What is semiotics?
The American philosophers of the 19th century spent academic time on discussing the relationship between signs and symbols. Were these relationships natural? Were they created by people? Were they a part of humanity? One of these philosophers was Charles S. Peirce. I had the fortune to read most of his known manuscripts, scribbles, pages of notes that were not in collections or interpreted in readings published about Peirce. To me, he provided the best explanation of why we have language…we have language for the following purposes: 1) to indicate a relationship between two or more people, their actions, their objects such as one person looks at something in the sky so another person looks up; 2) to communicate an interpretation of what one sees, “Oh, there is a hot air balloon!";” 3) to expand and extend upon the meaning of what one interprets to have a specific function as as to inform another person, “That is beautiful! I rode in a hot air balloon one time!”
From a learning perspective, these three levels of communication (pragmatics) are bound by semantic rules which are coded by the human brain in neuro-semantic circuits and networks of interdependent layers of meaning. And their levels of complexity which Peirce referred to as firstness, secondness, and thirdness exists parallel to the neurobiological complexity of processing. So, some communicators are able to indicate basic semantic relationships, “I want more juice.” But with more learning, the communicator is able to interpret these relationships, “So, you have juice. Do you want a different type of juice?” And, at the highest level these relationships displace beyond expressing joint reality to symbolizing experience, “I think it would be amazing to ride in a hot air balloon…you would not hear any motor.” This latter example takes the communicator into a world beyond the obvious interpretations of what is present or easily displaced into symbols that mean more than the one-to-one existence between an object such as a hot air balloon and the shared observation of being able to see the hot air balloon to thinking about riding in a hot air balloon.
What is difficult to understand is that these levels of complexity coexist in parallel meanings and are therefore dynamic or synergistic. For example, I look up into the sky to see what my walking partner is looking at. I see what I think is a hot air balloon in the distance sky but my walking partner says, “Wow! I didn’t know they were advertising their opening!” I say, “What are you referring to?” She says, “That hot air balloon is an advertisement for the new store on Market Street.” I say, “How did you know that? I don’t see anything that is an advertisement!” She says, “The colors are red, yellow, and blue which are their signature brand colors and I know they are opening today.” I then ask, “But maybe the colors have nothing to do with the store! Maybe someone just likes primary colors.” This short conversation could be analyzed for the relationships among signs (referents, things observed, surface forms or words) as well as for the meaning of the symbols (referential displacement, semanticity, flexibility, productivity, and efficiency) in terms of their presuppositions, arguments or propositions.
This relationship between the structural use of language and the underlying purpose or value of meaning is semiotics. Peirce referred to this analysis of such relationships as pragmaticism, the whole is greater than the parts. This has suggested for some time that language is synergistic as is the brain that codes such meanings (Arwood, 1983). Thus the use of such analysis to create methods that are aligned with these definitions of meaning that I call Pragmaticism Methodology opened the door for specifically assigned meaning to these methods as Viconic Language Methods (VLMs).