|
|
|
______________________________________________________________________
What is semiotics?
______________________________________________________________________
-
Semiotics is a science concerned with signs. It deals with all processes
of information interchange in which signs feature. Human beings talk, write,
blink, wave, and disguise themselves. They put up signposts and erect barriers
to communicate messages to other people. They produce and interpret signs.
But even if no-one intends to communicate anything, sign processes are
taking place: a doctor interprets the symptoms of a disease, a dog follows
a trail, a thief triggers an alarm.
-
Semiotics explores all such processes with regard to common structures.
Its scope reaches far beyond the area of cultural phenomena and involves
the interaction of animals, the activity of orientation and perception
of all living things, the stimulus and response processes of animals and
plants and even the metabolism of organisms and information processes by
machines.
-
The scientific disciplines concerned with different aspects of culture(s)
(linguistics, literary science, musicology, art history, archeology, history,
sociology, political science, religious studies etc.), nature (chemistry,
biology, physics etc.)and technology are integrated in semiotics by exploring
the sign character of the cultural, natural and technological phenomena
examined.
-
Semiotics describes the various sign phenomena (descriptive semiotics),
systematizes them in theories and models (theoretic semiotics), and attempts
to apply this knowledge in helping to find solutions to problems in science,
society, commerce, and in everyday life (applied semiotics).
-
Semiotic questioning is older than all individual scientific disciplines
and serves to overcome their isolation and to partly neutralize their specialisation.
-
Semiotics offers specialists from diverse disciplines and fields of practice
an interdisciplinary forum for the analysis of common problems. Semiotics
serves as a theoretical basis for the dialogue between cultures.
|
