ABSTRACT
A word with a variety of meanings. Symbols pervade human life, and are used in a wide range of specialised discourses, as well as in everyday living. Usually, the word ‘symbol’ is taken as referring to a sign or action of some kind which is used to communicate a meaning to somebody in virtue of a shared set of norms or conventions. A symbol therefore communicates a meaning because it stands for something else, although there is no necessary connection between it and what it stands for (hence its use and meaning are both matters of convention; a conception which Peirce uses in his semiotics). In analytic philosophy ‘symbolic logic’ involves the substitution of symbols for terms which occur in natural language (‘~’ means ‘not’; ‘·’ means ‘or’, etc.) as a means of analysing the structure of arguments. In Freudean psychoanalysis, symbols are taken to stand in place of some object which has been repressed (in this sense, symbols usually have some (often metaphorical) relation to their referents; although Freud-a smoker-stated that there are times when a cigar is simply a cigar, from the psychoanalytic point of view the latter could be taken as a metaphor for the phallus when it occurs in a patient’s dreams). In Peirce’s semiotics, a symbol is a kind of sign which bears no relation or resemblance to what it stands for. A symbol can also have historic significance and a multitude of resonances of meaning linked to this (e.g. in European culture, the sign of the cross can be a potent symbol not only for Christian faith, but also for the institutions, identity, traditions and values associated with that culture). [PS]
Within sociology, symbolic interactionism is a theoretical framework that focuses upon the relationships between human agents (and as such, upon ‘micro’ social phenomena, rather than the large scale or ‘macro’ concern with social structure, found in Marxism or functionalism). Crucially, it is concerned with the way in which competent social agents construct and make sense of the social world which they inhabit. Such explanations are typically grounded in the detailed recording of everyday life, through participant observation or non-participant observation. Symbolic interactionism was developed at the University of Chicago, in the early part of this century, not least under the influence of the pragmatist philosopher G.H.Mead. The term itself was coined by Herbert Blumer in 1937, although symbolic interactionism became a widely accepted approach only in the late 1960s and 1970s.
