69249454-chandler-semiotics

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SEMIOTICS: THE BASICS
‘the 14 pulsars of the Milky Way’ – it could easily represent an
explosion. In case the alien beings would like to track us down to
discuss this further, there is a helpful route-map at the bottom of the
picture, but since it adopts spatial conventions analogous to those of
the London Underground map we probably won’t be hearing from
them soon, unless that is, they realize that the key to decoding it is
the image at the top, which to most of us looks like dumb-bells or
eye-glasses, whereas it is apparently intended to represent two
hydrogen atoms engaged in ‘hyperfine transition’. However, as
Gombrich points out, even if they cracked this code, ‘The trajectory.
. . is endowed with a directional arrowhead; it seems to have escaped
the designers that this is a conventional symbol unknown to a race
that never had the equivalent of bows and arrows.’ The message, one
fears, seems likely to be ‘lost in translation’.
Gombrich’s observations on making sense of the Pioneer
plaque capture very well the processes of ‘decoding’ outlined by
semioticians in the structuralist tradition. Paired with the term
‘encoding’ this sometimes has the unfortunate consequence of
making the processes of constructing and interpreting texts (visual,
verbal or otherwise) sound too programmatic. The Pioneer plaque
example shows that reading (or viewing, or listening) requires reference
to relevant codes (relevance itself requiring hypothesis-testing).
We need ‘prior knowledge’ of such codes in order ‘to separate the
code from the message’. Although with practice the process of
decoding can become transparent (so that it can seem strange to say
that pictures require ‘reading’), the process is clearly a cognitively
active one. What is ‘meant’ is invariably more than what is ‘said’
(Smith 1988; Olson 1994), so inference is required to ‘go beyond
the information given’ (in the famous phrase of the American
psychologist Jerome Bruner). While psychologists refer to the generation
of inferences by invoking familiar social and textual ‘scripts’,
semioticians refer to accessing social and textual codes (and sometimes
to the modality judgements needed to compare these codes).
In contrast to the importance accorded to the active process of
‘decoding’ in this example, everyday references to communication
are based on a ‘transmission’ model in which a sender transmits a
message to a receiver – a formula which reduces meaning to explicit