ABSTRACT
Learning is an aspect of living, so a semiotic understanding of learning should be contextualised within an understanding of living. As John Dewey argued in Democracy and Education and elsewhere, living is a matter of an organism interacting with its environment. Since Charles Sanders Peirce's increasing concern with semiosis as a universal process, and with the universe as 'argument', semiotics has followed Dewey's example in setting its parameters beyond those of specifically human meaning-making in cultural settings. Learning will be considered with respect to three central elements of a semiotic view of living: change, significance and practice. It can be argued that semiosis drives the learner rather than vice versa, and this perspective has significant implications for understanding learning-related concepts such as intelligence, effort, instruction and teaching. However, it is possible to examine semiotic learning from various perspectives.
