ABSTRACT
The chapters of this volume illustrate the complexities of symbols in human life. As such, many contributors have argued for the need to analyze symbols in a broadly inclusive conceptual framework that is sensitive to meaning, process and context. Humans live in a world that is constantly changing and only ever partially known. In constructing symbols, they form and transform their field of experience in order to act in the face of life’s tensions and indeterminacies. This experiential perspective differs radically from more mainstream approaches (referred to as “cognitive” and “objectivist” in this volume), which tend to conceptualize mind as a device like a computer that processes, encodes, stores and retrieves information found “out there” in the world. Implicit in this “cognitive” perspective is a mind fundamentally separated from a world that itself is composed of static and uniform entities. Thus, a “symbol” here is simply an internal representation of an entity “out there”. In contrast to this, the cultural-semiotic approach developed in this book explored symbols as transforming our relationship to reality by going beyond the confines of the material world (which itself is only vaguely known at any moment) to open up the world through imagination. This happens through the action of agents with bodies, feelings, a personal history and a cultural context. Meaning is not something simply discovered; rather, it emerges in the process of interaction with both the social and physical world.
