69249454-chandler-semiotics

176
SEMIOTICS: THE BASICS
FIGURE 6.1 Pictorial plaque on Pioneer 10 spacecraft (1972)
Source: produced by the Pioneer Project at NASA Ames Research Center and obtained
from NASA’s National Space Science Data Center
insightful commentary on this endeavour (Gombrich 1972, 55–6).
He noted that alien beings ‘could not possibly get the message’. The
most obvious reason is that on the sensory level they would have
to be tuned to the same narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum
as we are, whereas even on Earth other creatures do not share
the same sensory apparatus. However, his main point was rather
less obvious: ‘reading an image, like the reception of any other
message, is dependent on prior knowledge of possibilities; we can
only recognize what we know’. No one could make sense of this
message without access to relevant social and textual codes. ‘It is
this information alone that enables us to separate the code from the
message.’