What Semiotics Is

Charles Peirce compares the action of signs to what our experience of blue would have been had we been born wearing blue-tinted glasses: it is an influence on our experience that runs so deep we do not even become aware of its influence until some circumstance or other forces us to realize its action in shaping our identity and lives. For human animals, it was our becoming aware of the difference between the world as it appears to be in everyday experience and the world as it appears through telescopes and microscopes that, "slow-by-slow", forced intellectuals of modern times to recognize the need for recognizing a point of view that transcended the difference between the critical control of objectification reliant mainly upon "common experience" and the extension of that control to include the "special experiences" made possible by experimentation reliant upon instruments with results mathematically integrated. That realization marked the dawn of the postmodern era of intellectual culture, the era where it comes to be understood that the action of signs (semiosis) provides the framework for the whole of human knowledge, from its animal origins in sensation to its farthest reaches beyond the material world in the contemplation of spiritual dimensions within the physical order of being as independent of awareness by finite mind.