viii as those who study 'signs' know - the activity of unravelling mysteries by interpreting signs is how humans get to the bottom of things, both in fiction and in life. Human beings are interpreters of signs... The study of this quest is called semiotics.

viii Semiotics... is an academic discipline in its own right that studies the most critical of all features of human sapience - the capacity to create and use signs (words, symbols, etc.) for thinking as well as for communicating and preserving knowledge.

p.10 Charles S. Peirce... Perhaps his greatest insight is that our sensory and emotional experience of the world influences how a sign is constituted and why it has been brought into existence in the first place. We construct a semeion not because we simply want to refer to something in particular or classify it as part of some category, but because we wish to understand that something in a sensory-based way.

p.11 semiotics can be defined simply as the science of meaning.

p.19 Saussure suggested, first and foremost, that any true semiological science should include synchronic and diachronic components. The former involves studying sign systems at a given point in time - normally the present - and the latter how they change over time.

p.28 When we gesture, talk, write, read, watch a TV program, listen to music, look at a painting, [JLJ - play games] we are engaged in primarily unconscious sign-based behaviours of various kinds. As Peirce aptly remarked, human life is characterized above all else by a 'perfusion of signs.' ...Perhaps the most important function of signs is that they make knowledge practicable by giving it a physical and thus retrievable and usable form... Knowledge is 'signed information.'

p.32 a sign invariably generates another sign, or interpretant, which in turn becomes itself a source of additional semiosis... according to Peirce, it is doubt that drives the making of knowledge.

p.75 Codes are found in all domains of human intellectual and social life... Codes are systems of signs that people can select and combine in specific ways (according to the nature of the code) to construct messages, carry out actions, enact rituals, and so on, in meaningful ways.

p.77 Conventional codes govern all aspects of human intellectual and social life... Three general features define codes. The first one can be called representationality. This implies that the signs and the rules for combining them in codes can be used to stand for - represent - something. The end result of representation is a text of some kind that contains... a message. The second one can be called interpretability. This implies that messages can be understood successfully only by someone who is familiar with the signs and rules of the codes used to construct them. The third is contextualization. This implies that message interpretation is affected by the context in which it occurs.

p.132 A Philosophical question arises from all this: Is representation an attempt to encode reality, or is it necessarily an illusory practice... designed to impart sense to life, which otherwise would have none? ...The traditional structuralist would counter by saying that representational practices allow us to probe and explore reality and thus 'discover' the elements of reality - albeit often by accident or serendipity.

p.133 Signs give shape to formless ideas, not in an arbitrary fashion, but rather in response to inferential processes that are tied to our experience of reality.

p.134-135 Serendipity characterizes the history of discovery in mathematics and the sciences... The historical record suggests that discovery is hardly the product of a systematic search for truth, but rather a serendipitous consequence of using our abductive brain.

p.139 As a representamen, the Fibonacci sequence seems to have led to an incredible discovery - namely, that a simple recursive pattern constitutes the fabric of a large part of nature.

 The predictive power of representation generally lies, arguably, in the fact that it is an imaginative 'modelling strategy.' Representation leads to knowledge not because it is designed as 'knowledge productive' but because it is an imaginative model of something. The power of scientific representation... suggests that we are probably 'programmed' to discover things... In observing and representing the facts of existence, thus giving them form, we constantly stumble across hidden patterns.

p.141 Undoubtedly, the strongest appeal of semiotic theory is the many potential applications that it has for the study of cultural systems, spectacles, rituals, artifacts, and the like. [JLJ - also game theory]

p.141 semioticians attempt to answer three basic questions about some cultural product: What does it mean? How does it encode its meaning(s)? And why does it mean what it means?