A sound can make us turn our heads.
A movement can make another organism flee.
A gesture can alter what someone does next.
A rhythm can bring several people into coordination.
In each case, a difference makes a difference.
We have called this mattering. When the difference operates between systems in a way that changes their dispositions or behaviour, it can function as a signal.
But a signal is not necessarily a sign.
That distinction takes us to the threshold at the centre of this series:
How does a difference that matters become a difference that means?
A signal can simply trigger a response
Consider an alarm call.
One animal produces a particular sound. Others respond by orienting, hiding or fleeing.
The sound matters because of what it does.
The receiving organism does not need to construct a symbolic proposition equivalent to:
There is a predator nearby.
The relation can be much more direct:
signal → changed disposition
The signal has significance because it changes the possibilities available to the receiver.
This is already a remarkable achievement.
But it is not yet symbolic meaning.
A sign does something more
A sign also makes a difference to us.
A word can make us cautious.
A red light can make us stop.
A gesture can invite us to sit down.
But the sign participates in something additional.
It belongs to a semiotic system in which forms can be construed through their relations to other forms and meanings.
The red light does not merely cause braking. It belongs to a system in which particular colours, positions and sequences have conventional significance.
The word danger does not merely trigger avoidance. It makes a situation available for construal as an instance of danger.
The difference is subtle but profound.
A signal changes what happens.
A sign can change what something means.
Meaning is not hidden inside the form
This distinction also changes how we should think about signs.
It is tempting to imagine a sign as a physical form with a meaning attached to it.
A sound is produced.
A meaning sits somewhere behind it.
An image is made.
Its meaning lies inside it.
But meaning does not work like that.
A sign belongs to a system of relations.
A word means what it does partly because of the alternatives available in the language.
A traffic signal means what it does because of the system of distinctions in which it participates.
An image acquires significance through its relations to other images, practices, conventions and contexts.
Meaning therefore belongs to the system, not to the isolated form.
The particular sign is an instance within that system's meaning potential.
The importance of recurrence
How might a signal begin to acquire this new status?
One possibility is through recurrence.
A particular signal occurs repeatedly.
A response becomes established.
Others learn the pattern.
The signal becomes recognisable.
Its relations to other signals become stable.
Eventually the form can occupy a more general position within the social system.
This does not mean that recurrence automatically creates meaning.
Recognition is not yet semiosis.
But recurrence can create the conditions under which a form becomes something more than a one-off event.
It becomes a recognisable difference within a shared repertoire of distinctions.
From response to recognition
This gives us several possibilities that should not be collapsed.
A system can respond to something without recognising it as a recurring form.
It can recognise a recurring form without treating it symbolically.
And it can eventually participate in a semiotic system in which the form has a conventional meaning.
We might therefore imagine a loose progression:
response → recognition → social stabilisation → symbolic construal
The progression is not a rigid evolutionary ladder.
These relations can coexist.
But it helps us see that the emergence of meaning need not be a single event.
A sign is the result of a new mode of organisation becoming possible.
Social stabilisation
Meaning is fundamentally social in an important sense.
A private association can be powerful without being a cultural sign.
A particular song may remind me of my childhood.
That association matters.
But it is not thereby part of a shared symbolic convention.
A sign must be available beyond one private history.
It must participate in a system of distinctions that others can recognise and use.
This is why social stabilisation matters.
A form becomes reproducible.
Its use becomes recognisable.
Its alternatives become meaningful.
Its relations to other forms become established.
The community has acquired a new semiotic resource.
Convention expands possibility
Convention gives significance a new kind of portability.
A pattern that once mattered in one interaction can now be reproduced in another.
A gesture can travel.
A word can be used in new situations.
A symbol can survive the event that first gave it significance.
A musical motif can recur across an entire film.
The sign therefore allows a relation to become portable across contexts.
That is one of the great powers of semiosis.
Something that once mattered in a particular situation can become part of a larger potential for meaning.
Presence and absence
The ability to carry meaning beyond its original context creates another extraordinary possibility.
A sign can refer to what is not present.
A person's name can be used when the person is absent.
A photograph can evoke someone who has died.
A map can represent a distant landscape.
A story can preserve a past event.
A musical theme can invoke a character who does not appear on screen.
The sign therefore extends the range of social presence.
The absent can become symbolically available.
This is something a simple signal need not do.
Music crosses the threshold
Music gives us a particularly revealing example.
A rhythm can coordinate a group without representing anything.
A melody can create expectation without referring to anything beyond itself.
A piece can become personally significant through memory without acquiring a determinate semantic content.
Then something changes.
A recurring melody becomes associated with a character in a film.
The audience hears it and anticipates the character.
The character need not appear.
The musical figure now participates in a symbolic relation.
Its musical properties remain.
But it has acquired another function.
The music has been recruited into semiosis.
This is an important distinction.
We do not have to conclude that music, considered in itself, is a symbolic system.
It is enough to recognise that music can become a participant in a larger semiotic system.
The film score
This is one reason the film score is such a useful case.
A musical passage may already matter because of its rhythm, timbre, harmony and affective force.
A film can then establish a recurring relation between that passage and a character, place, memory or idea.
Repetition stabilises the association.
The musical event becomes a sign within the film.
And then the film can manipulate the sign.
Play it before the character appears.
Distort it when the character is in danger.
Return to it when a memory is recovered.
Place it against an unexpected image.
The musical resource can now participate in increasingly complex meanings.
Yet it remains music throughout.
A triumphant disaster
Consider the striking experiment of placing triumphant music over footage of a natural disaster.
The music has its own musical organisation and cultural associations.
The images construe catastrophe.
Placed together, they can produce irony, absurdity, satire or something darker.
Where is that meaning?
Not in the music alone.
Not in the images alone.
It arises from their relation within a larger semiotic configuration.
The music has become meaningful through its participation in a system larger than itself.
This is a clue we will return to later.
A sign is a relation within relations
We can now formulate the distinction more carefully.
A signal is a difference that matters within an interaction.
A sign is a difference that participates in a system of symbolic relations.
The sign therefore belongs to a network.
It can be contrasted with other signs.
Combined with them.
Interpreted through them.
Reused in new contexts.
Reinterpreted in the light of later signs.
Its meaning can evolve because its relations can evolve.
This is why meaning is not something a sign possesses permanently.
The sign has a potential
A semiotic system therefore contains a meaning potential.
It is not simply a collection of established signs.
It contains structured possibilities for making meaning.
A particular sign is an instance within that potential.
A novel use can extend the potential.
A convention can stabilise it.
A metaphor can reorganise it.
Different modes can contribute to it.
The semiotic system is therefore capable of evolving.
The potential changes as new meanings become socially available.
What changes at the threshold?
We can now answer our central question.
What is added when a signal becomes a sign?
Not necessarily a stronger response.
Not necessarily greater complexity.
Rather:
the difference becomes available for symbolic construal.
Instead of merely changing another system's behaviour, it can become something through which participants construe another distinction.
A warning sound can become a symbol of danger.
A gesture can become a conventional sign of agreement.
An image can come to stand for an absent person.
A melody can signify a character.
A word can make an experience categorisable.
The system has acquired a new possibility: meaning can be made from the difference.
The emergence of reference
Once this possibility exists, reference can develop.
A sign can stand in a relation to something beyond the immediate event.
The thing referred to may be present or absent.
Concrete or abstract.
Actual or imagined.
Reference therefore expands the range of what a social system can discuss and remember.
But reference is not the whole of meaning.
A sign also belongs to a system of contrasts and relations.
The word home, for example, acquires some of its possibilities from its relation to words and concepts such as away, family, place, belonging and many others.
A sign does not simply point outward.
It also participates inwardly in the system that gives it meaning.
Meaning makes difference portable
This may be the deepest transformation.
Before semiosis, a difference can matter in the situation in which it occurs.
Once it becomes a sign, the distinction can travel.
It can be remembered.
Repeated.
Combined.
Taught.
Reinterpreted.
A community can preserve a distinction long after the original event has disappeared.
This gives culture a new kind of memory.
It also gives culture a new kind of future.
Because signs can be reused, the past can become a resource for constructing possibilities that did not previously exist.
From signal to sign
We can therefore see the path we have travelled.
A difference occurs within a field of possibilities.
It matters because of its consequences.
When its consequences operate between systems, it can function as a signal.
Signals can become socially stabilised.
Stable differences can become recognisable.
And when a form enters a semiotic potential, it can become a sign.
The difference is no longer merely something that happens.
It has become something that can be construed.
That is the threshold into meaning.
But something even more remarkable happens after that.
Once a system can make one thing mean something, it acquires the possibility of making meanings themselves into resources.
A meaning can be related to another meaning.
A process can be construed as a thing.
A journey can construe a life.
A network can construe a society.
A musical figure can construe a character.
The semiotic system begins to work with its own resources.
And that brings us to the next transformation:
What happens when meanings become resources for making further meanings?
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