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.
I spent an hour recently talking with a semiotics professor who was trying to explain semiotics to me. He was very patient, and so was I, and at the end of an hour I concluded that semiotics is like Indian chakra-based medicine: a set of heuristic practices that work well in a lot of situations, justified by complete bullshit.
I learned that semioticians, or at least this semiotician:
When I've read short, simple introductions to semiotics, they didn't say this. They didn't say anything I could understand that wasn't trivial. I still haven't found one meaningful claim made by semioticians, or one use for semiotics. I don't need to read a 300-page tome to understand that the 'C' on a cold-water faucet signifies cold water. The only example he gave me of its use is in constructing more-persuasive advertisements.
(Now I want to see an episode of Mad Men where they hire a semotician to sell cigarettes.)
Are there multiple "sciences" all using the name "semiotics"? Does semiotics make any falsifiable claims? Does it make any claims whose meanings can be uniquely determined and that were not claimed before semiotics?
His notion of "essence" is not the same as Plato's; tokens rather than types have essences, but they are distinct from their physical instantiation. So it's a tripartite Platonism. Semioticians take this division of reality into the physical instantiation, the objective type, and the subjective token, and argue that there are only 10 possible combinations of these things, which therefore provide a complete enumeration of the possible categories of concepts. There was more to it than that, but I didn't follow all the distinctions. He had several different ways of saying "token, type, unbound variable", and seemed to think they were all different.
Really it all seemed like taking logic back to the middle ages.