Sign and Symbol

Category: Fields of research

Semiotics

Semiotics is an interdisciplinary field that studies signs. American logician, philosopher, and mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) coined the term „semiotic“, and is a pioneer of semiotics. Peirce defines a sign as something that “stands for something in some respect of capacity”. Peirce views the whole universe as pansemeiosic, that is, “perfused with signs.” He also viewed even the human mind and consciousness as sign activity. He believed that “there can be no isolated sign” because a sign is only part of a semeiotic process. Peirce conception of the sign was triadic, in that every sign has three distinct correlates. In the triadic sign, the first correlate is the sign (representamen), the second correlate is the object, and the third correlate is the interpretant. The semeiotic Sign (written with an uppercase) contains an irreducible triadic correlation in which a sign (written with a lowercase) stands for an object to an interpretant. The sign functions as the conveyer of meaning that mediates between the object and the interpretant; the interpretant mediates between the object and the sign to interpret the meaning; and the object mediates between the sign and the interpretant in order to ground the meaning. Removal of any one of the three correlates reduces the Sign from an actual Sign to a mere potential Sign. He distinguishes between three types of signs: 1) icons – signs that resemble or stand in for something, 2) indexes – signs that have some causal connection to what they stand for, 3) symbols – signs that in no way resemble or have a causal connection to what they stand for. Thomas Sebeok, in Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics (1994), in addition to the three types of signs that Peirce introduced, added three more distinct types of signs: 1) symptoms – signs that are manifestations of instinctive and innate bodily responses (to some internal or external stimuli) in humans and animals, 2) signals – signs that, by some convention, stand as a clear representation of something ( mathematical signs, semaphores, Morse code signals, etc., 3) names – linguistic signs that designate an extension class. It is important to emphasize that there is a lack of uniformity in social sciences as to the usage of the terms “sign“ and „symbol“, as some authors depart from definitions used by Peirce and Sebeok. In this entry, we will use the terms sign and symbol according to Peirce’s definitions.

Linguistic Signs

For Ferdinand Saussure, another pioneer of semiotics, language is a system of interrelated terms, what he called ‘langue’ (language), and is contrasted with ‘parole’ (speech), which relates to individual speech acts or speaking in general. A specific Langue is comprised of a supra-individual and underlying code that is embedded in the minds of speakers of a certain language, and which enables common understanding between them. The analysis of this shared system of rules is the central object of linguistics. The language system has two types of relationships: ‘syntagmatic’ (items are arranged in consecutive order) and ‘associative’ (deep and not directly observable grammatical and semantic relations). Saussure also makes a crucial distinction between a “sign”, “signified”, and a “signifier”. Both a signified and a signifier together make a sign, while the relation between them is always arbitrary. The signifier is a sound or an image that represents something that is being signified (a concept, idea, object, etc.). The signifier is a physical manifestation of a mental concept, a signified. In Saussure’s linguistics, the whole language is ‘a system of (arbitrary) signs’.

Roland Barthes added to Saussure's analysis of the relationship between the signified and the signifier. This new conception sees signs of the first order of the sign system (both the signifier and the signified) serving as the signifier of the second order of the sign system operating at the level of myth. Second-order signs work by establishing an ideologically clear connection of first-order signs with an idea that seems completely natural and thus creates a myth.

Symbols

Culture is fundamentally rooted in symbols, which serve as the primary means through which humans construct meaning, organize knowledge, express emotions, and regulate social life. At its most basic level, a symbol is anything that represents something else through a conventional association, conceptual connection, or perceived resemblance. Since almost anything can function as a symbol, and since its significance depends on the meaning attributed to it by a particular community, the relationship between a symbol and what it represents is not inherent but established through shared practices, customs, and conventions.

Symbols are distinguished by the richness and complexity of their meanings, which are often multiple, fluid, diverse, and layered. Their significance frequently relies on metaphorical associations that establish parallels between elements from different contexts that might otherwise appear unrelated. Furthermore, because symbolic meanings are shaped by cultural conventions, they are context-dependent and subject to variation both between and within cultures. One of the most important functions of symbols is their ability to communicate what cannot easily be expressed in words. They can convey ineffable concepts, abstract ideas, and complex emotional experiences that resist precise or complete verbal articulation. Leslie White argues that human cultural evolution started with the invention of symbols, because without symbols there is no culture.

Symbols play a particularly prominent role in complex domains such as politics and religion. Their capacity to accommodate a wide range of associations and interpretations enables them to resonate with different groups within a population and appeal to diverse audiences. The more widely a symbol circulates in the public sphere, the broader the range of meanings and references it may acquire. As its scope of significance expands, its meaning becomes increasingly rich and complex, allowing for multiple, diverse, and sometimes even contradictory interpretations.

Ernest Cassirer believes that reality is revealed to the observer only through symbols. For Cassirer, symbols mediate between sensory experience and meaning and allow for their instantaneous connection. All expressions of culture, language, myths, art, religion, and even science are mediated by symbols and structurally separated by layers of meaning. Symbolic forms, on the one hand, form the entire culture, while, on the other hand, they shape the individual perception of reality. This omnipresence of symbols is the reason why it is better to call a man an "animal symbolicum" instead of an "animal rationale".

Symbols in the perspective of Anthropology

In his article “Symbolism” (1932), Edward Sapir argues that the human capacity to create and interpret symbols enables us to distinguish between a wink and a blink. Although both involve essentially the same physical movement—the rapid closing and opening of the eye—they differ in their symbolic significance. A wink conveys a meaningful message, suggesting that the person performing it shares a secret or is involved in a conspiracy, whereas a blink is merely an involuntary, meaningless movement.

In “Key Symbols” (1973), Sherry Ortner introduces the concept of key symbols, which are symbols that are representative and characteristic of whole societies, nations, and religions. Such symbols are usually highly abstract and polysemous, yet they fundamentally shape practice and reasoning. Ortner points to the Virgin of Guadalupe, for instance, which is a key symbol as it serves as a powerful symbol of Mexican identity.

The inherent polysemy of symbolic meaning also informs Victor Turner’s analysis in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (1967). Turner identifies multivocality as a defining feature of symbols, arguing that they can represent multiple objects, activities, and relationships. Rather than maintaining a one-to-one correspondence between a symbol and its referent, symbols establish a one-to-many relationship, allowing them to convey several meanings simultaneously. To understand these meanings, Turner distinguishes among three interpretive dimensions: exegetical meaning, which concerns the explanations and interpretations provided by members of the culture; operational meaning, which emerges from how a symbol is used in practice; and positional meaning, which derives from the symbol’s relationship to other objects and symbols within the same or related cultural contexts. Furthermore, Turner argues that symbols are characterized by a polarization of meaning. One pole is associated with sensory experience and the emotional responses elicited by the symbol, while the other is linked to normative values, ideological principles, and forms of social organization.

Claude Lévi-Strauss defined culture as a set of symbolic systems, and as symbols are the basis of communication, the whole science of society, culture, and men is a communication theory. The world becomes meaningful only if it is structured, because symbols do not have an immanent meaning, but their meaning comes from their position inside the wider structure. Culture’s structure is based on binary oppositions, and those binary oppositions reflect binary structure found in the human mind. According to Lévi-Strauss, symbols derive their meaning from those innate binary oppositions, which reflect ultimate psychological symbolic opposition between culture and nature. Lévi-Strauss applied the principles of Saussure's structural linguistics in the analysis of culture. Lévi-Strauss argues that communication in society works through the exchange of symbols. There are three types of fundamental exchange: the exchange of women by rules of kinship, the exchange of goods and services according to the rules of the economy, and the exchange of symbols according to linguistic rules. Symbolic structures of exchange in areas of kinship, language, and economy are key for understanding social life, not human biology.

Clifford Geertz, in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), argues that the goal of anthropology is to discover the conceptual structures that motivate the actions of the subject and to construct a system of analysis. The analysis is the classification of structures of meaning and the determination of their social basis and meaning. Geertz reinterpreted Weber’s concept of Verstehen as “webs of significance in which individuals are caught”, and those webs of significance are crucial for Geertz’s understanding of culture. He views culture as a system of symbols. Meanings are not contained in some abstract symbolic systems, as Lévi-Strauss thought, but are found in the ‘ongoing patterns of life’, that is, in observable interactions, practices, and rituals. All those observable actions signify public symbolic knowledge that the researcher has to interpret through the method that Geertz calls „thick description“. Thick description is similar to critical reading or interpretation of a literary text. The thick description focuses on the „emic“ significance of social action. For him, every culture is unique, and that should be presented to the reader, and in that sense, culture should be “read as a text”. That text should be understood in a native, that is, emic cultural context, so the reader could learn and understand the local meaning. Geertz argues that cultural patterns consist of symbols that represent relationships between psychological, social, and physical aspects of reality. His key insight is that models have two meanings: models of reality and models for reality. Models of reality describe and reflect the world as it exists, while models for reality guide people’s actions and shape how they understand and interact with the world. These two functions operate together within cultural patterns. Applying this idea to religion, Geertz explains that religious symbols both describe how the world is understood to be and prescribe how people should live and behave. Geertz defines religion as “(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic“.

Symbols in the Psychoanalytic Perspective

Sigmund Freud (1989) maintained that the symbolism found in dreams, myths, fairy tales, and linguistic utterances expresses, in disguised form, unresolved childhood conflicts or taboo urges surrounding sexuality and violence that are repressed in the subconscious of individuals.

Carl Jung argued that the most significant shared ideas or predispositions in the collective unconscious are archetypes. Archetypes are emotionally charged universal images, thoughts, and symbols, and they have had a major role in the history of humankind, as well as playing a great role in people’s everyday lives. The most common and widespread archetypes are: the shadow, the anima/the animus, the persona, the self, and the hero. The shadow is the unconscious, instinctive, impulsive, infantile, negative, and undeveloped aspects of the ego and the personality. The anima and animus are concepts that reflect the psychological bisexuality of human nature, as every person possesses unconscious images that represent characteristic features and tendencies of the opposite sex. Anima is the feminine and emotional aspects found in men, and animus is the masculine and rational characteristics found in women. The persona represents someone's public personality, a mask that the ego assumes and is socially accepted, that is, the tendency of people to adopt the norms and social roles of the society that they live in. The hero represents an idealized picture that a person has of himself or herself.

In Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, the subject constitutes a trilogy of orders. These orders are: „Real“, „Imaginary“, and „Symbolic“. Imaginary represents the discourse of everyday life, and on this level, the effects of the unconscious are not acknowledged. In the Imaginary, the subject mis-recognises the nature of the Symbolic, because the subject sees the Symbolic as transparent and realistic. Imaginary represents the area of „necessary illusions“. The Real, per Lacan, is always „in its place“. The Symbolic represents the substitute for what is absent from the Real.

The „Mirror Stage“ is theoretically very important for Lacan because it represents the emergence, in 6–18–month–old infants, of the capacity to recognize their own image. This recognition is significant because the infant has to recognize the image as itself, but also as not itself, and only as a reflection. The mirror is a part of the Imaginary. A child forms his own identity when the father (agent of the father principle) interrupts the mother-child relationship. The mother’s place (feminine) tends to be the Real, the father represents the Symbolic, and the child is Imaginary. That is, the child builds his or her identity by accepting sexual differences. Sexual differentiation starts with the realization that the mother lacks a penis (mark of difference). Lacan names the symbolic meaning of the penis „phallus“. While the penis is real, the phallus becomes a symbolic signifier of what is missing. The Symbolic makes the child confront its vulnerability and mortality, which is symbolically represented by the fear of castration. Through this, the Symbolic gives the world (society) law and meaning.

Symbols in the Sociological Perspective

George Herbert Mead argued that symbolic communication, which takes place through language or non-verbal communication, enables the construction of a social world (attitudes, roles, and institutions), but it also plays a key role in shaping the individual mind. In this sense, the two key elements of the self are its reflexive nature and its ability to develop symbolic forms of communication. Language and other forms of symbolic communication enable communication that is mediated by "significant actions", self-conscious acts by which we distinguish human from inhuman behavior.

Herbert Blumer contends that symbolic interaction refers to the fact that human interaction is always mediated by symbols. Language is a mechanism for producing and symbolizing objects. Meaning is not inherent in the objects themselves but arises through symbolic interaction. Meaning is not fixed but is fluid and is constantly being rebuilt in relation to the world of objects.

In his book Forms of Talk (1981), Goffman explores different forms of speech and pays special attention to the "footing of talk". This term refers to the projection of the selves that the interlocutors have during the conversation. He views society as loosely integrated through everyday conversation, which is based on the ritual affirmation of a shared reality. Conversation plays a key symbolic role here, helping to define, strengthen, and maintain the structure of social groups and patterns of interaction. Everyday communication is maintained through symbolic and routine elements of decency. Institutional and interactive order are loosely connected through a common ground in symbolic and ritual forms that connect the individual with ingrained sacred and moral values. The social structure does not define cultural practices or rituals, but helps individuals to choose from an already available repertoire.

Randall Collins, using Goffman's theoretical concept of "encounter", concludes that situations are the ones that should be the basic unit of sociological analysis of micro-interactions. He believes that in different situations, in which people enter into direct personal contacts and go through the same emotional states together, "interaction rituals" are created. These interaction rituals create a sense of belonging to a group, and that leads to individual experiences that achieve a higher level of "emotional energy." Higher levels of emotional energy are manifested in a sense of satisfaction and trust in the members of the group. The more intense the interaction rituals, and the stronger the shared emotional connection between the participants, the more emotional energy an individual will feel. The emotional energy that an individual experiences during an interaction ritual is instilled in the individual's mind on a subconscious level in the form of symbols. This symbol acquires the characteristics of the sacred, or sacral, and thus becomes a symbol that represents the whole group. Interaction rituals happen constantly during everyday life, in different situations. For an individual to receive emotional energy from an interaction ritual, that person must possess knowledge of shared symbols. However, these symbols must be experienced in person to provoke an emotional reaction. Collins calls the entire repertoire of symbols "cultural capital".

Robert Wuthnow advocates a positivist and empiricist approach to culture. He presented his approach in detail in the books: Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis (1987), Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment and European Socialism (1989), and Vocabularies of Public Life: Empirical Essays in Symbolic Structure (1992). Wuthnow criticizes the dominant approach in the sociology of culture, which he calls the "subjective" approach, which focuses on the beliefs, attitudes, and values of an individual. The goal of this approach is to gain insight into what symbols mean to a particular person. Wuthnow thinks that it is difficult to gain insight into a person's inner mental state and therefore what some symbols mean to that person. Instead, one should focus on patterns of symbolic codes that can be empirically observed, such as words and text, social movements, visual symbols, cultural products, and the like. For this type of cultural structuralism, each individual symbol must be produced by a specific person, in a specific environment.

In that sense, it is necessary to examine the origin and spread of cultural symbols. This process has three stages: 1) in the first stage, the production of certain symbols takes place; 2) in the second stage, there is a selection - some symbols are rejected, and others spread because they affect the environment in which they originated and use the resources of that environment to spread further; 3) in the third stage, some symbols are institutionalized by creating routine mechanisms for their constant reproduction. Some symbols become so institutionalized that society creates a large number of interconnected institutions that serve to spread and reproduce these symbols, and they begin to be perceived as "reality". One such system of symbols is science. According to Wuthnow, the goal of theoretical and empirical research on symbols and culture should be to identify, as systematically and exactly as possible, the environmental factors that contributed to each of the three stages of the spread of symbols.

Pierre Bourdieu introduced the concept of symbolic capital, which consists of prestige, status, titles, and reputation. Of all the forms of power and domination, the most important are symbolic power and symbolic violence. All cultural symbols - art, food and clothing patterns, science, religion, language - serve to pursue the interests of those in power. Those at the top of the hierarchy of a field use symbols to preserve, increase, and legitimize that power, so such strategies are a source of symbolic power and symbolic violence. Symbolic power and violence have the function of creating and increasing social "distinction". Society is filled with the great struggle to create social distinctions, because class struggles are, in essence, struggles to create a symbolic classification of people into distinct classes. Symbolic power and symbolic violence serve to create, legitimize, and preserve the distinctions that exist between social classes.

In his early works, The System of Objects (1968) and The Consumer Society (1970), Jean Baudrillard claims that modern society is increasingly structured with signs and symbols. All objects can be analyzed in the context of binary oppositions that reveal the rules and internal relationships that structure objects. Marxism overlooked that goods are a sign that gives individuals a cultural identity. The sign constitutes a special material reality that is used for prestige, status, and thus for social differentiation. In premodern (symbolic) societies, social relations are organized around symbolic exchanges at festivals, rites, and rituals that strengthen the social order. Here the sign had a purely referential function. Industrial societies have a fixed and stable hierarchy of the sign that clearly distinguishes the real from the unreal, so the sign and reality are truly equivalent, and goods reflect social statuses. Culture is organized around a social world in which words, sounds, and images have a direct relationship with objects and reality: code produces coherent meanings and provokes precisely defined answers. With the emergence of postmodern culture, the sign and its code become autonomous, producing their own inner meanings without reference to objective reality. The reference value is destroyed and replaced with total relativity, combinations, and simulation, so that the signs are exchanged with other signs, rather than with the real things. The sign becomes liberated from the archaic obligation to mean something and finally becomes free, indifferent, and indefinite, in a structural and combinatorial game that overcomes the rule of a certain equivalence. In the new "semiurgical" society, the code functions as an organizational principle that creates new forms of communication and social order.

Ethnicity and Symbols

Herbert Gans introduces the concept of "symbolic ethnicity," which refers to the nostalgic attitude of emigrants towards the culture of the country they came from. This ethnicity is symbolic because it is based more on sentiment than on preserving the original cultural features.

Anthony Smith developed his approach to the study of ethnicity, which he called "ethnosymbolism". The study of myths, culture, religion, and language, which shape ethnicity and nation, is key to the theoretical approach of ethnosymbolism.

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