to all living organisms.

In humans, this ability manifests through the production of complex meaning-carrying artefacts. The most sophisticated type of such artefacts is natural language. But it is not the only one. Indeed, in their self-cognition, as well as in their interaction with others and with the environment, humans are made to constantly negotiate with a diversity of signals and symbolic artefacts. Some are simple – jewellery, make-up, dress codes and so on. Others are slightly more complex – salutations, codes of seduction, table manners, birth ceremonies, funeral processions, marriage contracts, royal coronations, parliament opening ceremonies and so on. Some are highly sophisticated and take various forms: aesthetic (e.g. the arts), cultural (e.g. ceremonies), religious (e.g. churches), technical (e.g. electrical blueprints), scientific (e.g. chemistry symbols), economic (e.g. money), etc. And all living organisms present similar capabilities, but often these will be less complex. From the use of signals to basic symbols, they allow communication among members of a community.

Practically no domain of human activity is devoid of the use of signals and of symbolic artefacts. Most have a specific signature, structure and usage. In fact, they may form one of the most complex systems that humans have to learn, master, share and, above all, interpret.

All semiotic theories aim to offer some description, explanation and understanding of the nature and usage of the artefacts whose main feature is to carry meaning of one sort or another, but also to study the active process involved in their semiosis or interpretation.

Semiotics . . . [is] . . . concerned with ordinary objects in so far (and only in so far) as they participate in semiosis. (Morris 1938: 3)

Semiotics is the study of signs. It thus investigates the structure and function of all events which involve signs: the processing of information in machines, the metabolism in organisms, the stimulus-response processes in plants and animals, the activities of perception and orientation in higher creatures, the interactions of primates, communication between humans, the dealings between social institutions, and the delicate processes of interpretation which take place in the comprehension of the complex sign structures in legal matters, in literature, music, and art. (Posner et al. 1997: 1)

Thus, all semiotic theories share a set of theses regarding signs: (a) they are artefacts of some sort; (b) they carry some meaningful content; and (c) they must be interpreted by some sort of inner capacity. ‘A sign is an object which stands for another to some mind’ (Peirce, MS 214, 1873).

Semiotics is hence a sort of epistemic endeavour that constructs theories about or applies them to objects, facts or events that carry meaning for living beings. To put it simply, semiotics explores and defines the conditions of signs being signs. ‘It is general semeiotic, treating not merely of truth, but also of the general conditions of signs being signs’ (Peirce 1958: CP 1.444).

Non-semioticians may criticize such a definition as being too general. But one must be very careful, for this definition is not about the meaning of a lexical item. It is just an introductory definition for a research programme. Semiotics is a field which studies ‘signs’ in the same general manner as psychology is said to study ‘cognition’ and ‘emotions’, or as neuroscience studies the ‘brain’, for instance. The important point of this definition is that semiotic phenomena are not taken as objects of study because of their physical properties or features, but because of the intriguing property by which they have meaning.

The semiotic paradigms

Naturally, this general definition of semiotics has been refined and deepened in various ways. Both the nature of semiotic artefacts and the process of semiosis have been the object of many theories which have become the main paradigms of semiotics. In our research in view of linking semiotics with computation, we may distinguish three main types of such paradigms: philosophical, linguistic and naturalist. These paradigms or types of semiotic theories are not inherently contradictory to one another. They form different points of view for explaining, describing and understanding semiotic artefacts and the process of semiosis. And as they are well known, we shall briefly present them here.

The first and probably the best-known set of semiotic theories are the philosophical ones. They come in three different shades and tonalities: mentalist, pragmatic and hermeneutic theories. Each one has its own concepts, arguments, discourses and methodology. And they are not theoretically independent from one another. They have strong interwoven relations.

The first type of philosophical semiotic theories is the mentalist ones, which are also the most famous. They are grounded in the long-standing tradition of Greek and Medieval philosophy (Abelard, Aquinas, Occam). Their formulation was coined by Augustine as ‘aliquid stat pro aliquo’ (Augustine) and reformulated by Poinsot, who insisted that this ‘stat pro’ or, in English, to ‘stand for’ was to be conceptually understood as to ‘represent’. This approach was integrated into most of the modern and contemporary semiotic philosophical trends (from Port-Royal to Kant, Frege and Fodor). This relation has become one of the prototypical features of semiotic artefacts: a symbol or a signal (natural sign) is something that stands for or represents something else. The explanation of the proces s by which something effectively stands for something else is mainly explored through a philosophy of mind where perception, conceptualization and language will be understood as the dominant components of the processes of semiosis. In other words, according to this mentalist paradigm, semiotic artefacts have the main relational feature of standing for something else. Meaning is the result of a semiotic process where a mind creates a representation that stands for something else.

The second set of philosophical theories are the pragmatist ones. They find their original synthetic expression in Peirce. His theory sees a semiotic phenomenon not mainly as a state, but as a complex epistemic activity called ‘semiosis’. This activity is a process by which certain artefacts become carriers of meaning or, more simply, signs. It is a dynamic process that rests upon complex epistemic categorizing operations realized by human agents such as sensing, perceiving and conceptualization.

Peirce also complexifies the stand for relation. It links together: (1) something that is the carrier of meaning (i.e. the representamen); (2) something that the sign conveys for somebody (i.e. the interpretant); and (3) that what it stands for (i.e. the object). And semiotic phenomena can come in many forms such as symbols, icons, signals or indices, which all inhabit a dynamic process, semiosis, itself carried out by interpreters.

Variants and nuances of this Peircean pragmatist semiotic theory are numerous: in Frege, the stand for relation becomes ‘term’, ‘sense’ (Sinn) and ‘referent’ (Bedeutung); in Morris (1938), it is ‘signal/symbol’, ‘interpretant’ and ‘designatum’. And other variants may add epistemic modalities (Hintikka 1997), contexts and situations (Morris 1938; Barwise and Perry 1983), culture (Luhmann 1995), embodiment (Brier 2008) or cognition (Brandt 2013).

A well-known variant of this triadic model has been the behaviourist formulation by Ogden and Richard (1923: 140). Here, the triadicity of the sign is translated in terms where a ‘stimulus’ is the representamen, the ‘reaction’ is the reference or object, while the ‘engram’ is sometimes identified with the ‘thought’. According to this perspective, the study of a semiotic artefact must reveal what, in it, makes it a stimulus, what it stands for or represents and what is the engram it produces in the interpreter.

Compared to the mentalist paradigm, this pragmatist view complexifies the stand for relation with respect to three components: representamen, interpretant and object. Meaning emerges in a process of semiosis where (a) some agent, (b) creates interpretation, on (c) an artefact so that it signifies something else. An interesting point here is that these ‘artefacts’ may themselves be other signs.

The third philosophical semiotic paradigm is a hermeneutic one. It has its source in the theory of language and textual interpretation initiated by Herder and Hermann and developed by Schleiermacher, Humboldt and Dilthey. And more recently, Gadamer, Habermas, Adorno and Ricoeur enhanced it and applied it to different types of semiotic artefacts. Although not always expressed in classical semiotic terms, these theories emphasize that meaning is given to semiotic artefacts through the epistemic process of understanding the world. In revealing the meaning of semiotic artefacts, hermeneutic semiosis may call upon not only the inner experience of the interpreter but also the culture in which he or she lives. Hence, interpretation is a dynamic process that is circular or, in better terms, spirally enhanced.

Some researchers such as von Uexküll explicitly integrated this hermeneutic point of view into semiotics. Semiotic artefacts are mediators in building our own world (Umwelt). And for some others (Jakobson, Martinet, Vygotsky, Halliday, Eco, Apel, etc.), this mediation also had to take into account the important role of language or, more generally, of various means of communication such as dialogue (Ricoeur) or intentionality (Austin, Searle, Grice). For their part, Lotman, Luhmann, Brier, Brandt and many others complexified these relations pertaining to meaning by including contexts, situations, and social and cultural environments.

Hence, in this hermeneutic paradigm, both the semiotic artefacts and the process of semiosis have become more complex. They comprise an interpreter whose process of interpretation creates different states or an inner world that stands for the word itself. And various complex intervening factors such as the context, situation, culture or intentions may come into play.

Some contemporary semiotic theories associate hermeneutic positions through modern cognitive theories. They may call upon such things as phenomenological experience, perception, memory, conceptualization, categorization, reasoning and information processing. Here, meaning is intrinsically rooted in the human cognitive tendency to explain and understand. For Brandt, a theory of meaning so understood is the project of cognitive semiotics. Thom and Petitot have proposed that semiotics should focus on the phenomenological experience of the world.

Finally, some other semioticians will add a communicational dimension to this cognitive framework. In so doing, they build a bridge towards the Morrisian semiotic theory. Signs are not built just for individual cognitive purposes; they also are a means of sharing meaning. Signs participate in the interaction and social negotiation we have with others in our relation to the world (Habermas 1984; Apel 2000). Thus, meaning is the result of an interpretation that emerges through cognition and communication. Communication is a form of interactive meaning creation, for it relies on coordination and cooperation, among other things.

The second very important paradigm comes from structuralist and formal linguistic theories. In these theories, attention is directed towards the structure of semiotic artefacts and the effect it has on the process of semiosis itself. Three main points of view regarding this structure are proposed. One sees it as being similar to a linguistic structure, the second one sees it as a logical form, while the third views it more as a dynamic mathematical form.

The first one has its origin in Saussure but developed within the structuralist movement often called the ‘semiological school’ – its leaders include Hjelmslev, Trubetzkoy, Jakobson, Greimas, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Rastier, Todorov and Fontanille. But there are important variants in terms of understanding the nature of what this semiotic structure is. The dominant understanding of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• 1 The complexity of semiotics
• 2 Semiotics in computing
• 3 Computing in semiotics
• 4 Models in science and semiotics
• 5 Conceptual models in science
• 6 Conceptual models in semiotics
• 7 Formal models in science
• 8 Formal models in semiotics
• 9 Computational models in science
• 10 Computational models in semiotics
• 11 The workflow of computational semiotics
• 12 Computer models in science and semiotics
• Notes
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Copyright