The signs we live by - The relationship between semiotics and psychology

In our introduction to this special issue on semiotics and psychology, we o utline the background and motivation for this project, preview the main the mes addressed by the seven contributions, and draw some conclusions about t he mutual relevance of psychology and semiotics for each other. Our motives for undertaking this special issue were basically three-fold. First, we we re curious, given the recent decline of traditional approaches to cognitive psychology, about the status of sign- or symbol-processing explanations of human cognition and behavior. Second, we were interested in the practical application of semiotics to understanding recent developments in electronic communication systems, particularly in the domain of non-linguistic commun ication. Finally, we wanted to pursue the relevance of semiotics to postmod ern conceptions of psychology as a human science. Not all of the issues we had in mind could be addressed in the contributions to this special issue; however, they do reflect the wide diversity of scholarship in semiotics and they point to some unexpected parallels between the fields of semiotics an d psychology. We conclude that future inquiry in both fields could profit f rom pursuing these parallels in more detail.