Critical Realism and Semiosis I --introduction

This paper explores the mutual implication of critical realism and semiosis. Three key questions can be posed in this regard. 1 The first (discussed in Section II) concerns how far critical realism needs to include semiosis, provisionally defined as the intersubjective production of meaning, 2 in its more general approach to social relations, their reproduction and transformation. In exploring this issue we interpret social relations broadly to include not only actions and interactions but also institutional orders and the lifeworld. Apart from addressing the closely related, controversial, but nonetheless analytically distinct, issue of whether reasons can also be causes, critical realists have paid little attention to semiosis. Their neglect is quite unjustified because reasons are merely one (albeit important) aspect of the causal efficacy of semiosis and can, in any case, only be understood in and through the operation of semiosis. Second, and equally important for our purposes, we will show how semiosis in turn depends on a broader social context – which implies that, insofar as semiosis has been studied in isolation from its context, it offers an incomplete account of social causation and risks falling into one or more kinds of reductionism. This is where critical discourse analysis (or CDA) has much to offer but, depending on the explicandum, it may still need supplementation through more concrete-complex analysis of extra-discursive domains. We discuss this question in Section III. Thirdly, and finally, in Section IV, we give an account of semiotic structures and of the distinctive features of emergence in texts (discussing some examples), which draws upon work in critical semiotic analysis (particularly CDA, Chouliaraki & Fairclough 1999) that is compatible with CR. This supports our conclusion that non-semiotic approaches are best combined with semiotic approaches (and vice versa). Overall we seek to show that semiosis involves mechanisms that are intelligible from a critical realist