ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the mutual implication of critical realism and semiosis. At least three major sets of questions can be posed in this regard.1 First, we argue that critical realism cannot afford to ignore semiosis, provisionally defined as the intersubjective production of meaning,2 in its more general approach to social relations, their reproduction and transformation (see Section I). In discussing this issue we interpret social relations broadly to include individual actions, the diverse relations between these interactions, and the emergent properties of institutional orders and the domain of the lifeworld. Apart from addressing the closely related, controversial, but nonetheless analytically distinct, issue of whether reasons can also be causes, critical realists have paid little attention to the nature and significance of semiosis. Prioritising the former at the expense of the latter is quite unjustified because reasons are merely one (albeit important) aspect of the causal efficacy of semiosis. In addition, their effectiveness can only be understood in and through the operation of semiosis. Second, and equally important for our purposes, we inquire into the social preconditions and broader social context of semiosis. This set of problems is well suited to the application of critical discourse analysis because the latter can provide explanatory contextualisations of the production, communication, and reception of semiosis and therefore provide a means of thinking about the articulation of the semiotic and extra-semiotic in social transformation (see Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999). But we also show that, depending on the explanandum, it may be necessary or appropriate to supplement critical discourse analysis (hereafter CDA) through more concrete-complex analyses of extra-discursive domains. This implies that, insofar as semiosis has been studied in isolation from its context, this is bound to lead to an incomplete account of social causation and therefore risks committing one or more kinds of reductionism (see Section II). Finally, we turn to a third set of questions. These concern the nature of semiotic structures, the dialectics of their constitutive role in and emergence from texts and textual practices, and their role in social structuration (see Section III). We exemplify these issues by drawing on critical semiotic analysis (especially CDA),
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that semiosis involves mechanisms that are intelligible from a critical realist point of view. Our concluding section draws these different themes together to argue that semiotic analysis might benefit from paying attention to other aspects of critical realism and that critical realism might benefit from paying more attention to semiosis when exploring the social world.
