ABSTRACT
While semiotics is often encountered in the form of textual analysis, there is far more to semiotics than this. Indeed, one cannot engage in the semiotic study of how meanings are made in texts and cultural practices without adopting a philosophical stance in relation to the nature of signs, representation and reality. We have already seen how the Saussurean and Peircean models of the sign have different philosophical implications. For those who adopt the stance that reality always involves representation and that signs are involved in the construction of reality, semiotics is unavoidably a form of philosophy. No semiotician or philosopher would be so naïve as to treat signs such as words as if they were the things for which they stand, but as we shall see, this occurs at least sometimes in the psychological phenomenology of everyday life and in the uncritical framework of casual discourse.
