Overview
Structuralists view society and its rules as expressions of deep structures, often binary codes, that express our primary natures. A systematic study of such codes is semiotics, which was later hijacked by Poststructuralists as evidence that language alone provides a true reality.
Introduction: Pierce
Ferdinand de Saussure was not the first to propose a science of signs: the American Charles Pierce (1839-1914) independently {1} developed semiology within the context of pragmatism. Pierce side-stepped Descartes' scepticism, observing that we are persuaded by the number and variety of arguments supporting a conclusion, rather than by the meditations of one individual, even ourselves. "The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed upon by all who investigate is what we mean by truth, and the object represented in this opinion is real." Pierce examined these investigations (methods of inquiry, standards of inference, ways of clarifying, identifying hypotheses, etc.), classifying them by the number of relations they exhibit. Meaning and understanding involve threefold relations, and as such constituted signs. Semiotics is a theory of how we are guided and constrained in interpreting signs, and some of Pierce's terminology is still widely used: iconic (sign resembles referent), indexical (sign is causally associated with referent) and symbolic (sign has an arbitrary relation to referent). Indeed, most things ultimately could be seen as signs: mathematical and logical symbolism, even science itself.
Saussure's Semiotics
Saussure worked on a much smaller canvas and devised a semiology that properly applied to linguistics. Certainly the signified (concept) and signifier (sound or letter group) were connected only arbitrarily, as had been noted since Aristotle. But Saussure made it a cardinal feature of his system: the principle of arbitrariness, he said, dominates all linguistics. The English call their faithful friend dog and the Spanish perro.