In contemporary discussions of signs, the distinction between “semiology” and “semiotics” is not merely terminological. John Deely shows that this divergence involves two different ways of conceiving the sign, language, and the relation between culture and nature.
Deely first reconstructs the lexicographical history of the two terms. “Semiology” appears in English dictionaries as early as 1850, initially with a medical meaning: it concerns “the signs or symptoms of diseases”. “Semiotics”, attested in 1870, also emerges in the same pathological context, as the name of the discipline dealing with symptoms.
The decisive shift occurs in 1883. By that year, Deely notes, both “semiology” and “semiotics” were already being defined as either a “doctrine of signs” or a “science of signs”. The vocabulary of medical symptoms was thus extended toward a general theory of signification.
It is with Ferdinand de Saussure, however, that the issue acquires a decisive theoretical significance. According to Deely, Saussure “appropriated” the term “semiology” in order to designate a “science of signs” restricted to cultural productions and grounded in the conventional character of the linguistic sign. In this perspective, the center of semiological inquiry becomes the domain of symbolic and arbitrary systems produced by society.
Deely insists on the radical nature of this move. Saussurean “semiology” does not include the entire order of natural signs. Signs grounded in physical relations — smoke and fire, clouds and rain, symptoms and disease — are progressively excluded from the privileged theoretical field of semiology.
“Semiotics”, by contrast, increasingly comes to designate a “doctrine of signs” capable of embracing both cultural and natural signs. Deely describes this perspective as a theory in which culture appears merely as “a compartmentalization” of nature accessible to semiotic animals.
According to the author, the divergence between semiology and semiotics therefore corresponds to two distinct epistemological orientations. Semiology remains within the framework of the Geisteswissenschaften, the sciences of culture and spirit. Semiotics, on the contrary, moves toward a general theory of semiosis capable of traversing the distinction between nature and culture.
For this reason, Deely considers the Saussurean definition of a “science of signs” to be insufficient. The tradition he associates with Augustine, Poinsot, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Thomas A. Sebeok leads instead toward a “doctrine of signs” that cannot be confined either to human language or to cultural phenomena alone.
Reference: John Deely, On “Semiotics” as Naming the Doctrine of Signs, in Semiotica, 158–1/4, 2006.