Concept
Semiosis
Related concepts (13)
Sign (semiotics)
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, as when a word is uttered with a specific meaning, or unintentional, as when a symptom is taken as a sign of a particular medical condition. Signs can communicate through any of the senses, visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or taste. Two major theories describe the way signs acquire the ability to transfer information.
Value (semiotics)
In semiotics, the value of a sign depends on its position and relations in the system of signification and upon the particular codes being used. Value is the sign as it is determined by the other signs in a semiotic system. For linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, for example, the content of a sign in linguistics is ultimately determined and delimited not by its internal content, but by what surrounds it: the synonyms redouter ("to dread"), craindre ("to fear"), and avoir peur ("to be afraid") have their particular values because they exist in opposition to one another.
Code (semiotics)
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) emphasised that signs only acquire meaning and value when they are interpreted in relation to each other.
Biosemiotics
Biosemiotics (from the Greek βίος bios, "life" and σημειωτικός sēmeiōtikos, "observant of signs") 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.
Semiotics
Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes (semiosis) and meaning-making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, usually called a meaning, to the sign's interpreter. 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.
Semiosphere
The semiosphere is an idea in biosemiotic theory proposing that, contrary to ideas of nature determining sense and experience, the phenomenal world is a creative and logical structure of processes of semiosis where signs operate together to produce sense and experience. Abstraction (sociology) Human communication Biosemiotic theorists regard the idea of the semiosphere as beginning with continental philosophers' recognition of an epistemological gap between the ontological and the ontic, where it is initially difficult to conceptualize the way that subjectivity is created in between them.
Encoding (semiotics)
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.
Meaning (semiotics)
In semiotics, the study of sign processes (semiosis), the meaning of a sign is its place in a sign relation, in other words, the set of roles that the sign occupies within a given sign relation. This statement holds whether sign is taken to mean a sign type or a sign token. Defined in these global terms, the meaning of a sign is not in general analyzable with full exactness into completely localized terms, but aspects of its meaning can be given approximate analyses, and special cases of sign relations frequently admit of more local analyses.
Zoosemiotics
Zoosemiotics is the semiotic study of the use of signs among animals, more precisely the study of semiosis among animals, i.e. the study of how something comes to function as a sign to some animal. It is the study of animal forms of knowing. Considered part of biosemiotics, zoosemiotics is related to the fields of ethology and animal communication. It was developed by semiotician Thomas Sebeok based on the theories of German-Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll.
Decoding (semiotics)
Decoding, in semiotics, is the process of interpreting a message sent by an addresser (sender) to an addressee (receiver). The complementary process creating a message for transmission to an addressee is called encoding. All communication depends on the use of codes. More traditional communication models always include three main elements: a sender, a transmitter, and a receiver (Fawkes 21). The sender is responsible for “encoding” (i.e., selecting information) their message and putting it through a transmitter (i.