Is semiotics bullshit?

There may or may not be some legitimate field of inquiry going under the name of semiotics. In grad school a number of years ago, however, I took a (graduate-level) Introduction to Semiotics that was a pretty remarkable hodgepodge of bullshit, along with just enough non-bullshit to make a complete outsider like myself (not at all fluent in the obscurantist discourse of "cultural studies," "critical theory," and the like) feel like maybe the problem was me and not the material. (Later reflection gave me a lot more confidence that the problem was, in fact, the material.)

Among the reading was Freud, Lacan, Derrida, J. L. Austin, Marcel Mauss, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, and Peirce. (There was other stuff too that I don't recall right now.) Interestingly, of those I would say that only Lacan and Derrida were outright charlatans (which is not to endorse any of the others in particular, just to say that they were all doing something at least potentially more valuable than pulling stuff out of their asses). But the writings of the non-charlatans were presented so confusingly and tendentiously that it never remotely cohered into any sense that semiotics was a field with any integrity of its own or anything useful to contribute. That is to say, none of those thinkers would have described himself as a "semiotician," so it was very much a post hoc attempt to put a framework around a bunch of very diverse writing that in many cases was pretty foreign to its original intent.

This is all n=1, of course, but on that basis I tend to think that semiotics as a standalone field is probably more or less as you say it is.

I like how you call it "a set of heuristic practices that work well in a lot of situations, justified by complete bullshit." Because my first instinct when writing this comment was to include a remark to the effect that even if theoretical semiotics is mostly or entirely crap, there is some valuable work that calls itself some variety of applied semiotics. For example, there are some people who do musical semiotics, and—since it's not at all obvious what music signifies and how it does so, either in the general or specific cases—I have found some of that work enlightening. But on further thought, you're absolutely right in your characterization of it. Musical semiotics can be full of insight, but its adoption of the theoretical apparatus of (e.g.) Roland Barthes or Umberto Eco is no part of its value—that, instead, is an attempt to bring "theoretical" rigor to a fundamentally nonrigorous enterprise. So much the worse for any "application" of semiotics if it relies on the cesspool of semiotic theory to back up its assertions.

(Now I want to see an episode of Mad Men where they hire a semotician to sell cigarettes.)

They did.

"The cosmetic manufacturers are not selling lanolin, they are selling hope. . . . We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality. We do not buy just an auto, we buy prestige."

From Vance Packard's 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders, which is largely about Dichter's work.

And looking around the modern world, Dichter won, didn't he? Pretty much any advertisement from the 1930s or earlier looks like a small ad today.

Another update:

It seems the semiotician I spoke to had some ontology in mind that most famous semioticians don't use.

A/The key foundational figure in semiotics was Saussure. His most-cited contribution was to say that words did not operate by referring to things in the world, but to concepts in the mind. He said other things as well, but they're called structuralism rather than semiotics, I think.

In other words, he proposed that language uses intensional rather than extensional representations.

This is a crucial insight for logic, philosophy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. However, so far I don't see that Saussure added anything to the notion of intensional representation developed by Frege, Church, and Carnap by 1947, and he had none of their logical rigor.

Saussure seems to have developed the concept independently around 1907. Somehow, despite his fame, his ideas seems not to have been referenced in the development of intensional logic in the decades after his death.

I read Clifford Geertz's article "Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." This is an example of how semiotics is useful. It isn't really a set of tools; it's an attitude, or a set of things to look for. Geertz concludes that the "purpose" of Balinese cockfights parallels the purpose of literature in Western society: it's a representation of their most-important and most-threatening social dynamics. It symbolizes status conflicts, but it doesn't relieve their tension, or have any directly understood functional role except entertainment. But not shallow entertainment, like a cockfight in England would have been; entertainment the way literature entertains, by letting the Balinese look at a representation of themselves and the best and the worst that can happen, without any actual risk.

Geertz arrives at this conclusion because he is asking himself, when he sees the Balinese acting in ways he doesn't understand, "What story are they telling / enacting?" rather than assuming the activity is what it looks like (Western cockfighting), or that it must have a (non-artistic) social function.

It seems to me, though, that a structuralist approach could arrive at the same conclusion as easily.

The systematized reasoning of semioticians reminds me of the "ideas of reference" seen in paranoia,  which are typically very elaborate and convoluted and only illogical if one rejects the premises and/or rules of inference.

seems to believe people have an extra-computational ability to make correct judgements at better-than-random probability that have no logical basis

This is a very common belief. I've even seen seasoned mathematicians and AI gurus make this mistake, often unwittingly.

Did the books also give the example of advertising?

Semiotics, as a description of the entirety of communication, is a set which contains itself, and moreover contains the set theory which says that it contains itself, and also contains every possible notation system by which its properties might be defined.

Any formal process of defining semiotics, in a sense, defines the formal process by which anything is defined.

If semiotics exists in a non-trivial and complete form, it violates Godel's incompleteness theorem, because it encapsulates and defines all possible arithmetic systems, and every possible provable statement within any arithmetic system can be proven within it. Therefore, semiotics must exist, if it exists at all, in a trivial and/or incomplete form.

I'm pretty sure.

From reading La Wik, semiotics seems like an interesting and important field of study.

However, my impression resonates with the comments I see here - the word has the stench of bullshit about it, whatever value some may have produced in the field.

If the field has produced useful work, it seems to be suffering under the same fate as quantum mechanics when Deepak Chopra types appropriate it's language for their nonsense.

Is anyone here aware of something of valuable produced in the field of semiotics? A bunch of valuable things, maybe in a particular book?

People don't want to know the truth about these things. I don't know why.

Wow, that sounds like a lot of bullshit?? It's like those theories where lizards inhabit the Hollow Earth. Sorry you had to put up with those fakes. They need to wake up and realize that magic is not real.

Edit: before you say I didn't look into it in extreme depth before calling it bullshit, consider that I'd be losing... a bajillion utilities by doing so!! I lost enough utilities just looking at a cursory explanation of the theory it's really bad