PSY427H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter N/A: Semiotics, Mental Representation, Social Fact
Document Summary
Representation connects meaning and language to culture. Representation means using language to say something meaningful about, or to represent, the world meaningfully, to other people. Representation: to describe something; to call to mind by description. Representation is the production of the meaning of the concepts in our minds through language. Based off of past experiences and used to interpret the world. We need to be able to communicate with others. Any visual image needs to be interpreted for any information to carry over. Visual signs are iconic signs in that they bear a resemblance to the object. Written or spoken signs are called indexical. They bear no obvious relationship to the things in which they refer. The letters t r e e bear no resemblance to a tree, but they still give us information. The relationship we assign to the word tree is arbitrary, just something we made up.