English / Greek · sēmeîon
semiotics
A name for a looking you already do: how one thing stands for another, and that it does not always stand in the same way.
Etymology
Greek sēmeîon: mark, token, omen, medical symptom. English semiotics is the study of that standing-for. Semiology is the sister word from Saussure’s French. The house prefers the looking to the school.1
Semantic range
A pipe that looks like a pipe. Smoke that came from fire. A flag you were taught. The word pipe, which does not look like a pipe at all. A sentence that can lie. Magritte writing under a picture: this is not a pipe.2
What the gloss loses
The word sounds like a department. It is closer to a question: what job is the standing-for doing, to whom, in what respect.
Misuse
Using semiotics as a fog. Or treating every coincidence as a coded telegram because a science of signs exists.
How does this stand for anything, if it does?
Notes
- Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), s.v. σημεῖον.
- Charles S. Peirce, “What Is a Sign?,” in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. the Peirce Edition Project, vol. 2, 4–10 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
