Talk:Semiotics/Archives/2014

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WP:COATRACK and WP:NOR

An editor keeps inserting unwarranted commentary to this article violating WP:INTEGRITY, WP:NPOV, WP:UNDUE and WP:NOR. The text is full of spelling mistakes (almost all Greek words have wrong diacritics), inaccuracies ("σημιωτικὴ, which transliterates into Latin as semiotica"), repetitions (the same information about Locke and Stephanus is repeated again and again), original research ("That Locke deliberately dropped the epsilon following the mu in σημείον is clear from the fact that he personally and directly oversaw, in his own household, the preparation of four subsequent editions of the Essay."), irrelevant points, and prescriptivisms. --Omnipaedista (talk) 20:25, 17 June 2014 (UTC)
I retained what complied to policy guidelines and deleted the repetitions and inaccuracies. --Omnipaedista (talk) 20:56, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

remove Semiotics of Food

The setion on Semiotics of Food is misplaced. This article should be on Semiotics in general, now it seems like Food is the major application of the field. One sentence mentioning food among other things should be enough for this article, so please remove the misleading section. -- IP — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.204.153.98 (talk) 07:21, 29 August 2011 (UTC)

Keep Food In

Analysis of food is a worthy topic in it's own right and it is directly related to Semiotics and one line would not be worthy of this topic nor an appropriate entry for Wikipedia. I do believe the section could be improved, but it shouldn't be eliminated.

Food or food advertising was a common subject for the Semiotic analysis of Barthes. The presentation of food and the presentation signifiers of food is a rich area for such analysis. It is well known that food as advertised often looks different when actually ordered. Food styling is just one example of how images of food are manipulated in commercials, on packaging or today through social media and the ever present instagram filter; something that is accepted as real through manipulation becomes a signifier. Semiotics can provide a framework upon which to develop a critical analysis of food and its' signifiers.

Semiotics -- of Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard -- was often applied to advertising both to deconstruct it as well as to help create it. A classic (well known) and seminal example of the deconstruction of advertising is Barthes' analysis of the Panzani advertisement.

File:Http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/S4B/Images/panzani.gif
Panzani Pasta Ad

The example is from Barthes' essay 'Rhetoric of the Image." Simply put: an ad for pasta and sauce presented as a still life cornucopia with fresh ingredients (tomatoes, mushrooms) and the name Panzani and the color choices within the ad signify that the pre-made pasta and tinned sauce is authentically Italian or as Barthes says, "Italianicity." The analysis from Barthes is that the actual product is not authentic; it works in France because French consumers are open to common textual and visual tropes percepted to be Italian. Excerpts from Barthes text can be found here.

Thus not only is food or images of food, directly related to seminal work of Barthes and others, food today is subject to increased exposure through digital media and through a variety of techniques, regulations and practices can be very much different than how it appears. A paste purporting to be Raspberry jam may contain Beaver excretions which seems likley to be just an urban rumor but which Snopes notes is partly true. This is perhaps an extreme example, but it connotes why food is not always as it seems and is a very valid topic within the context of a encyclopedia reference to Semiology.

The section should be improved to discuss the Panzani ad and other classic or modern examples.

In the neo-marxist perspective Semiotics can be used encourage the masses to reject modern advertising and the goods offered through mass marketing. Yet, Semiotics is apolitical and can be as easily used to help create sustainable healthier food supplies, and to encourage healthier diets without engendering a debate about the means of production. Education about the uses of Semiotics as it applies to food would certainly be worthy of an encyclopedia entry and it belongs in this section.

I welcome input and advice here... would someone like to tackle this? If not in time I will try myself but I'd love to gain some consensus first Hhawk (talk) 22:02, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

  • I agree that it should be removed to form its own article, or to a subsection in the article on semiotics on culture. It would be much better placed there. It is correct that there is a literature on this, but it is not central to the general topic of semiotics. Today there are Semiotics of Everything, and we can't include subsections on all of them (We already have dedicated articles to "Semiotics of dress", "Semiotics of agriculture", Semioics of Literature, Semiotics of Food would form a nice partner to those. I would say that in this general article the most a line of text in one of the other subsections and a a see also link. User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 00:39, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

Cleaning

Removed these paragraphs as much too detailed for this article: --80.235.82.125 (talk) 17:20, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

But "semeiotics” in this established and even ancient sense of a specialized science "was not what Locke had in mind" with his proposal of “semiotics” (σημιωτική) as a general doctrine of signs, in contrast to any special science or branch of science. In other words, Locke’s "omission" of the epsilon following the mu in his term “semiotics” was not a semantic error by someone ignorant of Greek, but was rather a "deliberate spelling" to contrast his proposal to name the general doctrine of signs (Σημιωτική, semiotica or “semiotics”) with the existing name of the specialized branch of medicine (Σημειωτική, “semeiotics”) concerned with analyzing symptoms of disease. [1]

What Locke had in mind with his proposal for the development of semiotics as a general study (what would come to be called a cenoscopic in contrast to an idioscopic science after Bentham and Peirce[2]) was the fact that the general division of science (perennial since Aristotle) into speculative (or the study of the nature of things) and practical (or the study of how we can gain some control over things, both in behavior and in technology) made no mention of the fact that the whole of human knowledge, whether speculative or practical, depends in its origins and throughout its development upon the action of signs or “semiosis”. In the five closing paragraphs (little more than the very last page) of his Essay concerning Humane Understanding, Locke proposed that, along with science as concerned with attainment of speculative truth (or “knowledge of things, as they are in their own proper beings”), and science as concerned with attainment of practical truth (or the “right applying our own powers and actions, for the attainment of things good and useful”), there is need for a science concerned with “signs the mind makes use of” both in acquiring knowledge of things and in developing control over things. For this new, “third science” Locke proposed the name “σημιωτικὴ” or, alternatively (he is explicit on the point), “the doctrine of signs”.

Many misunderstandings have arisen from the careless reading of that concluding chapter of Locke’s Essay, beginning with the claim of later linguists to “correct” Locke’s spelling of Σημιωτικὴ by inserting an epsilon after the mu, thus: Σημειωτικὴ, which transliterates as “semeiotics” rather than “semiotics”. While this “correction” can be to a limited extent justified by Greek etymology and orthography, this is true only when the orthographic considerations are introduced entirely apart from the actual philosophical context of Locke’s introduction of his term to name the new, general science. In the context of Locke’s work, intention, and time, such a correction is a misguided “correction”, a blunder, philosophically speaking.

In Peircean circles[clarification needed], Max Fisch (21 December 1900 – 1995 January 6), the doyen of Peirce scholarship within his lifetime, introduced the myth that “semeiotic” was Peirce’s preferred term for the doctrine of signs. So deep runs the influence of habit over logic, that not even the exposure of this myth as a falsehood[3] has so far persuaded later generations of Peirce scholars (epigones, in this matter) to abandon their preference for singling out Peirce’s work on the doctrine of signs as “semeiotic” or “semeiotics”, in contrast to all other work in “semiotic” or “semiotics”—as if the study of semiosis was not a larger project than the work of any one researcher, however key. John Deely has argued against Fisch's claim about Peirce's preference for the spelling and singular form "Semeiotic".[4] Deely cites Peirce's use not only of "Semeiotic" but also "Semeiotics", "Semiotic", and "Semeotic", which last Peirce once stated might be the best rendering.

Thomas L. Short in his 2007 book Peirce's Theory of Signs,[5] says in a footnote on p. xi in the Preface, "I use ‘semeiotic’, in Peirce’s occasional spelling, for his theory or theories of signs, and the more usual ‘semiotic’ for that movement which originated in Europe...independently of Peirce and that later appropriated him, with confusion all around".

Other Peirce scholars[who?] have tried to disparage the name “doctrine of signs” by associating the term “doctrine” with authoritarian and dogmatic religious teaching. But such a move presupposes considerable ignorance of the history of the term “doctrina” in the context of the Latin Age, where it was a synonym for “scientia”,[6] and where (in the 1632 Tractatus of Poinsot[7]) the irreducibly triadic character of the relation formally constituting signs as signs was originally established. Inasmuch as the latter term (“science”) in modern times came to be restricted to idioscopic investigations, while both scientia and doctrina in Latin times applied mainly to cenoscopic investigation, and in view of Peirce’s claim that semiotics belongs first to cenoscopy in its contrast to ideoscopy,[8] there is much wisdom in Sebeok’s decision to prefer in contemporary context the expression “doctrine of signs” over Saussure’s proposal for a “science of signs”,[9] even as ..

Peirce himself, the main transitional figure in this area from a modern to a postmodern intellectual culture in philosophy,[10] would likely have had little use in his own semiotic development for provincial narrowness in trying to eliminate or belittle the oldest name for semiotic study, even as he most emphatically rejected for semiotics the understanding of “doctrine” in the latter modern sense of “dogma” (as Bergman points out[11]). Peirce’s whole idea for semiotics as the doctrine of signs was that semiosis would become the focal point for a community of inquirers, who would investigate the perfusion of signs throughout the universe for its own sake and according to its full requirements. (He would not likely have looked with admiration upon the development of a scholarly circle closed upon his personal work as something to be isolated from or within the larger semiotic community of inquiry.)

Too, no one understood better than Peirce that history is to philosophy (cenoscopic science) what the laboratory is to science in the specialized modern sense (idioscopic science).[citation needed] He distinguished himself among the moderns by being the first thinker educated in the modern mainstream to ignore Descartes’ advice to beware in reading the Latin philosophers antecedent to modernity, “lest in a too absorbed study of these works we should become infected with their errors”.[12] Unlike his modern forebears, and unlike most of his own followers today, Peirce did indeed read the Latins — Aquinas, Scotus, the Conimbricenses, in particular — and from them seems to have gotten some of his most seminal ideas for semiotic, most notably perhaps the Conimbricenses’ thesis that “all thought is in signs”.[13]

In sum, as Peirce recommends, if we go by the history of the terms rather than by etymology, we find two things. First, we find that the oldest common name for the development of a cenoscopic study of the action consequent upon the being proper to signs (according to the classical formula “agere sequitur esse”, or “the way a thing acts reveals what it is that is acting”) — understood as transcending both the nature/culture divide and the inner/outer divide—is “doctrine of signs” (doctrina signorum). Second, we find from John Locke that the Greek form of a name as proposed synonymous with doctrina signorum is Σημιωτική, or “semiotics”.[14]

As above. --Dr Oldekop (talk) 06:29, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

Not all of these considerations surrounding Locke’s term in context—indeed, few of them collectively considered—enter into the explicit consciousness of students of philosophy raised in the late-modern Analytic or even phenomenological traditions of philosophy; yet all of them are at work in the preconscious dimension of understanding at work (as our postmodern philosophical era dawns) in every educated human being alive today as inheritors perforce of linguistic systems shaped by modern philosophy, indeed, yet dating back much farther than the modern traditions of philosophy and linguistics.

  1. ^ Full examination of the circumstances of Locke’s work confirm this point. Locke devoted utmost care in preparing four subsequent editions of his Essay up until his death in 1704. In each of these full editions (2nd ed. 1694; 3rd ed. 1695; 4th ed. 1700; 5th ed. 1706, but preparation completed before Locke’s 1704 death), his original spelling of σημιωτικὴ was retained in his proposal for “the doctrine of signs” (John Deely, “On the Word Semiotics, Formation and Origins”, Semiotica 146.1/4 (2003), 1–49; Why Semiotics? (Ottawa: Legas, 2004). Thus we are constrained to think that because σημειωτικὴ was already a signum ex consuetudine (a customary sign) by Locke’s time, his proposed σημιωτικὴ was quite deliberatively and contrastively a signum ad placitum, a neologism stipulated for the express purpose of naming a new science, a discipline which did not yet exist yet whose right to existence, in contrast to all existing disciplines, needed to be recognized and named accordingly, as Saussure also (but incognizant of Locke’s earlier statement) would point out.
  2. ^ i.e., critical control of objectification (“cenoscopy”) that provides the basis and framework for the later and further development of human knowledge by the use of experiments and the mathematization of experimental results (“ideoscopy”).
  3. ^ John Deely, "Clearing the Mists of a Terminological Mythology Concerning Peirce”.
  4. ^ Deely, John (October 2008 draft), "Clearing the Mists of a Terminological Mythology concerning Peirce", Arisbe PDF Eprint.
  5. ^ Short, T. L. (2007), Peirce's Theory of Signs, Cambridge University Press. PDF Eprint.
  6. ^ “When I had recognized”, Peirce observes in his letter of 23 December 1908 to Lady Welby, that “the history of words, not their etymology, being the key to their meanings...I accordingly recognized that, in order that the lines of demarcation between what we call ‘sciences’ should be real, in view of the rapid growth of sciences and the impossibility of allowing for future discoveries, those lines of demarcation can only represent the separations between different groups of men who devote their lives to the advance of different studies...” (in Semiotics and Significs. The correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, ed. Charles S. Hardwick, p. 79). The history of the expression “doctrine of signs”, thus, not some etymological stipulation or association, is what determines its appropriateness in the naming of semiotics.
  7. ^ John Poinsot, Book I, Question 3, esp. 154/20–30 (i.e., p. 154, lines 20–30), Tractatus de Signis, trans. and ed. John Deely with the assistance of Ralph Austin Powell (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985; corrected 2nd ed. with new materials, South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2013).
  8. ^ Peirce 1908: 482: “I have learned that the only natural lines of demarcation between nearly related sciences are the divisions between the social groups of devotees of those sciences; and for the present the cenoscopic studies (i.e., those studies which do not depend upon new special observations) of all signs remain one undivided science”—Draft of a letter dated 1908 December 24, 25, 28 “On the Classification of Signs”, in The Essential Peirce (1893–1913), Volume 2, ed. Nathan Houser, André De Tienne, Jonathan R. Eller, Cathy L. Clark, Albert C. Lewis, D. Bront Davis (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998).
  9. ^ Thomas A. Sebeok, Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs (Lisse, Netherlands: Peter de Ridder Press, 1976; corrected reprint Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985), “Foreword”, p. ix: “The expression doctrine of signs, for the title of this collection, was selected with deliberation to emblematically align the arguments embodied in these eleven essays with the semiotic tradition of Locke and Peirce rather more closely than with others that prefer to dignify the field—often with premature strategic intent—as a ‘theory’ or even a ‘science’. For Locke, a doctrine was hardly more than a body or system of principles or tenets loosely constituting a department of knowledge. Things, Actions, and Signs were for him “the three great Provinces of the intellectual World, wholly separate and distinct one from another”. The mind makes use of signs both in the contemplation of things and in actions for the attainment of its ends; moreover, it does so for “the right ordering of [the one and the other] for its clearer Information”. The business of the doctrine of signs, or semiotics, he asserted at the very end of his ‘celebrated essay’, was to consider matters such as these”. See further “Doctrine”, terminological entry for the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok et al. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1986), Tome I, p. 214.
  10. ^ The fullest statements of this idea to date remain “Charles Sanders Peirce and the Recovery of Signum”, Chap. 15 in John Deely, Four Ages of Understanding (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 611–668 and The Red Book at [1].
  11. ^ Mats Bergman, Peirce’s Philosophy of Communication (New York, NY: Continuum, 2009), 47ff.
  12. ^ René Descartes 1628, “Rules for the Direction of the Mind”, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross in 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1931), vol. I, p. 6.
  13. ^ See Mauricio Beuchot and J. Deely, “Common Sources for the Semiotic of Charles Peirce and John Poinsot”, Review of Metaphysics XLVIII.3 (March 1995), 539–566. Also John P. Doyle, ed. and trans., The Conimbricenses. Some Questions on Signs (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press); bilingual critical edition of the “De Signis” section of the Conimbricenses’ commentary on Aristotle’s De Interpretatione, in Commentarii Collegii Conimbricensis et Societatis Jesu. In Univer¬sam Dialecticam Aristotelis Stagiritae. Secunda Pars (Lyons: Sumptibus Horatii Cardon, 1607).
  14. ^ In Latin transliteration, Locke’s proposal becomes Semiotica. No such transliteration occurred in Latin’s time as a living language; but it is hard to avoid suspecting some synchronicity in the choice of this term by Sebeok and his editorial colleagues (including Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Juri Lotman, among others) to name the first international journal devoted to semiotics.
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