An Ecological Approach to Semiotics

This paper proposes an ecological approach to the perception and interpretation of signs. The theory draws upon the ecological approach of James Gibson (1966; 1979). It is proposed that cultural and natural perception can both be explained in terms of the direct pick‐up of structured information and the Gibsonian concept of affordances (Gibson, 1979) without having to invoke a sharp distinction between direct and indirect perception. The application of the theory is exemplified through attention to language and to the visual and audio arts.