What Can Semiotics Teach Us About Our Decision-Making?

“I knew something was wrong. I didn’t know what. I just sensed it. Something felt odd.”

When I first read this sentence in an incident report, I had not come across semiotics and the science of signs. Since studying the subject, I have found it fascinating and challenging in equal measure. Semiotics helps us understand and explore decision-making and why our interpretation of information and situations may differ from what we intended.

What is Semiotics?

Semiotics is about meaning-making and how we construct our own reality through spoken and unspoken signs and symbols. Much of our decision-making involves interpreting signs and representations within our immediate environment. Semiotics explores our interpretation of signs and why interpretation may differ from that intended. A sign is anything that stands for something else and could be something created to communicate, such as emojis, metrics or sirens. Most signs we use in life however, are sub-conscious within the environment, learnt implicitly through cultural and personal experience. For example, a pilot learns to recognise cumulonimbus clouds as a sign of dangerous turbulence, or a firefighter learns to read the signs of flashover and backdraft.

Charles Sanders Peirce, who was one of the fathers of pragmatism and is considered by many to be one of the greatest philosophers of all times, believed that we interpret everything in life through signs. Whilst some signs are taught, most signs we use are learnt through experience. For example, we learn to navigate a busy road by ‘reading’ the visual and audible signs to avoid traffic, and we learn that a business metric worsening is a sign of the need to act (or potential trouble ahead!). Every second we are deciphering these signs to understand and construct meaning of situations. Semiotics explores how our meaning-making of signs and why interpretation may differ from what we expect or perhaps had planned for.

The Semiotic Notion of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness

Peirce argued that our understanding of signs, and ultimately the consciousness, occurred at three levels: Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness.

➡️ Firstness is a feeling, quality or emotion without conscious thought, analysis, comparison, or processing of information. During Firstness, your mind is captivated by the quality of something, such as the sensation of a sound, colour, smell or feeling. It is an emotional experience, but there is no active thought, consciousness or attribution to an object. Each of us experiences Firstness when our minds drift and we lose focus. It’s a delicate state that cannot be created, only experienced when it occurs. Firstness is thought-less, a sensation prior to perception or consciousness.

➡️ Secondness involves a state of consciousness and occurs when the sense of Firstness links in our minds to another object, such as associating smoke with fire. There is a mapping between a sensation of Firstness and its cause but does not yet involve any meaning. For example, we hear the distant sound of screeching tires and connect the noise to a car braking hard, but there is no interpretation of what is occurring. There is merely a cognitive connection between the effect (the screeching sound, i.e. the sign) and link this to a direct cause (car braking hard, i.e. the object). Secondness is about practical experience and is present in a lot of safety-critical decision-making, which involves subconscious feelings or sensations. It’s an intuitive reaction to something, but we cannot yet explain it. It is difficult to teach because our understanding of what a sign represents is tacit and learnt through experience.

➡️ Thirdness is the state where meaning-making and interpretation occur. It is where the sensation of Firstness (a feeling or emotion) connects with Secondness (the consciousness connection of the sensation with an object). This is when we interpret the ‘sign’ we are observing. For example, you hear a fire engine approaching, and due to the Doppler effect of the siren, the sound (the sign) increases as it draws nearer, and you connect this with the object (the emergency vehicle) and (hopefully) our consciousnesses links the sign with the object and prompts us to take the necessary action. This can be seen as the pre-determined or habituated mode of thinking where our consciousness has linked the sign with the object. Our response to the state of Thirdness emanates from the norms, social conventions and habits we learn through experience. It is a conscious and intellectual experience that makes social communication and interaction possible. Thirdness is about regularity and habit, much of which will be learnt tacitly through experience.

Why is semiotics relevant?

Because so much of our decision-making involves the sub-conscious and tacit interpretation of signs, semiotics is a useful way of exploring how situations and how information is interpreted (or potentially misinterpreted) from what we had intended. The notion of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness is a structured form of sensemaking.

 Semiotics can help explore errors and why someone may not have made the causal connection between the sign and what we believe it represents (Secondness), or maybe they interpreted it differently and assigned another meaning to it (Thirdness).

 We navigate safety and risk through signs, much of which are informal within the environment, but others are formal and produced to signify certain information and action. Management systems, for example, are full of signs such as procedures as a representation of how work should be conducted, an audit is a sign of conformity and metrics that signify performance. I don’t think that adequate focus has been given to the interpretation of representations and signs within safety and risk and the role it plays in shaping people’s actions and decisions. With a few exceptions, there’s very limited application of semiotics to safety research.

I find semiotics a fascinating but deceptive and challenging subject to understand. It is best summarised in the phase Simplexity – simple at the basic level but increasingly complex the more you delve in.

What to learn more?

If you’re interested in learning more about semiotics within risk and safety, here are some good sources:

• Semiotics by Daniel Chandler
• Dr Rob Long provides some great semiotic material: https://safetyrisk.net/an-introduction-to-semiotics-and-risk/
• A Meaning Processing Approach to Cognition by John Flach and Fred Voorhost (a fun way of overviewing some complex topics)
• Pragmatism and Organizational Studies by Philippe Lorino (should be compulsory reading for anyone in safety and risk)

#semiotics #peirce #sensemaking #safetyprofessional #EHS #healthandsaftey #QHES #safetyleadership #aviationsafety #railsafety #nuclearsafety #constructionsafety #miningsafety #humanfactors #patientsafety #HOP #safetyculture #accident #humanerror #safety #culture