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Semiotics and Consumer Culture Semiotics, the science of signs, has a long history. The “father of medicine,” Hippocrates (460-377 BC) was interested in signs and their relation to medical symptoms; after him philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine and Locke also wrote about various aspects of signs. We may say that modern semiotics started with the work of two authors: Ferdinande de Saussure (1857-1913), a linguist at the University of Geneva, who called his approach “semiology” and Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), a philosopher at Harvard University, who called his science “semiotics.” Saussure’s book,?Course in General Linguistics, published in 1915 is made of notes from his students that were collected and put together by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Peirce produced an enormous body of writings on semiotic theory that have been extremely influential, and his term for the science of signs, “semiotics,” is the one currently used by scholars in the field, whatever their orientation. The root of both semiology and semiotics is the Greek word for sign, sēme?on. In his?Course in General Linguistics,?Saussure described what he meant by signs and explained their significance (1966:16): Language is a system of signs that expresses ideas, and is therefore comparable to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, polite formulas, military signals, etc. But it is the most important of these systems. A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; it would be part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology; I shall call it?semiology?(from Greek?sēme?on?“sign.”). Semiology would show what constitutes a sign, what laws govern them. Saussure explained that signs have two parts: a sound-image or?signifier?and a concept or?signified; it is important to recognize that the relation between the?signifier?and?signified?is arbitrary and based on convention. Thus, the meaning of signs can change over tim