Sign Worship

By Paul Bouissac

Editorial to Semiotix, issue 9, May 2007

Rather than confidently aiming at absolute truth, scientific research strives to

reduce ignorance. Sustainable knowledge is backed by healthy skepticism and
constant willingness to critically reconsider even the best entrenched
assumptions. Genuine research distrusts direct phenomenal evidence, and relies
on limited predictions supported by calculations. Results are rarely the ones
which were anticipated. In general, discoveries are surprising, that is, counter-
intuitive. Everyday life evidence is useful only in a limited way – we cannot intuit
the causes of long-term effects, nor factor in our working memory too many
parameters in assessing complex situations. This is why humans painstakingly
devised ways of overcoming their relative cognitive blindness by crunching
numbers and manipulating symbols. We end up knowing a few things that we
cannot fully understand because this knowledge is at odds with our direct
phenomenological intuitions.
As Nobel Prize physicist Richard Feynman put it his Alix G. Mautner
Memorial Lectures: “I am going to describe to you how Nature is – and if you
don’t like it, that’s going to get in the way of your understanding it. It’s a problem
that physicists have learned to deal with: They’ve learned to realize that whether
they like a theory or they don’t like a theory is not the essential question. Rather
it is whether or not the theory gives predictions that agree with experiment. It is
not a question of whether a theory is philosophically delightful, or easy to
understand, or perfectly reasonable from the point of view of common sense.”
(QED: The strange theory of light and matter, 1985, p.10).
The “science of signs” started as a bold vision, the idea that a great
diversity of domains more or less restricted to the human sphere, could be
conceptualized through a single general model: the sign. This was unexpected
and exhilarating, as is, at first, any form of scientific reductionism, and such a
novel approach to the great diversity of social interactions and cultural
productions, soon expanded beyond the human sphere to encompass all forms of
life under the name of biosemiotics, unleashed a flow of speculations and a few
research projects. In the meantime the notions of sign, sign-dynamics or sign-
systems (as some prefer to say) have come to designate indiscriminately
different theoretical constructions and common sense notions that form the
basis of what could be called “folk semiotics” (a component of “folk psychology”).
Echoing an earlier assessment by Ogden and Richards (1923), David Lidov
pointedly called attention to this state of affairs in his article on Sign in the
Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of Semiotics (1998). Space and time
metaphors have characterized these models of the sign, variously conceived as
structures or processes, apprehended in the forms of graphs and diagrams as
abstract relations or as transformations, dynamic events, staggered open-ended
interpretations, replications, and the like. These were ways of expressing the
shortcomings of a single notion that is both loaded with philosophical history
and too simplistic (even in its most sophisticated forms), or perhaps too self-
evident, for actually explaining anything. Impervious to these predicaments,
semiotic discourse keeps uncritically gravitating around the Sign or its temporal
proxy, Semiosis. Its absolute centrality is taken for granted. There is a serious risk
that semiotics could become a sign-worshipping intellectual pastime, indulging
in self-fulfilling prophecies, unable to deliver any epistemological surprises, and
mostly translating the knowledge of various disciplines into the predictable
philosophical or linguistic jargons that have come to dominate semiotics.
Perhaps, the notion of signhas outlived its heuristic usefulness and scientific
fertility.
This is why semioticians should pay more attention to other notions that
might help them break away from such a sterilizing fascination by refocusing,
reframing and reassessing their epistemological quest. One such notion is
thememe, which most semioticians have found unpalatable when it was
proposed some three decades ago by Richard Dawkins (1976). There is no
question here of substituting an object of worship for another. Memetics has
already shown its limitations in this respect. The point of interest, however, is
that the meme is a model that intersects with several versions of the sign model.
It focuses our epistemological attention on what Saussure called “the life of
signs in social life” and it provides an evolutionary twist to the Peircean notion
of semiosis, by underlying the fact that what we call “signs” often happen to die,
as archaeology and historical linguistics amply demonstrate. It offers an
opportunity to re-think or “un-think” the interplay of information and behavior,
of the emergence and extinction of symbols and meanings. It opens the way to
new methods of investigation from evolutionary ecology and niche construction
to population genetics and game theory, which could refreshingly recast old
semiotic problems in a novel light, and, in so doing, bring in some mathematics
and its capacities for leading the human mind to true discoveries and new
theories. It also brings into play an interesting shift of perspective since the
meme is modeled on biological processes (thus making it amenable to
neuroscientific investigations, notably regarding memory and cognition)
whereas the sign models are rooted in philosophical speculations that tend to be
used to interpret known biological processes rather than guide further inquiries
aimed at reducing ignorance.
All advances in knowledge have proceeded through questioning what was
previously taken for granted. Semioticians have reached a point of stasis in
which too many assumptions have become articles of faith in a kind of sign
worship.

Imitation, Memory, and Cultural Changes: Probing the Meme Hypothesis, a

symposium organized by the Toronto Semiotic Circle. Proceedings and Videos.