The view that psychological or spiritual processes cannot explain the sign process. Proponents of this doctrine argue that signs cannot be explained by their relationship to reason, namely, reason accepted as an internal or private sphere; reason could be explained only in terms of semiosis or sign action.
This abrupt change in heuristic orientation was called the paradigm shift by Thomas Kuhn. Therefore, semiotics (the study of signs) is nothing more than such a shift, according to the way signs are understood and studied.
In the paradigm shift, the community of scientists, or at least a significant part of it, is not simply redirected from one series of questions and problems to another; it also revives its understanding of what is considered a correct explanation. In the study of signs in the last hundred years, there has been a shift from the psychological explanation of signs to the semiotic examination carried out by reason. For some semioticians, this conceptual and heuristic revolution is as great and significant as that initiated by Galileo and continued by Newton.
Aristotle‘s physics explained the fact of the motion of bodies in general. Galileo and later Newton shifted the focus of physics, presupposing the motion of bodies; what needed to be explained was the change in direction and speed.
Charles S. Peirce in his semeiotics is a prominent antipsychologist. In contrast, however, Ferdinand de Saussure often characterized the sign as a psychological unit; he also defines semiology as a branch of social psychology. However, from the perspective of his followers, Saussure provided sources for the development of an antipsychological theory of signs.
