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8:14

(In »From semiotics via memetics to the collapse of militant atheism«)

Semiotics deals with the investigation and interpretation of signs within all sorts of communication: firstly, the relationship of signs to what they are intended to represent (semantics); secondly the relationship of signs to each other (syntactics) and thirdly the relationship of signs to their users (pragmatics). The American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure are usually regarded as the two philosophical giants of semiotics. From the mid-19th century up until the early 20th century, quite independently of each other, they both constructed extensive systems that were later used as platforms for all subsequent forms of working with semiotics. Peirce launches the idea of a triad of signs and, as early as a century before Dawkins, is inspired by Charles Darwin into describing the signs as replicators, while de Saussure – who for the sake of clarity calls his theory semiology rather than semiotics – focuses primarily on the binary relationship between the word in itself and the concept behind the word within language.