CODES, SIGNS AND SIGNALS

Codes, honeybee-dances and facial expressions

One of Grice's most lasting achievements was to provide an alternative to the code model view of communication. According to the code model, an utterance is a signal which encodes the thought or message a communicator wishes to communicate: in order to retrieve the speaker's ‘meaning’, all the hearer need do is decode the signal the speaker has provided into an identical thought or message. Construed in this way, linguistic communication works according to broadly the same principles as semaphore, or Morse code.

The assumption that human communication is a matter of coding and decoding was one of the key ideas underlying the semiotic programme (Peirce 1897, 1903, de Saussure 1916/1974, Vygotsky 1962). Indeed, this programme proposed that most aspects of human life – from language, customs and rites, to the media, the expressive arts and science – were best analysed as systems of ‘signs’, or underlying codes and ‘sub-codes’ (Eco 1976), which underpin and facilitate every type of human social and cultural interaction. As we have seen (and will continue to see), many approaches to ‘meaning’ and communication come heavily laden with semiotic baggage.