ABSTRACT
The goal of semiotics is to discover how meaning is conveyed and generated by texts and, for semiotician's purposes, by objects, artifacts, and material culture in general. Semiotics has a long history, but modern semiotics is generally held to have been founded by two thinkers—the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. The fundamental concept of semiotics is that of the sign, which can be defined, generally speaking, as anything that can be used to represent or stand for something else. Physicians must interpret signs and symptoms indexically and try to determine what illnesses or problems they represent. This is done by interpreting the signs and symptoms in the context of a knowledge of human physiology and related concerns. Roland Barthes, the famous French scholar, wrote numerous books on everything from semiological theory to the analysis of narrativity.
