Semiotics Series: Peircean vs. Saussurean Semiotics (Exclusive)
Added 2021-04-01 00:00:02 +0000 UTCErik and Pills (mostly Erik) goes through some examples to explain the more general utility and applicability of C.S. Peirce's triadic semiotic model, as opposed to Saussure's binary semiotic model. We discuss car accidents, interspecies communication, and music adaptations.
Please look at the attached chart to follow along, this one was too difficult to explain without a visual aid!
Comments
Really liked this episode. Sorry I'm slowly making my way through your content at my own pace. What came to mind throughout is what is really happening with deception, you guys mentioned Baudrillard and power relations towards the end. So one subject purposefully producing a different interpretant than what is actually going on in material reality in another subject e.g. a predator with camouflage produces the interpretant, oh that rustling was just some foliage, in the prey. Apple promotes the idea of fungibility in their marketing for their products to make customers believe they are purchasing the legisign when they are actually purchasing the sinsign, so they get away with planned obsolescence. Politicians setting up photoshoots for optics to invoke the interpretant of sympathy in the minds of voters, when materially they can still make decisions that will harm those voters. People buying modern Levi's jeans and having them fall apart after a few months because they were expecting a different qualisign of the object to the one they got. Seems our modern world is totally full of these predatory mis-interpretant situations. Pierce's lense is really useful, I'm glad to be learning this, so thanks Eric and Pills.
Myles Jeffers
2022-02-25 21:52:34 +0000 UTCThanks for this, it's a very accessible and interesting intro
anacidcommie
2021-06-26 08:54:54 +0000 UTCPlease thank Erik for a really interesting episode, I found this a lot easier to understand than the first episode, and I can appreciate how much more specific and widely applicable the Piercian system is compared to the Saussurian one. TBF on Baudrillard tho, as far as I can see, he was looking at the whole territory thing as a mental and social construct, simulations and simulacra as the way we collectively perceive the world through the lens of the neoliberal spectacle which shapes our way of thinking and acting on the world, not on how it would impact the real, physical world that exists outside of our perception of it (in the sense of climate change/environmental degradation etc). Also I don't know how much he actually cared, in the sense that he was a self-described nihilist after all. But I definitely haven't read enough to be 100% positive about this take, and I'm sure both of you could correct me on this if I'm wrong.
anacidcommie
2021-06-22 18:49:27 +0000 UTCBBC explains Pragmatism, a helpful intro for those interested: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p003k9f5 Apparently CSP was a philanderer.
Wayne Ha
2021-04-05 08:09:53 +0000 UTCI'll ask him brb
Plastic Pills
2021-04-01 16:06:38 +0000 UTCMore complex just means there is more contingency, not that it's better. Getting to the experience of red itself takes a billion years of evolutionary contingency, though, children, animals also have a feeling of red. To construct a syllogism you need to have a sufficiently complex language, abstraction, a set of rules for logic, and then some sort of education as to what the value and use of a syllogism is, all that requires a lot of social contingency in addition to the perceptual. With that, of course, is that a syllogistic sign has a very limited use (like academic papers or arguing with people on the internet).
Plastic Pills
2021-04-01 15:40:51 +0000 UTCSeems to me that as we move from levels I to X on the chart, we get simpler, not more complex. If you encounter raw experience, as if for the first time, it’s overwhelmingly rich (such as if you use drugs or meditative samadhi to relax the part of the mind that wants to reduce experience to symbols). As you move toward the abstraction of level X, you desiccate, like dried soup. A university instructor, for example, has to re-hydrate the soup for the incoming students, to make it edible again, to help them reconnect to the ocean of raw experience that had been removed by the symbol-system. We can of course never know what another person’s raw experience really is. Communication is an intersubjective guessing game that requires interaction, trial and error (testing our presumptions). The movie “Arrival” touches on this a bit, in the context of interspecies communication. The particular way that a symbol-system collapses raw experience into signs has to do with choices, which of course leads to questions of power, as you alluded to with your closing comments on Borges and mapping!
Michael
2021-04-01 15:22:51 +0000 UTCGuys, great job covering a difficult topic. On Mr Tate's work, is data visualisation the mediation between physical territories and its representation in digital form (colour choice, distortions in area sizes and distances, geopolitical claims)? Concur that this comes up often among users of GIS (fan of Esri ArcGIS myself). Also I see potential application for decoding symbols emerging from protests and/or sociopolitical movements in visual, auditory, material, and performative forms.
Wayne Ha
2021-04-01 03:07:52 +0000 UTC
