Free Transcript of Episode 2.6 What Can Semiotics Do For Me?
Semiosis 101 Season 2, Video 6 Transcript
Hello readers.
In this free transcript for the video published on Semiosis 101 on 25 May 2023, we discuss the question What can semiotics do for me? The answer may not be what you expect, as I review two books from different perspectives.
Watch the free video on YouTube for the full impact…
…and here is the video’s transcript.
NOTE: As with any video transcript the tone used is conversational. The following transcript text features ad libs, and therefore should be read in the spirit of any semi-scripted video.
What can semiotics do for me?
That is an honest question asked by anyone.
My answer will be the same as everyone else’s answer.
It will not be a simple market-ese feel-good sound-bite.
The answer is
…it depends.
The answer depends on the personal
needs of ‘me.’
Do you want semiotics as an analytical tool to deconstruct the impact of what has already been visually created? This will lead to a different answer to those creatives who wish to improve how they create designs and illustrations.
So, do you want semiotics to enhance your effective construction of visual communication? In the question what are your expectations for ‘do’? I have presented two scenarios for creatives in regard to ‘me’ and ‘do.’ Deconstruction post-creation or construction at ideation. Semiosis 101 favours the latter.
To explore in this video what semiotics can do for you constructively, I will review two more books that helped shape my thinking around this question. The two books I will review are sort of thematically linked from two different perspectives. One from theory and the other from comparative practice. These books are Peirce For Architects by Prof. Richard Coyne, and A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce by James Jakób Liszka.
Now a general introduction book on Peirce’s semiotic theory is useful, I hear you visual communicators say, but architecture?
I did say this was comparative. Some of the talented graphic designers I have met have begun as architects, so bear with me.
Coyne’s book has great Peircean insights directly applicable into Visual Communication Design.
But first an admission.
Prof. Richard Coyne was my PhD viva internal examiner at Edinburgh College of Art in 2016. As part of my viva voce defence of my thesis Prof. Coyne asked me why Derrida (another philosopher) was not central in my doctoral thesis. This led to an interesting discussion where I defended my centring of Peirce as one of two philosophical themes I was synthesising (the other being Heidegger’s Hermeneutic phenomenology - more on Dasein later in season 2).
Fast forward to 2019 and Prof. Coyne is inspired to re-examine Peirce in the context of his discipline of architecture in a new book. During the first Covid lockdown I bought his book out of curiosity, to discover this kind acknowledgement in his book “A PhD thesis by Dave Wood renewed my interest in C.S. Peirce”.
Ok bragging rights now over, and onto the review of the rich insights of applying Peirce into a comparative design discipline.
Architecture is not Visual Communication Design, so in this book I was interested more in two aspects: Coyne’s interpretation of Peirce’s writing, and then the general application into a different design discipline that can be modelled to another.
On the first point, considering my PhD thesis was the catalyst for Coyne to begin rethinking Peirce, I was particularly interested in his thoughts on the three categories of Representation: Iconic, Indexical and Symbolic. It is the middle level classification of Indexical that he sees relevant to his discipline.
But throughout the book he provides more designer-centric context in which non-semiotician creatives can grasp the theory, especially on page 21. Peirce was one of the founders of the philosophy of Pragmatism, which follows a rule, a Pragmatic Maxim, that sets its philosophical line in sand, so to speak. Peirce’s Semiosis emerges from his Pragmatism, so the maxim helps ground the theory within rules on application.
For non-semioticians, the maxim is just another ‘technical’ detail in the ‘way’ of creatives’ understanding. On page 104 Coyne offers creatives a summary, which I will paraphrase for brevity: A thing’s meaning is dependent upon the practical application of the use of that thing.
We will dedicate a future Semiosis 101 episode to the Pragmatic Maxim, but for now the important notion to grasp to move on is that the thing for us, is whatever we need to semiotically encode. There is a link in the YouTube description below to Prof. Coyne’s book.
The second book is by Liszka, and is one of many introduction books to Peirce that I have in my personal library. (The alternative spelling of semiotics with an extra ‘e’ stems from the Ancient Greek root of mark/seme). For the non-semioticians in the Semiosis 101 audience a tip. If you attempt to read it one chapter at a time, hoping that each chapter will build a literal progression of understanding of Peirce for creatives, you will quickly get disillusioned. These books are not written as a creative’s how-to guide. It is an academic book going into depth on aspects of Peirce’s theoretical semiotic writings.
So how does a creative gain insights and value from such books?
Strategically.
Approach it as a design researcher. Start with the index and contents.
Firstly, in this review I will present you with a summary of what I found crucial in this book that added to my growing understanding of Peirce.
Secondly, I will demonstrate my technique for discovering the useful information and how and where I have used this new knowledge.
Before I proceed, let me emphasise I own this book and my technique would be adapted to library books in a non-permanent way. I use colour highlighters. There I have said it. I permanently annotate in MY reference books. I do this while I read, so I can quickly find the information again.
In library books I do not. Instead I use the non-permanent highlighter sticky strips that peel off! Ok, good practice pep talk is over, onto the review of Liszka’s book. This book is erudite. But my first strategic research-reading of Liszka’s book was part of a literature review. Therefore I used the index to locate the references to ‘abductive reasoning’ (more on that in a future episode) and the ‘triadic relation in the determination flow.’ Through locating a number of pages where variations of those terms appeared, I used highlighter colours to locate them for future referencing.
In this episode and the following two episodes I will be referring to Peirce’s semiotic relationship between, in designer-centric terms, the Concept, its Representation and then Interpretation. But there is no chance of a creative finding those terms in such an index. Peirce’s terms are Object (aka Concept), Representamen (aka Representation) and Interpretant (aka Interpretation). Liszka breaks the operation of these terms down in detail.
In his second chapter Semeiotic Grammar, Liszka discusses in depth, four formal conditions that Peirce sets out that a semiotic sign must have. I will summarise these conditions of semiotic sign here in designer-centric terms, from which some future Semiosis 101 episodes will then explore.
1. Representative Condition:
It must correlate to or represent a Concept (Object)
2. Presentative Condition:
It must have some sense or depth in its presentation of the representation
3. Interpretative Condition:
It must articulate something to someone
4: Triadic Condition:
It must mediate itself as a sign through the inter-relationship of the first three conditions.
In the context of the question that began this video “What can semiotics do for me?” what do these two books do to help answer that question beyond a glib “depends?”
To end this sixth season two video, we can straight away say that the question asked at the beginning is not helpful. So let us reframe the question, and here is why. Design - graphic, interactive, illustration, etc. is not a selfish act. Design is FOR someone. The designer is not serving their own needs, the outcome of design is for a target audience. That target audience in Peirce’s Semiosis is entwined with the designer and client. From the two books you can now see two sides to the effective semiotic encoding of meaning.
Come back to Semiosis 101 for the next two weeks, as we will reframe this week’s question in two ways: What can semiotics do…
…to help creatives encode richer meaning?
…to hook and maintain an audience’s attention?
Watch the free video on YouTube for the full impact…