How meaning is formed.
After reading chapter 2 “How meaning is formed” in the book Visible Sign, I’m kind of confused by the paradigms and text, especially p.35, 37, 42 and 47.
The author tries to use Both Saussure and Peirce’s theory of categorizing sign to understand how we extract meaning from a sign. So the categories of signs which Peirce defined are icon, index and symbol, while Saussure defined are iconic and arbitrary. They are the same thing just in different words.
In the 2nd chapter, I do agree with Peirce’s semiosis “it is not a one-way process with a fixed meaning. It is a part of an active process between the sign and the reader of the sign.” In Saussure’s theory, he thinks “value” determine the meaning of a sign. And the value is composed of 2 things, a dissimilar and a similar thing. Isn’t this redundant?
Fortunately, in the page 48 and 49, I can understand the whole demonstration, and think that we have to crop imagines carefully so that they will convey the meaning that we want to display.
Overall, I think this book is quite sophisticated than we can understand, and honestly speaking, I really don’t enjoy most imagines in the book.
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3 comments:
Haha~
Jessie, I agree with you that the photographies of this book is not interesting enough. Or... once the book becomes a school text book, it loses it's interest...
haha are you serious? this book is awesome! i mean SWEET. I agree, the theories presented are blah, and confusing. But they are the foundation to most of our work. I have to admit i fell asleep reading certain part of that chapter. With most theories though and other books describing theories, they are basically improving upon what the original person said about the theories.
Yeah it's true. I even learned about that in geometry back in high school.
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