Signs are important because they can mean something other than themselves. Spots on your chest can mean that you are seriously ill. A blip on the radar can mean impending danger for an aircraft. An X on a map can mean that there is buried treasure. Reading messages like these seems simple enough, but a great deal depends on the context in which they are read.
Spots on the chest need to be judged in a medical context; a blip on the radar needs to be read within the context of aviation; and an X on a map needs to be judged in the context of cartography.
Signs are not isolated; they are dependent for their meaning on the structures that help to organize them, along with the contexts in which they are read and understood.
Semiotics, then, is (among other things) about the tools, processes, structures, and contexts that human beings have for creating, interpreting, and understanding meaning in a variety of different ways.#5995•
We can think of semiotics as applying, in the broadest sense, to life. The reason is simple. All the forms of life that we can identify have meaning for us. So, what exactly is life? In order to understand what life is we should first try to categorize it, before going on to say something about the important distinction between having a life, living a life, and leading a life.#5991•
Life can be categorized in various ways. I have chosen to treat it in the broadest sense possible by dividing it into three basic forms: natural life, artificial life, and supernatural life. As we shall see, natural life is discovered life; artificial life is invented life; and supernatural life is imagined life.#5999•
Natural life is apparent to us from our immediate environment. It is life as we ordinarily know it. It is such that we can make discoveries about it. Humans, animals, plants, and microorganisms, along with the universe, galaxies, planets, minerals, and rocks, fall into this category. In fact, anything that we can observe and study using the theories and methods of the natural sciences (biology, chemistry, and physics) or the human and social sciences (e.g., psychology, sociology, politics, art, design, linguistics, economics, geography, anthropology, philosophy, communication studies, media studies, and material culture) will count as a form of natural life in the sense that I am using it.#6002•
Natural life can be contrasted with artificial life. Artificial life is not discovered in nature. Instead, it is invented by human culture. This kind of life may be wholly or partially non-natural. Artificial life is simulated or synthesized, often with materials that are nonbiological. Due to this nonbiological element, there may be a debate about whether artificial life is truly "real." Such things as replicants, cyborgs, robots, androids, and intelligent computers may appear to imitate human behavior, but we may still have doubts about the extent to which these forms of life can genuinely think, feel, and have consciousness in the same way that humans do.#5996•
Supernatural life is different again. Supernatural life is not life as we ordinarily know it. Instead, it is a form of life that transcends ordinary human knowledge and understanding. We come to know about supernatural life either because we imaginatively speculate upon it (as we do when we envision vampires, mermaids, or unicorns) or because we complement certain acts of faith by imagining the qualities that it might have (as we do if we believe in gods or angels).
This form of life is strange to us because natural laws or processes cannot explain it.#5997•
1. Have a life
2. Live a life
3. Lead a life#5994•
Things that have a life come into existence, persist for a certain amount of time, and then cease to be. The lives of human beings, of animals and plants, of particles, galaxies, and planets, robots and intelligent computers, material objects, and even of angels, vampires, fairies, and unicorns all conform to this pattern of birth, life, and death.#5992•
Things that live a life form a more restricted class. They may engage in reproduction, grow, and develop, undertake autonomous activity, have a certain degree of complexity, engage in adaptive behavior, and be able to process chemicals so as to gain energy. Most humans and animals do these things. In this sense, we want to say that they are living their lives.#6001•
Finally, there are things that have a life, live a life, and also lead a life. Leading a life is about making plans and having projects; it is about decision-making and development, fitting means to ends, conducting oneself according to certain moral codes, being part of a system of values, and trying to make sense of the world in complex ways.
These are the sorts of elements that make up typical human lives.
They are the things that give human life a meaning.
In other words, being human is having the potential to lead a life.#6000•
Signs come from two basic sources: the first is natural; the second is cultural. Natural signs arise from the way in which nature takes its course. Anything that is considered natural, or to have a natural aspect to it, can be considered under this heading. Our immediate environment of animals, vegetables, and minerals all exhibit features that have natural meanings to us as human beings, as do the further environments of the cosmos.
(Here anthroposemiotics links with zoosemiotics and phytosemiotics.) Natural meanings are not invented by human beings; they are discovered by them.
For example, the appearance of a rat on which there are infected fleas such as Xenopsylla cheopsis means that there is the possibility of catching the bubonic plague; evidence of the fungus Phytophthora infestans on potatoes means that they have potato blight; and discovering that a substance has the atomic number 79 means that we are in the presence of gold.
In contrast, culturally produced signs depend not on how nature is, but on how we are.#5989•
Fascinatingly, Newton's manuscripts reveal that when he first conducted his experiments into rainbows he found only five colors. However, in the Optics of 1704 he added two colors, to make seven in all. So why did Newton change his mind? The reason seems to be that Newton was impressed by the mystical qualities of the number seven, which at the time was the number of the planets thought to exist, as well as the number that the ancients thought symbolized God's perfection.
By insisting that the rainbow had seven colors, then, Newton gave the rainbow the mystical quality that he thought it should have.
Of course, there is now also a cultural expectation that leads us to say that there are seven colors in a rainbow.
But we would do well to remember that this was an idea invented by Newton.
Moreover, it is not an idea readily accepted by other cultures.#5993•
Metaphors are different from the other ways of meaning because they draw out connections between ideas, concepts, objects, images, texts, events, and processes that seem quite tenuous on the surface. Metaphors operate not by saying that one thing is like another (as is the case with analogies), but by insisting that one thing is another.
The metaphors that we use tend to reflect certain features of the society in which they are produced.
In the Western world, we live in a society that is largely mechanistic and consumerist in its outlook.
So when it comes to discussing all manner of topics we often use mechanistic and consumerist metaphors that reflect this outlook.#5990•
Let's take one concrete and one abstract example of a metaphor to see how they operate. When discussing a concrete topic such as disease, we often talk in mechanistic terms. This leads us to speak about the war against AIDS or the fight against cancer. The idea is that there really is a battle being fought against the diseases that we wish to conquer.
The same point about the influence of society applies when we speak about more abstract topics such as time.
Here, we frequently discuss matters in consumerist terms: we talk about using time, wasting time, saving time, and spending time, as if time were a commodity like money, rather than a process that unfolds.#5998•
8
Yet by thinking of meanings as natural we do ourselves a disservice. This is because what is often seen as natural is just the product of various cultural habits and prejudices that have become so engrained that we no longer notice them.#6032•
Communicating danger to people in the future seems to be simple. But it isn't. This is because over such a long period a message can easily be distorted or altered without this being in any way intended. (This distortion or alteration in the meaning or method of transmission of a message, whether intended or not, is called "noise.") Languages, both written and spoken, always change.
The meanings of symbols are often lost in the passage of time.
In fact, most messages are bound so closely to a particular period and place that even a short time later they cannot be understood.
Therefore, ensuring that a message created now can be decoded by future generations is highly problematic.#6109•