This glossary serves as a term bank for various key terms from fields of study pertaining to the construction of meaning in groups.
Biosemiotics
Noun
Biosemiotics is a field of semiotics and biology that studies the prelinguistic meaning-making, biological interpretation processes, production of signs and codes and communication processes in the biological realm. Biosemiotics integrates the findings of biology and semiotics and proposes a paradigmatic shift in the scientific view of life, in which semiosis (sign process, including meaning and interpretation) is one of its immanent and intrinsic features.
Cell signaling
Noun
In biology, cell signaling (or cell communication) is the ability of a cell to receive, process, and transmit signals with its environment and with itself. Cell signaling is a fundamental property of all cellular life in prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Signals that originate from outside a cell (or extracellular signals) can be physical agents like mechanical pressure, voltage, temperature, light, or chemical signals (e.g., small molecules, peptides, or gas).
Code
Noun
In semiotics, a code is a set of cultural conventions, contemporary sub-codes, and themes used to communicate meaning. The most common is one's spoken language, but the term can also be used to refer to any narrative form: consider the color scheme of an image (e.g. red for danger), or the rules of a board game (e.g. the military signifiers in chess).
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) emphasized that signs only acquire meaning and value when they are interpreted in relation to each other. He believed that the relationship between the signifier and the signified was arbitrary. Hence, interpreting signs requires familiarity with the sets of conventions or codes currently in use to communicate meaning.
Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) elaborated the idea that the production and interpretation of texts depends on the existence of codes or conventions for communication. Since the meaning of a sign depends on the code within which it is situated, codes provide a framework within which signs make sense.
To that extent, codes represent a broad interpretative framework used by both addressers and their addressees to encode and decode the messages. Self-evidently, the most effective communications will result when both creator and interpreter use exactly the same code. Since signs may have many levels of meaning from the denotational to the connotational, the addresser's strategy is to select and combine the signs in ways that limit the range of possible meanings likely to be generated when the message is interpreted.
Connotation
Noun
In semiotics, connotation arises when the denotative relationship between a signifier and its signified is inadequate to serve the needs of the community. A second level of meanings is termed connotative. These meanings are not objective representations of the thing, but new usages produced by the language group. Connotative meanings are developed by the community and do not represent the inherent qualities of the thing or concept originally signified as the meaning. The addition of such meanings introduces complexity into the coding system. If a signifier has only a single denotational meaning, the use of the sign will always be unambiguously decoded by the audience. But connotative meanings are context-dependent.
Encoding
Noun
Encoding, in semiotics, is the process of creating a message for transmission by an addresser to an addressee. The complementary process – interpreting a message received from an addresser – is called decoding.
The process of message exchanges, or semiosis, is a key characteristic of human life depending on rule-governed and learned codes that, for the most part, unconsciously guide the communication of meaning between individuals. These interpretive frameworks or linking grids were termed "myths" by Roland Barthes (1915–1980) and pervade all aspects of culture from personal conversation to the mass media's output
Icon (SIgn Type)
Noun
Icons are those signs that signify by means of similarity between sign vehicle and sign object (e.g. a portrait, or a map).
Index (Sign Type)
Noun
A sign that signifies by means of a direct relation of contiguity or causality between sign vehicle and sign object (e.g. a symptom as a sign of disease, smoke as a sign of fire).
Metonymy
Noun
Metonymy is a figure of speech in which a thing or concept is referred to by the name of something closely associated with that thing or concept. Both metonymy and metaphor involve the substitution of one term for another. In metaphor, this substitution is based on some specific analogy between two things, whereas in metonymy the substitution is based on some understood association or contiguity.
Modality
Noun
In semiotics, a modality is a particular way in which information is to be encoded for presentation to humans, i.e. to the type of sign and to the status of reality ascribed to or claimed by a sign, text, or genre. It is more closely associated with the semiotics of Peirce than Saussure because meaning is conceived as an effect of a set of signs. So, the modality refers to a certain type of information and/or the representation format in which information is stored. The medium is the means whereby this information is delivered to the senses of the interpreter.
Ontology
Noun
In metaphysics, Ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality.
Ontology includes questions of how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exist on the most fundamental level. Ontologists often try to determine what the categories or highest kinds are and how they form a system of categories that provides an encompassing classification of all entities. Commonly proposed categories include substances, properties, relations, states of affairs and events. These categories are characterized by fundamental ontological concepts, like particularity and universality, abstractness and concreteness, or possibility and necessity. Of special interest is the concept of ontological dependence, which determines whether the entities of a category exist on the most fundamental level. Disagreements within ontology are often about whether entities belonging to a certain category exist and, if so, how they are related to other entities.
Phenomenology
Noun
Phenomenology is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. In its most basic form, phenomenology attempts to create conditions for the objective study of topics usually regarded as subjective: consciousness and the content of conscious experiences such as judgements, perceptions, and emotions.
Sacred Canopy
Noun
Item B. Berger (1990) argues that religion provides a 'shared universe of meaning' and was used by people to make sense of the world, and to give their lives focus and order. He refers to religion as a 'sacred canopy', stretching over society and helping people to cope with the uncertainties of life. A sacred canopy could therefore be considered as a form of shared semiosphere that serves to provide a shared sign-space for its adherents.
Example: The sacred canopies of some religions have become less tightly woven in the modern age due to sustained contact with competing cosmogenies and worldviews.
Seme
Noun
A seme is a proposed unit of transmitted or intended meaning; it is atomic or indivisible. A sememe can be the meaning expressed by a morpheme, such as the English pluralizing morpheme -s, which carries the sememic feature [+ plural]. Alternatively, a single sememe (for example [go] or [move]) can be conceived as the abstract representation of such verbs as skate, roll, jump, slide, turn, or boogie. It can be thought of as the semantic counterpart to any of the following: a meme in a culture, a gene in a genome, or an atom (or, more generally, an elementary particle) in a substance. A seme is the name for the smallest unit of meaning recognized in semantics, referring to a single characteristic of a sememe.
Semiosphere
Noun
Semiosphere falls under biosemiotics and is an abstract, epiphenomenal, dialogic membrane of semiosis, in which sign processes operate under the set of all interconnected Umwelt (the sign-self's / subject's narrative boundary understanding of its self-world derived through the abstract process of reading text (signs), generating a paradigm of symptoms, signals, icons, indexes, symbols, and names from the semiosphere's code (semiotics) for interacting with other Umwelt.)
Semiotics of Culture
Noun
Semiotics of culture is a research field within semiotics that attempts to define culture from semiotic perspective and as a type of human symbolic activity, creation of signs and a way of giving meaning to everything around. Therefore, here culture is understood as a system of symbols or meaningful signs. Because the main sign system is the linguistic system, the field is usually referred to as semiotics of culture and language. Under this field of study symbols are analyzed and categorized in certain class within the hierarchal system.
Sign
Noun
In semiotics, a sign is anything that communicates a meaning that is not the sign itself to the interpreter of the sign. The meaning can be intentional such as a word uttered with a specific meaning, or unintentional, such as a symptom being a sign of a particular medical condition. Signs can communicate through any of the senses, visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or taste.
Example: Modern theories deny the Saussurian distinction between signifier and signified, and look for meaning not in the individual sign, but in its context and the framework of potential meanings that could be applied.
fr: Le signe
Signaling Theory (Biology)
Noun
Within evolutionary biology, signaling theory is a body of theoretical work examining communication between individuals, both within species and across species. The central question is when organisms with conflicting interests, such as in sexual selection, should be expected to provide honest signals (no presumption being made of conscious intention) rather than cheating. Mathematical models describe how signaling can contribute to an evolutionarily stable strategy.
Signals are given in contexts such as mate selection by females, which subjects the advertising males' signals to selective pressure. Signals thus evolve because they modify the behavior of the receiver to benefit the signaler. Signals may be honest, conveying information which usefully increases the fitness of the receiver, or dishonest. An individual can cheat by giving a dishonest signal, which might briefly benefit that signaler, at the risk of undermining the signaling system for the whole population.
Symbol (Sign Type)
Noun
A sign which signifies by means of arbitrary law, social convention, or habit of interpreted reference, regardless of resemblance and of factual connection.
Synecdoche
Noun
Synecdoche is a type of metonymy: it is a figure of speech in which a term for a part of something is used to refer to the whole (pars pro toto), or vice versa (totum pro parte).
Umwelt
Noun
In the semiotic theories of Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas A. Sebeok, umwelt is the "biological foundations that lie at the very epicenter of the study of both communication and signification in the human [and non-human] animal". The term is usually translated as "self-centered world". Each functional component of an umwelt has a meaning that represents the organism's model of the world. These functional components correspond approximately to perceptual features, as described by Anne Treisman. It is also the semiotic world of the organism, including all the meaningful aspects of the world for any particular organism. It can be water, food, shelter, potential threats or points of reference for navigation. An organism creates and reshapes its own umwelt when it interacts with the world. This is termed a 'functional circle'. The umwelt theory states that the mind and the world are inseparable because it is the mind that interprets the world for the organism. Because of the individuality and uniqueness of the history of every single organism, the umwelten of different organisms differ. When two umwelten interact, this creates a semiosphere. As a term, umwelt also unites all the semiotic processes of an organism into a whole.
