Semiotics
its meaning by way of its distinctiveness as
SILVER RATTASEPP and KALEVI KULL
University of Tartu, Estonia
Contemporary usage of the term semiotics
is derived from John Lockes Essay Concern-
ing Human Understanding (1690), which
presents the requirement for a science that
would study the signs the mind makes use
of in acquiring knowledge. However, the
concept semeiotics also existed in Greek, to
denote the study of medical symptoms and
natural signs. The key difference with latter
development of semiotics is the absence, in
Greek thought, of a notion of sign that would
be applicable beyond the natureculture
binary. Such a general notion of signs
was introduced by Augustine of Hippo
(354430). Nevertheless, it was not until the
late nineteenth century that semiotics began
to develop as a separate branch of the sci-
ences. The two leading figures and founders
of contemporary semiotics were Charles
Sanders Peirce (18391914) and especially
Ferdinand de Saussure (18571913); the
posthumous publication in 1916 of the lat-
ters Cours de linguistique gnrale (Course
in General Linguistics) laid the groundwork
for much of twentieth-century semiotics in
the West.
De Saussure proposed a science of semi-
ology to cover the study of all arbitrary sign
relations, which would be patterned after
linguistic signs. He posited a dyadic or binary
model for semiological analysis, consisting
of linguistic terms, called signifiers, and
their conventional relation to cognitive states,
called signifieds. Language conceived as the
full set of such arbitrary and therefore con-
ventional sign relations is thus a total system
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies, First Edition.
Edited by Daniel Thomas Cook and J. Michael Ryan.
2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118989463.wbeccs205
of distinctions, in which every sign acquires
related to other signs within the same system.
As a consequence, de Saussure limits sign
action within the realm of culture.
Earlier, however, Charles S. Peirce had
proposed a more general definition of signs,
founded on convention conceived as a for-
mation of habit, and divided into numerous
classifications, of which the distinction
between icons, indexes, and symbols has
become the most widespread. Referring to
the modes or mechanisms by which habit-
ual sign usages are acquired, icons refer to
the relation of similarity or resemblance,
indexes refer to the relation of correlation
or causality, and symbols to relations based
on conventions, that is, the dispositions or
factitious habits of their users. The sign is,
in this instance, not an object in itself, but
a set of conditions that have to be met in
order for processes of meaning to appear
and which, furthermore, require processes of
habit formation. Unlike de Saussures model,
which was patterned after language, Peirce
took a pragmatic or phenomenological route,
defining a sign as cognizable, as something
that can be experienced. Also unlike de Saus-
sure, who proposed a binary conception of
signs, Peirces was a threefold one, comprising
of an object, an interpretant, and a represen-
tamen. A sign is determined by something
other than itself, called its object, but which,
on the other hand, determines some mind
or knower, called the interpretant, so that
the interpretation of the object is related by
way of a mediator, called the representamen.
A sign is thus something which stands for
somebody or something in some respect or
capacity. With these general conceptions of
sign action, Peirce laid the foundation for an
2 SEM IOTICS
understanding of semiosis that would not be
limited to human culture.
Picking up on this theme, in 1963 Thomas
A. Sebeok, a linguist and a biologist, intro-
duced zosemiotics as the study of animal
semiosis. In addition to Peirce, this devel-
opment became heavily based on the
Umwelttheorie of the German-Estonian
biologist Jakob von Uexkll (18641944)
and the theory of semiosphere developed by
Juri Lotman (1990; 2009/1992). An Umwelt
(a concept usually retained in its original
German form in English-language texts)
refers to the experienced, meaningful world
of an organism, based on that organisms
species-specific capacities for perception
and action. Umwelt, the lived, sensed, rec-
ognized world of an organism, comprises
those aspects of the environment that the
organism is capable of perceiving, which
are then rendered into capacities of action
or behavior toward those aspects. The envi-
ronmental objects which the organism can
perceive and thus relate to take on a certain
tone, a meaning for that organism. Humans,
too, have their particular Umwelten, and
hence biosemiotics is a comparative study of
meaning in human and nonhuman worlds.
This fruitful fusion of Peircean semiotics
and Uexkllian biosemiotics led Sebeok to
propose the thesis that since all living enti-
ties incorporate a species-specific model of
their environment by means of signification
and communication by signs, semiosis is
coextensive with life.
The academic institutionalization of semi-
otics started to become more widespread
from the 1960s onward, with the first major
centers established in Paris, Bologna, Bloom-
ington, Moscow, and Tartu. The International
Association for Semiotic Studies was estab-
lished in 1969. The oldest journals in the field
are Sign Systems Studies (initially Trudy po
znakovym sistemam, established in 1964) and
Semiotica (established in 1969).
By the early twenty-first century, semi-
otics had generally replaced semiology as
the name for the discipline, and emphasis
has slowly shifted from the static, binary,
and linguistic model of de Saussure toward
the more encompassing and dynamic, tri-
adic model of Peirce. Another development
is the understanding that the sciences as
based on experimental control of its objects
depend fundamentally on the prior critical
or conceptual control of objectification that
would provide the framework within which
sciences proper operate. Semiotics, the study
of the action of signs, is the science of the
latter. In consequence semiotics is necessar-
ily an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary
perspective that requires input from more
specialized sciences, and studies the premises
and assumptions, the habits and methods that
establish the boundaries of these sciences but
which often go unnoticed within those sci-
ences themselves. In general, semiotics serves
both as a theoretical and methodological tool
for the scientific study of cultural and living
(communicative) systems.
Semiotics of culture as a major branch in
semiotics owes much to the TartuMoscow
school of semiotics, which was initiated
by Juri Lotman (19221993). The aim of
semiotics of culture is to study the whole
set of sign systems that organize culture,
including arts, media, everyday behavior, and
material culture. The entirety of the cultural
field comprises a semiosphere, a relational
field of interconnected semiotic phenom-
ena, characterized by various dynamical
processes, such as those between the center
and the periphery of any given semiosphere,
as well as cross-border communication and
translation between different semiospheres.
Since sign relations are acquired or learnt
relations, they are therefore also modeling
relations. They serve as modeling relations
because a learnt relation can work as a sign
relation only if it is about some particular

existing regularity or recognizable difference,
that is, there cannot be learning without some
regularity to be learned. Accordingly, cultural
sign systems are modeling systems that carry
within themselves an acquired system of
distinctions and discriminations.
Analyses of consumer culture, such as
those of brand communication, consumer
behavior, marketing, identity formation,
and visual language, are a staple of cultural
and media semiotics. Necessarily, the world
of consumption is a web spun of various
meanings, codes, and symbols, all further-
more embedded in a particular historical
and cultural context. The goal of the semiotic
approach to consumption is to pick apart
those elements of interpretation which, for
everyday consumers, may seem obvious
and immediate, but which in fact consist
of layers of meaning making of a highly
complex nature. Applied semiotic analysis
reveals the (often hidden) codes by which
the object of analysis is constructed: the
relational structure of the object or phe-
nomenon that is responsible for its role and
dynamics in an organization, including, for
instance, that of consumers behavior and
preferences or values. Since semiotics studies
the underlying conditions and premises of
meaning making, it also eschews entrenched
dichotomies, such as those between fact
and value, for example, perceiving both
as premised upon a prior construction of
meaning (of objectivation).
As a result, a key element of the semiotic
approach to consumer culture is the shift of
focus from individual decision making and
individualized examples of consumer culture,
toward an analysis of dynamical cultural
interaction and communicative phenomena.
An important corollary to this, however, is
that a semiotic study of consumer culture
must also analyze the first-person perspec-
tive of consumers and their subjective and
intersubjective meaning making, rather than
SEM IOTICS 3
remaining in the position of a supposedly
impartial observer.
An early and influential example of con-
sumer studies from a semiotic perspective
is Jean Baudrillards now-classic early work,
such as The System of Objects (1996/1968) and
The Consumer Society (1997/1970), according
to which any analysis of the objects of con-
sumption needs to be a study of the discourse
about objects. Needs and desires, and their
means of gratification, are symbolically or
discursively constructed, and consumption
is used to place the consumer within the
symbolic field of the society. The system of
objects is a system of symbolic goods that
consumers use to signify themselves for the
society.
A thorough overview of further semiotic
developments in consumption and consumer
studies is provided by Mick et al. (2004). The
most pertinent issue has been to develop
explanatory frameworks for conceptualizing
the types of sign relations that constitute a
products potential meanings. For example,
the influence on consumers of various signs
may be based on recognition, comprehen-
sion, learning, memory, and appreciation
(aesthetic reactions) (Mick et al. 2004, 13).
Such analysis extends to the level of prod-
ucts, brands, and marketing (see also Danesi
2008; Rossolatos 2014; Williamson 1998).
As in many other branches of semiotics,
the Peircean and Saussurean schools are
relatively distinct in consumer semiotics.
The Saussurean paradigm (as developed by
Louis Hjelmslev and Algirdas Julius Greimas)
has focused on structural interpretation
of textual meanings, with the purpose of
identifying potential meanings of objects of
consumer culture. The Peircean paradigm has
focused on providing conceptual analyses for
the development of theoretical frameworks
for studying consumer culture. The fruitful
cooperation of these two major paradigms is
a present goal of general semiotics.
4 SEM IOTICS
Beginning from the 1990s, semiotic meth-
ods have been used in commercial semiotics
by companies providing semiotic consul-
tancy, one of the first among which was the
UK-based company Semiotic Solutions.
SEE ALSO: Barthes, Roland; Cultural Studies;
Emotions and Consumption; Methods of
Consumer Research; Needs and Wants;
Symbolic Value
REFERENCES
Baudrillard, Jean. 1996/1968. The System of Objects.
London: Verso.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1997/1970. The Consumer Soci-
ety: Myths and Structures. London: Sage.
Danesi, Marcel. 2008. Why it Sells: Decoding the
Meanings of Brand Names, Logos, Ads, and Other
Marketing and Advertising Ploys. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield.
Lotman, Juri. 1990. Universe of the Mind: A Semi-
otic Theory of Culture. London: I.B. Tauris.
Lotman, Juri. 2009/1992. Culture and Explosion.
Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Mick, David Glen, James E. Burroughs, Partick
Hetzel, and Mary Yoko Brannen. 2004. Pursu-
ing the Meaning of Meaning in the Commer-
cial World: An International Review of Market-
ing and Consumer Research Founded on Semi-
otics. Semiotica 152(1/4): 174.
Rossolatos, George. 2014. Brand Equity Planning
with Structuralist Rhetorical Semiotics. Kassel,
Germany: Kassel University Press.
Williamson, Judith. 1998. Decoding Advertise-
ments: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising.
London: Marion Boyars.
FURTHER READING
Berger, Arthur A. 2010. The Objects of Affection:
Semiotics and Consumer Culture. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Cobley, Paul, ed. 2010. The Routledge Companion
to Semiotics. London: Routledge.
Danesi, Marcel. 2002. Understanding Media Semi-
otics. London: Oxford University Press.
Holbrook, Morris B., and Elizabeth C. Hirschman.
1993. The Semiotics of Consumption: Interpreting
Symbolic Consumer Behavior in Popular Culture
and Works of Art. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Krampen, Martin, Klaus Oehler, Roland Posner,
Thomas A. Sebeok, and Thure von Uexkll, eds.
1987. Classics of Semiotics. New York: Plenum
Press.
Nth, Winfried. 1998. The Language of Com-
modities: Groundwork for a Semiotics of
Consumer Goods. In European Perspectives on
Consumer Behaviour, edited by M. Lambkin, G.
Foxall, F. van Raaij, and B. Heilbrunn, 354369.
London: Prentice Hall.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1994. Signs: An Introduction to
Semiotics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.