Semiotics belongs to that intermediate area of knowledge that constitutes the field of the human sciences: disciplines that are not founded on theorems or experiments, but neither on subjective opinions. It is a science of meaning, which investigates the ways in which human beings produce, interpret, and share meanings.
As Ugo Volli reminds us, from its very name—semiotics or semiology—the discipline has been defined in different and sometimes opposing ways: as a science close to linguistics or to philosophy, to cultural criticism or to the social sciences. Some scholars, such as Greimas following Hjelmslev, have sought to give it a rigorous form, grounded in formalized and interdefined principles and concepts, according to the model of the logico-mathematical sciences. Others, such as Saussure, have recognized its empirical vocation, oriented toward the study of the laws that regulate phenomena of communication and signification in social life.
Umberto Eco, following Peirce, instead proposed a philosophical perspective: semiotics as an inquiry into the conditions of possibility of meaning. Barthes and others highlighted its critical function, capable of unmasking the ideologies and power structures concealed within the languages of culture.
According to Volli, to understand semiotics it is useful to recall the concept of the “semiotic field” introduced by Eco: a vast cultural domain composed of texts and discourses, interpretive and codified practices, languages, genres, expressive techniques, messages, and rewritings. It is the ensemble of communicative phenomena that form the meaningful—and always social—world in which we live: what Lotman called the semiosphere.
From this perspective, semiotics is the paradoxical and always partial attempt to rediscover the order that makes this universe of actions and objects readable and coherent. When we read, converse, take part in an event, or watch a performance, we are able to interpret what happens and to connect it to values, tastes, and meanings. It is this shared and comparable interpretive competence that constitutes the true object of semiotics.
As for its methods, Volli emphasizes that they no longer amount to a rigid axiomatics. While benefiting from the legacy of formalization of the École de Paris, semiotics today functions as a toolbox, according to Wittgenstein’s famous metaphor: a set of different instruments—models, concepts, procedures—from which the researcher selects, from time to time, those most suited to the type of analysis to be carried out.
In sum, semiotics is the discipline that studies the conditions of the production and comprehension of meaning. It examines the functioning of languages and signs in social life, seeking to make visible the order that underpins our capacity to interpret the world and to communicate it to others.
Source: Ugo Volli, Presentazione della collana “I Saggi di Lexia”