The concept of semioethics, as Susan Petrilli explains, is not an invention detached from the history of semiotics. It is the point of arrival of a long theoretical trajectory that traverses the thought of Victoria Welby, Charles Peirce, Charles Morris, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Thomas Sebeok, Emmanuel Levinas, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Each, in different ways, has contributed to revealing the inseparable relation between sign and value, meaning and responsibility.
Semioethics and the Legacy of Significs
In the late nineteenth century, Victoria Welby coined the term significs to designate her approach to the study of meaning. Like semioethics, significs aimed to extend semiotic reflection beyond logic and epistemology, emphasizing the axiological and pragmatic dimensions of sign processes. Welby described significs as a “practical extension of logic,” an inquiry that links the critique of pure reason to the critique of practical reason.
According to Petrilli, both significs and semioethics focus on significance: the infinite potential for signification and interpretation that grounds all human knowledge and behaviour. Meaning, as Welby observed, constitutes “the condition and measure of the semantic-pragmatic validity of all experience.” In this sense, significs is a discipline of responsible understanding—a methodics of everyday life encouraging critical consciousness and freedom from dogmatism.
Welby’s notion of diagnostic, the ability “to see real distinctions and to read the signs which reveal sense and meaning,” anticipates the semioethical orientation of Petrilli’s thought: an ethics of listening and care rooted in the interpretive power of signs.
The Ethical Dimension in Peirce and Morris
In Charles Peirce’s semiotics, the ethical dimension is already implicit in the structure of the interpretant. The dialogical process through which one sign interprets another reveals that alterity is constitutive of meaning itself. For Peirce, the ultimate end of semiosis—the summum bonum—is reasonableness, the continuous, open development of thought governed by synechism, the principle of continuity. Reasonableness, as Petrilli notes, regulates evolution and expresses an ethical orientation: it is a process of growth through dialogue, not closure.
Similarly, Charles Morris explored the relation between signs and values in his book Signification and Significance(1964). He rejected the idea that describing a sign’s structure was sufficient to evaluate it. Communication, for Morris, always involves an order of values inseparable from the order of signs. His work connects semiotic theory with value theory and the theory of human action, emphasizing that sign interpretation necessarily entails ethical and aesthetic evaluation.
For both Peirce and Morris, then, semiotics cannot be limited to a neutral science of representation. The human capacity to interpret signs implies a responsibility to act reasonably, creatively, and ethically within the communicative world.
From Language as Work to Dialogism
The link between sign, value, and work is deepened by Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, who related linguistic value to economic value in the Ricardian-Marxian tradition. Against the ideal equilibrium postulated by Saussure’s linguistic model, Rossi-Landi viewed language as collective labour—a social activity embedded in the relations of production. Meaning, like material value, emerges from work and exchange, and therefore requires a critique of the economic and ideological structures that shape communication.
This social and ethical interpretation of language finds an echo in Mikhail Bakhtin and his circle, particularly in Valentin Vološinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929). Bakhtin described every utterance as a response to previous utterances: dialogical, polyphonic, and open to other voices. Meaning does not pre-exist in an abstract system; it is created in the living process of interaction.
In this dialogical conception, interpretation is not mechanical decoding but a responsive understanding—an infinite process of semiosis in which the interpreter becomes responsible for the transformation of meaning. Petrilli underlines that such dialogism implies “responsibility and answerability toward the other,” an orientation that will become central to the formulation of semioethics.
The Human Vocation of Signs
The historical figures evoked by Petrilli share a conviction: that the study of signs is inseparable from reflection on human responsibility. The relation between meaning and value leads inevitably to the question of how we act through signs—how interpretation becomes a mode of care for the world and for others.
In this sense, semioethics translates the legacy of significs, pragmatism, and dialogism into a new form of humanism—a humanism of alterity. Meaning is not only cognitive but ethical; interpretation is not only analysis but response. To interpret a sign is to take part in the life of the other, to assume the risk of dialogue, to transform knowledge into responsible action.
Riferimento bibliografico: Susan Petrilli, Semiotics in Ethics and Caring, in Bloomsbury Semiotics. Semiotics in the Arts and Social Sciences, Vol. 3, Bloomsbury, 2023.