The science of sign, as one of the founders of the field Swiss linguist Saussure, Ferdinand de famously put it. There are two main schools of semiotics, Saussurean and Peircean, the latter referring to the work of American pragmatics philosopher Peirce, Charles Sanders. The two semiotic models, which were constructed independently of one another, differ in one important respect: whereas Saussureâs model of the sign is binary, Peirceâs is tripartite. Unfortunately, with a handful of exceptions, there has been little cross-fertilization between the two schools of thought. Saussureâs key insight is that the sound of a word is arbitrary with respect to both its meaning and the thing to which it ultimately refers: there is no intrinsic reason, for example, that a cow should be called a âcowâ and that the word should be sounded in the way it is (that different languages have different words for the same thing is taken as proof of this latter point). On Saussureâs view of things, the word âcowâ is more usefully understood as a sign consisting of a signifier (the sound of the word) and a signified (the concept we associate with that sound) and he extends this idea to the whole of language. More than five decades after Saussure died, in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly (but not exclusively) in France, linguists, literary theorists, cultural critics, and psychoanalysts, like Barthes, Roland, LĂ©vi-Strauss, Claude, Metz, Christian, and Lacan, Jacques, began to experiment with Saussureâs notion of the sign and found that it could be extended to a great range of meaning-making activities, including the non-linguistic realms of everyday life. This led to a veritable explosion of interest in semiotics and for a number of years it was the dominant mode of analysis in the humanities, particularly in Cultural Studies which saw semiotics as a means of theorizing how ideology works. The pioneer in this respect was Roland Barthes, whose work on myth, showed that even the most ordinary of objects, such as soap bubbles, convey significance beyond mere utility (they can be a sign of purity, joy, cleanliness, childhood fun, and so on). As critics have since pointed out, however, the price of this has been to treat every cultural activity as being âlike a languageâ and while this has been a powerfully effective model to follow it does have drawbacks, inasmuch that not every cultural activity performs like a language. Since its heyday in the 1960s, semiotics has become a specialist and highly sophisticated area of study which has found a new audience amongst artificial intelligence researchers. Peirceâs model of the sign consists of three basic elements: the sign, the object, and the interpretant. A sign, he said, is anything that can be determined as such by another element, namely the object, which in turn has an effect on a person, i.e. the interpretant. Signs do not simply exist: they must be produced. Thus, anything can be a sign, but not everything automatically is a sign. By the same token, whatever is a sign is not a sign forever. Thus, red is a sign of communism (object) only for as long as there are people who remember that it is (interpretants). But it can also be a sign of danger (object) because âweâ (interpretants) have been trained to see it as such. The second way of thinking about the sign red does not cancel out the first, but adds to it. In this way a sign can become an object to another sign and so on to infinity. Peircean semiotics has been much less influential than the Saussurian mode, but it has not been without its adherents. It has been important to the work of Deleuze, Gilles, Eco, Umberto, and Kristeva, Julia. Further Reading: J. Culler The Pursuit of Signs (1981). U. Eco A Theory of Semiotics (1978).