Social is Emotional

This is a biological approach to the philosophy of mind that feeds an investigation of the phenomena of “social” and “emotional”, both of which are widespread in nature. I scrutinize the non-dualistic Darwinian concept of the continuity of mind. For practical reasons, I address mind at different levels of organization: The systemic mind are the properties of which a common, coherent evolution works upon. Separated from this is “language-mind”: the crystallization of thought in words, which is a strictly human phenomenon. As the phenomenology of the body is a theory of philosophy that lie beyond language it can—to a certain extent—be extrapolated across a species boundary. In the process the phenomenology of the body comes to resemble biosemiotics and with this tool, I investigate a field study of social play behavior in canids. This leads to a possibility to study the non-human experience of emotion as “locally meaningful phenomena”.     

The Hypothesis of a Genetic Protolanguage: an Epistemological Investigation

Progress in molecular biology has revealed profound relations between linguistic and genomic sciences, mainly through advances in bioinformatics. The structural symmetries between biochemical and verbal syntaxes raise the question of their origins: did they emerge independently, or did one arise from the other? Does the genetic code contain the traces of a protolanguage, a universal grammar whose gradual evolution and successive mutations progressively led to the polymorphism of natural languages? To explore this question, we review the isomorphism of the genetic code and verbal codes from lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic standpoints. We discuss the limits of these symmetries and their anthropomorphic connotations. We observe the gradual evolution of species and languages according to parallel mechanisms, and the genetic roots of the physiology of language. In conclusion, we hypothesize that human observers may not be projecting linguistic frameworks onto genomic structures. Rather, it could be their linguistic faculties that reflect the grammatical structure of genetic code.     

The Biosemiotic Turn

With the publication of this inaugural issue of the internationally peer-reviewed journal Biosemiotics, our still-developing young interdiscipline marks yet another milestone in its journey towards adulthood. For this occasion, the editors of Biosemiotics have asked me to provide for those readers who may be newcomers to our field a very brief overview of the history of biosemiotics, contextualizing it within and against the larger currents of philosophical and scientific thinking from which it has emerged. To explain the origins of this most twenty-first century endeavour effectively, however, will require tracing—at least to the level of a thumbnail sketch—how the ‘sign’ concept appeared, was lost, and now must be painstakingly rediscovered and refined in science. To relate this long history, this article will appear in Biosemiotics in three instalments, examining, respectively: (1) The History of the Sign Concept in Pre-Modernist Science, (2) The History of the Sign Concept in Modernist Science, and (3) The Biosemiotic Attempt to Develop a More Useful Sign Concept for Contemporary Science. In this instalment, we begin our introductory ‘stroll through the woods of sciences and signs’ by following the development of the sign concept within the context of scientific inquiry, in necessarily broad outline, from the beginnings of such inquiry in sixth century BCE, through its long development in the Middle Ages, and up unto the onset of modernity. For only within this larger historical context can our contemporary attempt to develop a naturalistic understanding of sign relations be understood.

A Short History of Biosemiotics

Biosemiotics is the synthesis of biology and semiotics, and its main purpose is to show that semiosis is a fundamental component of life, i.e., that signs and meaning exist in all living systems. This idea started circulating in the 1960s and was proposed independently from enquires taking place at both ends of the Scala Naturae. At the molecular end it was expressed by Howard Pattee’s analysis of the genetic code, whereas at the human end it took the form of Thomas Sebeok’s investigation into the biological roots of culture. Other proposals appeared in the years that followed and gave origin to different theoretical frameworks, or different schools, of biosemiotics. They are: (1) the physical biosemiotics of Howard Pattee and its extension in Darwinian biosemiotics by Howard Pattee and by Terrence Deacon, (2) the zoosemiotics proposed by Thomas Sebeok and its extension in sign biosemiotics developed by Thomas Sebeok and by Jesper Hoffmeyer, (3) the code biosemiotics of Marcello Barbieri and (4) the hermeneutic biosemiotics of Anton Marko?. The differences that exist between the schools are a consequence of their different models of semiosis, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. In reality they go much deeper and concern the very nature of the new discipline. Is biosemiotics only a new way of looking at the known facts of biology or does it predict new facts? Does biosemiotics consist of testable hypotheses? Does it add anything to the history of life and to our understanding of evolution? These are the major issues of the young discipline, and the purpose of the present paper is to illustrate them by describing the origin and the historical development of its main schools.     

Semioticians Make Strange Bedfellows! Or, Once Again: “Is Language a Primary Modelling System?”

Like other sciences, biosemiotics also has its time-honoured archive, consisting of writings by those who have been invented and revered as ancestors of the discipline. One such example is Jakob von Uexküll. As to the people who ‘invented’ him, they are either, to paraphrase a French cliché, ‘agents du cosmopolitisme sémiotique’ like Thomas Sebeok, or de jure and de facto progenitor like Thure von Uexküll. In the archive is the special issue of Semiotica 42. 1 (1982) edited by the late Sebeok and introduced by Thure von Uexküll. It is in the opening essay that Thure von UexküIl tries to restore Jakob von Uexküll’s role as a precursor of semiotics by negotiating the Elder with Saussure and the linguistics-oriented ‘semiology’ in his wake. However, semiotic mapping, in the strictly ‘disciplinary’ sense, of Jakob von Uexküll is no easy task because he ‘knew neither Peirce nor Saussure and did not use their terminology’ (Thure von Uexküll 1982,2). Because Thure prefers to call the Elder’s science ‘general semiotics’ (Thure von Uexküll 1982), this paper begins by assessing Thure von Uexküll’s semiotic configuration of Jakob, probe into the force and limits of the linguistic analogy, revisit the already time-honoured debate on the primary and secondary modelling systems, which was made famous by the Moscow-Tartu semioticians in the early 1970s, but severely criticized by Sebeok and his followers. The paper engages Sebeok from several fronts, directed first at his relegation of the Saussurian linguistic model, then at his critique of the Primary Modelling System, and finally at his reservation about evolutionism in light of the current debate on gene/meme co-evolution. Paper presented at the Eighth Annual International Gatherings in Biosemiotics University of the Aegean, Syros, Greece, 23–28 June 2008     

Role of Utility and Inference in the Evolution of Functional Information

Functional information means an encoded network of functions in living organisms from molecular signaling pathways to an organism’s behavior. It is represented by two components: code and an interpretation system, which together form a self-sustaining semantic closure. Semantic closure allows some freedom between components because small variations of the code are still interpretable. The interpretation system consists of inference rules that control the correspondence between the code and the function (phenotype) and determines the shape of the fitness landscape. The utility factor operates at multiple time scales: short-term selection drives evolution towards higher survival and reproduction rate within a given fitness landscape, and long-term selection favors those fitness landscapes that support adaptability and lead to evolutionary expansion of certain lineages. Inference rules make short-term selection possible by shaping the fitness landscape and defining possible directions of evolution, but they are under control of the long-term selection of lineages. Communication normally occurs within a set of agents with compatible interpretation systems, which I call communication system. Functional information cannot be directly transferred between communication systems with incompatible inference rules. Each biological species is a genetic communication system that carries unique functional information together with inference rules that determine evolutionary directions and constraints. This view of the relation between utility and inference can resolve the conflict between realism/positivism and pragmatism. Realism overemphasizes the role of inference in evolution of human knowledge because it assumes that logic is embedded in reality. Pragmatism substitutes usefulness for truth and therefore ignores the advantage of inference. The proposed concept of evolutionary pragmatism rejects the idea that logic is embedded in reality; instead, inference rules are constructed within each communication system to represent reality, and they evolve towards higher adaptability on a long time scale.     

The Poetics of Purpose

Hackles have been raised in biosemiotic circles by T. L. Short’s assertion that semiosis, as defined by Peirce, entails “acting for purposes” and therefore is not found below the level of the organism (2007a:174–177). This paper examines Short’s teleology and theory of purposeful behavior and offers a remedy to the disagreement. Remediation becomes possible when the issue is reframed in the terms of the complexity sciences, which allows intentionality to be understood as the interplay between local and global aspects of a system within a system. What is called “acting for purposes” is not itself a type of behavior so much as a relationship between a dynamic system that “exists for a purpose” and its microprocesses that “serve purposes.” The “intentional object” of philosophy is recast here as the holistic self-organized dynamics of a system, which exists for the purpose of self-maintenance, and that constrains the parts’ behaviors, which serve the purpose of forming the system. (A “system” can be any emergent, e.g. an abiotic form, an adapted species, a self, a conditioned response, thought, or a set of ideas.) The self-organized whole, which is represented to the parts in their own constrained behaviors, assumes the guiding function so long attributed to the mysterious “intentional object.” If emergent self-causation is not disallowed, creative originality, as well as directionality, becomes part of the definition of purposeful behavior. Thus, key tools used here, required for understanding emergence, come from poetics rather than semoitics. In the microprocesses of self-organization, I find what I call “accidental” indices and icons — which are poetic in the sense that they involve mere metonymic contiguity and metaphoric similarity — and which are preferentially selected under constrained conditions allowing radically new connections to habituate into an “intentional” self-organized system that, not coincidentally, has some of the emergent characteristics of a conventional symbolic system.

Life and reference

The paper recommends a broadening of Howard Pattee's seminal distinction between a dynamic and a linguistic mode of living systems. It is observed that even the dynamic mode is always a semiotic mode although indexical and analogically coded rather than symbolic and digitally coded. The analogically coded messages corresponds to a kind of tacit knowledge hidden in macromolecular structure and shape (e.g. molecular complementarity) and in organismic architecture and communication, i.e. in the semiotic interactions of the body. It is claimed that the origin of referential processes is tied to the flow of historical singularities. The function of analog and digital codes in evolutionary systems is discussed.     

The Role of Off-line Communication in Human Evolution

The existence of embodied communication in humans places them among other living systems and helps to differentiate sign patterns that are common to all bioforms from those that are peculiarly human. Despite the fact that the biological roots of communication have been proven, the understanding of human forms of discourse is still far from being clarified. The main question remains: when and why did humans acquire the ability to exchange messages via speech? My thesis is that it became possible only after humans made a shift from on-line to off-line interaction and learned to communicate in the interpersonal mode via externalized analog codes that constitute the various forms of human culture.     

Advertising and the Predation Loop: A Biosemiotic Model

The basic premise of biosemiotics as a discipline is that there are elementary processes linking signifying strategies in all forms of animate life. Correspondingly, the discoveries of biosemiotics should, in principle, be capable of revealing new insights about human signification. In the present article, I show that this is in fact the case by constructing a biosemiotic model that links advertising strategies with corresponding structures in animal predation. The methodological framework for this model is the catastrophe theory of René Thom. The end result is a revised understanding of an ostensibly cultural phenomenon that demonstrates its continuity with signalling processes conventionally associated with the natural world.