Meaning can only be explained by symbols, and symbols are used to explain meaning. The flip verse: there is no meaning that can be explained without symbols, and there are no symbols that do not explain meaning.

This may sound like a tangled statement, but it actually means simply: one meaning consists of two basic links: sending (expressing) and receiving (interpreting), both of which must be completed with symbols, and when the emitted sign is received and interpreted, it is replaced by another sign.

Therefore, the interpretation of meaning is the beginning of a new symbolic process, and interpretation can only temporarily end a symbolic process, but cannot end meaning. Precisely because each extended interpretation is a "perception that is thought to carry meaning", the symbol is the continuum of this ideographic and interpretation.

Definition of semiotics......

Chandler's Elementary Semiotics begins with "semiotics is the study of signs" to define semiotics, and then says, "If you're not that kind of person and you're going to get entangled in irritating problems and make people do it, then we'll talk about ......."

Amberto Eco defined it as "the study of everything that can be considered a sign", and another Italian semiotician, Petrelli, said that semiotics "studies the characteristics of human semiosis", that is, the "meta-symbolic faculties" of human beings.

Lady Victorian Welby, an English female scholar who established semiotics with Peirce at the end of the 19th century, suggested that semiotics should be called sensifics, or significs, that is, the doctrine of sense or significance, that is, "ideography".

Foucault said in his famous 1969 work on epistemology, The Archaeology of Knowledge: "We can call all the knowledge that makes signs 'speak' and develop their meanings hermeneutics, and all the knowledge of identifying signs and understanding the laws of connection as semiotics"

As far as the definition of domestic researchers is concerned, the Chinese word "semiotics" was proposed by Zhao Yuanren in a long article entitled "Outline of Semiotics" in 1926.

This article was published in the journal Science in Shanghai.

In this article he points out that "the symbol thing is very old, but no one has done anything to study the properties and principles of its use as a subject of all symbols." ”

What he means is not only that no one in China has done it, but that no one in the world has done it, and that Zhao Yuanren should be an independent proposer of semiotics.

Zhao Yuanren said that English words similar to the concept of "semiotics" can be symbolics, symbology, and symbolology. No one in the West has used these words, which shows that Zhao Yuanren did propose this discipline independently of Saussure, Pierce, and Welby.

Zhao Yiheng defined semiotics in 1993 as: "the doctrine of the activity of meaning." And gives a definition of the symbol. That is, "a sign is a perception that is supposed to carry meaning: meaning must be expressed in a sign, and the purpose of a sign is to express meaning." Conversely, there is no meaning that can be expressed without symbols, and there is no symbol that does not express meaning. ”

Without the expression and understanding of meaning, not only cannot human beings exist, but the "humanized" world cannot exist, and human thoughts cannot exist, because we can only think with symbols, or in other words, thought is also a process of producing and receiving symbols.

Thus, epistemology, semantics, logic, phenomenology, hermeneutics, psychology, all deal with only one aspect of the activity of meaning, while semiotics is a comprehensive discussion of meaning. Therefore, it is useful to define semiotics as "the science of meaning".

The purpose of this discussion is to determine the scope of semiotics. Many people think that semiotics is the study of human culture, in fact, the scope of semiotic research, culture is indeed the largest field, but semiotics also studies cognitive activities, mental activities, all activities related to meaning, and even all cognitive and spiritual activities of animistic things.

In order to affirm their own existence, human beings must search for the meaning of existence, so symbols are the essential conditions for human existence.

The founders of modern semiotics were Saussure and Pearce, who respectively proposed their own basic system of semiotics in the early 20th century, but semiotics itself has always been on the fringes of the academic world, until the 60s, Saussure's semiotics took off in the name of structuralism, when semiotics and structuralism were almost two different names.

In the 70s and 80s, structuralism broke through itself and became post-structuralism, in which semiotics played a great role, after which the Peirce model replaced the Saussure model as the basis of contemporary semiotics.

In recent years, Peirce's semiotics has replaced Saussure's semiotics, and one of the most important reasons is that Peirce focuses on the interpretation of the meaning of signs, and his semiotics is a semiotics that focuses on cognition and interpretation, and his famous quote is "Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign". ”

This is what semiotics should be.

Chinese Semiotics ......

The Chinese word semiotics was proposed by Zhao Yuanren in a long article entitled "Outline of Semiotics" in 1926, which was published in the Shanghai journal Science, which he co-founded.

In this article he points out: "Symbols are very old, but no one has done anything to study the properties and principles of their use as a subject of all signs." What he means is that no one has done it in China, but no one in the world has done it.

Although Saussure had already presented the semiologie in a classroom at the University of Geneva in 1913, his lecture notes were not published until after his death in 1916, and it was not until the 1930s that scholars came to their attention.

Peirce's semioticd theory of saving money did not meet the target, and it was only in the 30s that Morris introduced it systematically. In this article, Zhao Yuanren said that words similar to the concept of "semiotics" proposed by him can be symbolics, symbology or symbolology, which shows that he is indeed independent of Saussure or Peirce in proposing this discipline, and should be an independent proposer of semiotics.

After Zhao Yuan's appointment, the term "semiotics" disappeared from Chinese for decades and reappeared in Chinese publications, until a new era. As in the fifties and sixties, "semiotics" at this stage still appeared only in the translation of foreign philosophical linguistics. In 1978, Fang Changjie translated the famous scholar Ricoeur's introduction to French philosophy, which was the first text of semiotics to reproduce in Chinese.

The first articles by genuine Chinese scholars to discuss semiotics appeared in the early 1980s, such as Hu Zhuanglin's Pragmatics, Cen Qixiang's The Famous Swiss Linguist Saussure and His Famous Novel 'A Course in General Linguistics', Xu Zhiming's Saussure's Theory of Language, and Xu Siyi's On Saussure's Philosophy of Language.

At this time, the "semiotic awakening" focused on Saussure's linguistics, and the people who cared about it were generally from the linguistic community.

What really treats semiotics as a separate discipline is the article "On Semiotics" published by Jin Kemu, a famous orientalist in China, in the fifth issue of "Reading" in 1983.

This article is an impressionistic rambling with a bit of scattered arguments, but it is the first time that a Chinese scholar has come up with his own opinions, and it is no longer just an introduction to foreign theories. In the mid-to-late 80s, with the rapid rise of the "cultural fever", the interest in semiotics in the domestic academic circles increased sharply, and scholars from all walks of life began to apply it to different disciplines, which made a good start for the development of semiotics in China.