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A Scale of Significance

Schapiro, Meyer 1969. On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs. Semiotica 1(3): 223-242. DOI: 10.1515/semi.1969.1.3.223

We take for granted today as indispensable means the rectangular form of the sheet of paper and its clearly defined smooth surface on which one draws and writes. But such a field corresponds to nothing in nature or mental imagery where the phantoms of visual memory come up in a vague unbounded void. (Schapiro 1969: 223)

As Ted Nelson pointed out with his Xanadu Project that never finalized, there's no reason we should employ this arbitrary rectangular form of the sheet of paper on a computer screen. But alas, we do - I'm reading a PDF file.

The spontaneous graffiti on the walls of ancient Roman buildings are, in this respect, not different from those drawn today; like the modern ones they disregard the field they have usurped, even defacing an existing picture. But the field of the image is not always inviolate even in a word preserved with reverence as a precious object. In China where painting was a noble art the owner did not hesitate to write a comment in verse or prose on the unpointed background of a sublime landscape and to stamp his seal prominently on the picture surface. The ground of the image was hardly felt to be part of the sign itself; figure and ground did not compose for the eye an inseparable unity. A connoisseur in looking at an admired work could regard the empty ground and margins as not truly parts of the painting, as the reader of a book might see the margins and interspaces of the text as open to annotation. It is clear that the sense of the whole depends on habits of seeing which may vary. (Schapiro 1969: 225)

I anticipated the author's discussion of graffiti, which is indeed like the cave painting in its use of space.

The same properties of the field as a space with a latent expressiveness are exploited in printed and painted verbal signs. In the hierarchy of words on the title page of a book or on a poster the more potent words are not only enlarged but often isolated on a ground which is more open at the sides. (Schapiro 1969: 229)

This I've noticed on food packaging.

Picasso has often disregarded even the reversal of his signature in the print. It is an assertion of spontaneity, made all the more readily as the value of the drawing or print has come to be lodged in its energy and freedom and in the surprise of its forms rather than in the refinement of detail and subtlety of balance. One can doubt that the artist would accept the reversal of a carefully composed painting. (Schapiro 1969: 234)

When composition is not important, why bother?

In Western medieval art (and probably in Asiatic too) the apportioning of space among various figures is often subject to a scale of significance in which size is correlated with position in the field and with posture and spiritual rank. In an image of Christ in Majesty with the evangelists, their symbols, and the prophets of the Old Testament (the Bible of Charles the Bald, Paris, Bibl. nat. ms. lat. 1), Christ is the largest figure, the evangelists are second in size, the prophets smaller, the symbols are the smallest of all. (Schapiro 1969: 236)

Size matters.

Worth, Sol 1969. The Developement of a Semiotic of Film. Semiotica 1(3): 282-321. DOI: 10.1515/semi.1969.1.3.282

When writing about that mysterious scientific entity called a 'sign', we may use the word 'semiotic' with relative impunity; when writing about that magical phenomenon called 'movies', we use words like 'sign', 'semiotic', 'science', and even 'analysis' at our own risk. We will have to learn to accept ridicule and even occasional vituperation from those of our fellows who look at films and write about them with and out of love - of their own deep responses to the magic of film, and the art they believe film to be. (Worth 1969: 282)

This I noticed early on: virtually anything can have "semiotic" appended to it (cf. semiotic subject, semiotic reality; even tautologies like "semiotic sign" and "semiotic communicotin" have reached my eyes).

Shall one look at film as communication? This presupposes a definition of communication and commits one to a position that as yet has scarcely been adequately clarified, let alone accepted. (Worth 1969: 283)

Communicationalization. [Suhtlustamine, st sulustamine suhtlemise võtmesse.]

The process of film communication can be thought of as beginning with what I have called a Feeling-Concern. A person has a 'feeling' the recognition [|] of which under certain circumstances arouses enough 'concern' so that he is motivated to communicate that feeling to others. I have purposely chosen the words 'feeling' and 'concern' because they are imprecise. After consideration of the entire model, it might prove valuable to try to fit the concepts that these words identify into tighter conceptual frameworks, but for the moment let us use the word 'feeling' in the loose sense, by which we mean "I feel that..." (Worth 1969: 286-287)

Feeling does indeed occupy the category of Firstness in Peirce's system, though it is dubious if films really begin with a feeling or concern; Bee Movie for example, began with a title (was the "feeling" in that case that of considering such a title funny?).

We have suggested that viewing the film is a mirror image of the making process, that is, that the decoder reverses the process by which the encoder made the film. Should our viewer choose to treat these signs and signals as a message, he will first infer the Story-Organism from the sequenced Image-Events. He will become aware of the belief system of the film-maker from the images he sees on the screen. From this awareness of the message he will, if the communication 'works', be able to infer - to evoke in himself - the Feeling-Concern. (Worth 1969: 290)

Again reminiscent of Jakobson's cryptanalytical model of communication, explained here.

We can find some viewers and some makers who will say certain things are 'wrong' or 'ungrammatical'. Using this method, we would have to call each group a language community. These groups - the underground film-makers, the Hollywood film-makers, the 'new wave', the television documentarians, or the cinéma-vérité film-makers - do in fact rarely use the words 'ungrammatical' or 'wrong'. Rather, they will call other films dull, uninteresting, bad esthetically, old-fashioned, middle-class, square, and so on. (Worth 1969: 315)

Viewers are probably not as easily segregated into such groups as makers are.

Nöth, Winfried 1998. Ecosemiotics. Sign Systems Studies 26: 332-343.

According to these premises, ecosemiotics is the study of the semiotic interrelations between organisms and their environment. This definition presupposes that the center of interest of an ecological semiotics is not a homo semioticus, but more generally, an organismus semioticus. Still more fundamental is the question concerning the relationship between the organism and its environment. It is always of a semiotic nature, or is there at least always a semiotic aspect in this relationship, or do we have to distinguish between semiotic and non-semiotic environmental relationships? (Nöth 1998: 333)

How, indeed, are the organism and its environment semiotically interrelated beyond the grandiose philosophical datum that all experience is mediated by signs?

Not all theories of semiotics are able or willing to recognize semiotic aspects in organism-environment interactions. For example, F. de Saussure's (1857-1913) anthroposemiotics is a semiotics without any ecosemiotic perspective. According to Saussure, "nothing" in the cognitive environment of humans "is distinct before the appearance of language" (1916: 111-112), and even human thought, without the shaping form of language, is an "indistinct mass", and "a vague uncharted nebula" (ibid.), in which nothing is defined by necessity. Such a linguocentric program of semiosis is bound to impede any prospectives for the study of the ecological determinants in the process of semiosis interaction of the organism and its environment (see further Nöth 1994a). (Nöth 1998: 337)

Only all of developmental psychology contradicts Saussure on this point.

Semiosis in this sense is by no means restricted to processes in higher organisms, to culture and social convention. Any primitive biological organism already interacts semiotically with its environment when it selects or avoids energetic or material objects in its environment for the purpose of its own survival. Such triadic interactions of the organism with its environment constitutes a semiotic threshold from the nonsemiotic to the semiotic world. Peirce goes so far as to see the presence of mind in organismic nature when he writes: "The microscopist looks to see whether the motions of a little creature show any purpose. If so, there is mind there" (PC 1.269; see also Santaella Braga 1994). (Nöth 1998: 338)

As is to be expected, the semiotic threshold consists in the capacity to choose, or freedom to choose. Essentially, it is a matter of free will.

Kull, Kalevi 1998. Semiotic ecology: different natures in the semiosphere. Sign Systems Studies 26: 344-371.

The relationships between humans and nature are connected to deep cultural processes. A possible example can be the behaviour of the primeval society on Easter Island, in which the establishment of religious symbols and the building of stone statues led to the entire destruction of the forest on the island, followed by the degeneration of the culture (Ponting 1991). Besides constructing our understanding of nature, we also construct the surrounding nature itself. (Kull 1998: 346)

Already hinting towards ecosemiotic criticism (a mixture of literary theory, cultural studies, and ecology) springing from this insight. As the next paragraph points out, it is focused on "understanding the semiotic mechanisms which determine the place of nature in different cultures".

We can, in the best case, make the changes slower and maybe less harmful for biodiversity, but what we get is nevertheless nature with a human face. (Kull 1998: 347)

The hedgerows.

Biosemiotics is defined as an analysis of living systems as sign systems, the origin of sign being one of the problems in its competence. It investigates semiosis in the living which is much broader than human life, i.e. which exists beyond the mental (conscious) life, assuming the semiotic threshold to be close to where life begins. (Kull 1998: 350)

Recording this as a point of reference when we come to list the various "sign systems": the organism itself and/or the biosphere.

In all this, it includes the role of memory and the relationships between different types of (short-term, long-term, etc.) memory in culture. (Kull 1998: 351)

According to Lotman's isological principle, culture is a (complex, supraindividual) person(ality); thus, it can have memory systems much like humans do. In effect, libraries would be an example of the long-term memory of a culture, and someone gaining his/her 15 minutes of fame is an example of the short-term variety. Recall that "cultural memory" studies were anticipated by Lotman. (And Tulving's episodic and semantic memory systems could be better analogues than short- and long-term, if this thought were carried further.)

As a result of the differences humans can make, the nature in their Umwelt is distinguished into first, second, and third nature; what we think is outside the Umwelt, can be called zero nature. Zero nature is nature itself (e.g., absolute wilderness). First nature is the nature as we see, identify, describe and interpret it. Second nature is the nature which we have materially interpreted, this is materially translated nature, i.e. a changed nature, a produced nature. Third nature is a virtual nature, as it exists in art and science. (Kull 1998: 355)

Essentially this is a scale of the semiotizaton of nature: from nature untouched by humans to first recognized, secondly manipulated, and then (artificially) recreated (in representation). The scheme is a neat amalgamation of Uexküll's functional circle and Peircean categories.

Kernan, W. F. 1965. The Peirce Manuscripts and Josiah Royce - A Memoir Harvard 1915-1916. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 1(2): 90-95.

During the spring of 1915, it was impossible to enter the study of Professor Josiah Royce in Emerson Hall without being acutely conscious of the manuscripts of Charles Sanders Peirce which at that time filled every available surface of table, chair and floor with their bulky, dusty and yet somehow intriguing disorder. No matter what business brought one to this otherwise spacious room, nothing, not even the sonorous periods of Royce himself, could prevent a student of philosophy, standing because there was no place to sit, from entertaining a secret, almost Freudian wish to get at these fascinating papers, to re-arrange them, restore them to order, dust them off and above all to read them. (Kernan 1965: 90)

There's a scene like this in the 3rd volume of Tammsaare's Truth and Justice.

A first lecture (of the Lowell Lectures on Pragmatism) would be found, for example, at the top of one group of manuscripts prominently located on the right edge of Royce's long study table. Then three piles further on (and two days later) one would discover Lecture No. 2 firmly wedged between a lengthy dissertation on "The Doctrine of Chances" with pages unnumbered and a small, and intensely interesting, treatise "On the Prospects of Air-Sailing." The whole business, as I look back on it after fifty years, was most engrossing, wonderful and fascinating beyond belief, and I often felt, while at work in Royce's littered and crowded office, like Cortez, "on a peak in Darien." But it was utterly impossible at that time and with the means at my disposal to furnish Professor Bush with anything like a complete and authoritative list of the Peirce manuscripts. (Kernan 1965: 93)

Peirce was an interesting and interested man.

Potter, Vincent G. 1966. Peirce's Analysis of Normative Science. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 2(1): 5-32.

He tells us that as an undergraduate at Harvard (ca. 1855) he expounded as best he could Schiller's Aesthetische Briefe to his friend Horatio Paine (2.197). Almost 50 years later he expressed regret that he had not followed up this study in a serious way, because he then saw how fundamental it is to a theory of knowledge (2.120, 2.197, 5.129 ff.). (Potter 1966: 5)

Available on archive.org - at some point I should take up the books I've collected from such notes and read them, if even a chapter or few, as a companion series to this one.

Peirce's judgment in this matter, therefore, was not hasty. It was the result of long reflection during the height of his intellectual powers (in 1899 Peirce was only 58 years old). Finally in 1903 Peirce made public his conclusions in the Lowell Lectures of that year (5.533), and even then he was not prepared to say apodictically that esthetics is a normative science and indeed the science upon which both ethics and logic ultimately rest. He was content with the modest proposal of an opinion and an hypothesis (5.129, 2.197). (Potter 1966: 6)

Will I reach my prime around 2050? Or will civilization collapse a decade before that like a computer predicted in 1973?

Ultimately an argument cannot be judged valid because of some instinctive feeling that it is so, nor by any compulsion so to judge, nor by appeal to an intuition (see 2.155 ff., 2.19, 2.39-51, 3.432). In general, the psychological fact that men for the most part show a natural tendency to approve the same arguments which logic approves, the same acts which ethics approves, and the same works of art which esthetics approves is insignificant support for the conclusions of those sciences. (Potter 1966: 9)

Intuitions be damned. In one of the few published papers (by Peirce) I've read, it immediately came across as the source of Clay's dissention against the concept of intuition.

Indeed it would take "a whole course of lectures" to present Peirce's theory of mind. Clearly, however, Peirce is here making the same point he made in his letter to James (8.256) where he labeled as nominalistic (and hence erroneous) the notion that thought is in consciousness rather than consciousness in thought. Mind is thought, and thought is Thirdness, and Thirdness is ubiquitous. The human mind is only one manifestation of Mind, the highest perhaps because it has the greatest capacity for self-control, but not unique. Here again Peirce is insisting upon the continuity of reality. If mind is anywhere, it is everywhere in one form or another. (Potter 1966: 11)

One of the primary reasons why biosemioticians prefer Peirce over Saussure. The human mind is merely one of the highest manifestations of consciousness, but it pervades throughout the living world (and, in some sense, the non-living, cue AGI).

Ethics, then, is not concerned directly with pronouncing this course of action right and that wrong, but with determining what makes right right and wrong wrong. It has to do with norms or ideals in terms of which those categories have meaning. Peirce therefore came to see ethics as the science of ends.
The fundamental problem of ethics is not, therefore, what is right, but, what am I prepared deliberately to accept as the statement of what I want to do, what am I to aim at, what am I after? [...] It is Ethics which defines that end. (2.198)
Now it becomes clear just what is the relation of ethics to logic. (Potter 1966: 12)

Somewhat different from "the 'problem of happiness'" (cf. Petrilli & Ponzio 2008: 33). Here, the take-away is that the ethical aspect in phatic communion may have to do with the pseudo-social "ends" hinted at by "the communion of food".

Everyone is agreed that logic is normative. The majority of writers also include esthetics and ethics, so that the division corresponds to the ancient triad of ideals, the true, the beautiful, and the good. (Potter 1966: 14)

How ancient, though? Is it Aristotle's alone or are there other notable ancient representatives of this triad?

In the first lecture, "Pragmatism: The Normative Sciences," Peirce again tells us that traditionally the normative sciences have [|] been numbered as three: logic, ethics, and esthetics, and that he will continue to employ these terms. He characterizes these sciences as those which distinguish good and bad in the representation of truth in the efforts of the will, and in objects regarded simply in their presentation, respectively (5.36). Thus he begins to develop explicitly the notion that the sciences in question all deal with kinds of goodness. (Potter 1966: 18-19)

Monadic presentation, dyadic clash between will and resistance, and the triadic logical propositionalising. This ancient triad does not appear in every paper in this journal but it does appear in nearly every paper in the first issues of Mind, which would make comparisons between Peirce and the likes of Bain, hopefully, productive.

To make a normative judgment is to criticize; to criticize is to attempt to correct; to attempt to correct supposes a measure of control over what is criticized in the first place. Any other kind of criticism, any other conception of goodness and badness is idle (see 2.26). (Potter 1966: 20)

Unlike, for example, Tarasti's statement that "every semiotic act [...] includes within itself the relationship of dominant/dominated" (1998: 117), the sequence presented here seems better reasoned and thus justified. Here, the chasm between the minor and the major tradition, as Sebeok put it (cf. Petrilli & Ponzio 2008: 26) is between the neutral conception of control and the negative conception of domination.

Furthermore, granting that the phenomena of pleasure and of pain are prominent only in those states of mind in which feeling is predominant, they do not consist in any common feeling-quality of pleasure or of pain (even supposing that there are such qualities) (5.113). If one analyzes the phenomenon of pain, he will see that it consists in "a Struggle to give a state of mind its quietus" (5.113). It is, therefore, in essence an event, an actuality, and not just a mere quality of feeling, or, in terms of the categories, pain is essentially a Second and not a First, although undoubtedly it is accompanied by a First. (Potter 1966: 22)

Quietus (archaic) - "something that has a calming or soothing effect". The connection between phatic communion and the default mode network comes to mind.

Kull, Kalevi; Claus Emmeche and Donald Favareau 2008. Biosemiotic Questions. Biosemiotics 1(1): 41-55. DOI: 10.1007/s12304-008-9008-2

Semiosis, or true sign activity, occurs via a process of self-organisation. Taking place in self-organising systems, sign processes appear as emergent processes (or second-order self-organising processes - which means the 'organising self') of signification and interpretation that co-ordinate the biochemical self-organisation of living systems. In this sense, such activity might truly be thought of as being at the heart of the ongoing and interactive organising of physical constituents into biological agents, or 'selves'. Accordingly, such processes are not only upwardly causal (emergent) in their physical effects, but are also the result of downwardly causal or informational (semiotic) constraints upon the activity of the system as a whole. (Kull, Emmeche & Favareau 2008: 42)

A kind of "double articulation" of organisation: an organism organises signs, and signs organise an organism.

Repeatedly formulated by Thomas A. Sebeok (1996, 2001) over the course of many decades, the concept that life and semiosis are coextensive, we officially christen here as Sebok's Thesis - and it is one of the basic propositions held in contemporary biosemiotics. (Kull, Emmeche & Favareau 2008: 43)

A useful shorthand, for this thesis appears in every third or fourth paper in this journal, it appears.

But in our opinion, scientific knowledge of other species' phenomenological experience need not be seen as any more a priori inaccessible than any other science's previously "unsolvable mysteries." Rather, we feel that one of the main reasons why the question of organisms' subjective experience has been perceived as an "unscientific" question to begin with is simply because of the [|] fact that "the scientific method" has been prematurely codified (and perhaps has subsequently become petrified) in a too narrow and restricted sense, reflecting its origins in seventeenth and eighteenth century mechanistic reductionism. (Kull, Emmeche & Favareau 2008: 43-44)

I recall a conversation with the first author about this, though the answer (as to how to gain knowledge of other species' phenomenological experience) remains elusive, at least presently (hopefully further readings in this journal and re-reading Uexküll in Semiotica will ameliorate this lack of knowledge).

But again: this wil necessitate the introduction into science of something that non-semiotic science has generally resisted: an investigation into the qualities (or qualia) of experience and into the organization of subjective states per se. (Kull, Emmeche & Favareau 2008: 44)

Perce can help with qualia but the subjective states of other, non-human organisms would require familiarity with animal psychology or... would Uexküllian biosemiotics (an offshoot of psychological physiology) do the trick?

Seen thusly, the major task of any biosemiotic "case study" will be to ascertain the particulars of that available set of qualitative diversity that literally makes 'sense' (i.e., that makes a 'difference') for the organism or biosystem under study. In other words: the first task must be to describe the umwelt (or the entire network of experiential sign processes) proper to that organism. Thus we arrive at what we will call biosemiotics' Uexküllian Question: "How is the subjective experiential world (or umwelt) of an organism organised?" Or: "In what does the subjective world experienced by an organism (umwelt) consist?" (Kull, Emmeche & Favareau 2008: 44)

This would necessitate a thorough familiarity with a given species or living system. Did Uexküll himself reach the mammalian order or did he only study lower forms like ticks?

Neurosemiotic approaches to brain research and consciousness studies have been proposed by Deacon (1997), Favareau (2002), Neuman (2003), Roepstorff (2004) and Villa (2005); while a biosemiotically informed approach to cognitive robotics has been undertaken by Ziemke and Sharkey (2001), Sharkey (1999, 2002), and Emmeche (2001). (Kull, Emmeche & Favareau 2008: 51)

Deacon (1997) - The Symbolic Species; Favareau (2002) - "Beyond self and other: On the neurosemiotic emergence of intersubjectivity" [SSS, thus upcoming]; Neuman (2003) - Processes and Boundaries of the Mind: Extending the Limit Line; Roepstorff (2004) - "Cellular neurosemiotics: Outline of an interpretive framework"; Villa (2005) - "The neuro-heuristic paradigm" [only abstract available]; Ziemke & Sharkey (2001) - "A stroll through the worlds of robots and men" [Semiotica, thus eventually upcoming]; Sharkey (1999) - Combining Artificial Neural Nets: Ensemble and Modular Multi-Net Systems; Sharkey (2002) - "Biologically Inspired Robotics"; Emmeche (2001) - "Does a robot have an Umwelt"? [Semiotica].

In both cases, the goal is to move away from reliance on the sterile and unhelpful use of the term 'information' as a placeholder or mere metaphor in explaining genetic processes, and to replace it with a fully useable and genuinely bio-semiotic definition of what 'information' for a living system consists in. (Kull, Emmeche & Favareau 2008: 50)

Sounds like a move away from a vague term like Morris' suggestion to abandon "meaning" in scientific semiotics after Ogden and Richards conclusively demonstrated its uselessness. Information is no better, as experts attest.

Katz, Gregory 2008. The Hypothesis of a Genetic Protolanguage: an Epistemological Investigation. Biosemiotics 1(1): 57-73. DOI: 10.1007/s12304-008-9005-5

Another example is the analogy between the dualism knowledge/utterances in linguistics and the dualism genotype/phenotype in biology. These parallelisms are often presented as a surprising isomorphism of systems on completely different scales, perhaps reflecting our need to search for recurring patterns in natural phenomena. Yet a deeper scrutiny of this analogy may help us to revisit assumptions and result in both fields and suggest new modes of investigation. This may even reveal common evolutionary mechanisms that are responsible for shaping emergent properties of complex systems, independent of their relative or absolute scales. (Katz 2008: 59)

Knowledge/utterance is obviously generalized from the language/speech or type/token dualisms.

A particularly interesting commonality of the two evolutionary processes described here is the presence of multiple levels of representation. In a living cell, the reactions transforming different metabolites into each other have a representation in the structures of the various enzymes that catalyze these reactions. In turn, these enzymes have a clear mapping in the genes that code for their amino acid sequence. Similarly, in human language, one can identify mappings between neuronal firing patterns, sound waves and graphical signs. Both in the cellular networks and the structure of human language, multiple representations of the same functional units seem to be present. This multiplicity, or redundancy, of "memory devices" exchanging information with each other may have played a major role in the evolution of the combinatorial nature of human and biochemical languages (Segrè 2002). (Katz 2008: 60)

How metabolite transformations are represented in enzymes would be interesting to know. Is the passing remark about neuronal firing patterns an answer to the question about the neurophysiology of the semeion?

Recursive in the sense that the same rules and structures amy recur at different levels in the hierarchy, so that a structure may contain a substructure that is another instatiation of the same structure, in theory repeated ad infinitum (Johansson 2005). (Katz 2008: 60)

Heterarchy (cf. Bruni 2008: 114).

This symmetry extends to many points, including the way messages are delimited. Specific signals indicate the start and end of coordinated genetic systems and the limits between genetic segments within these systems. François Jacob called these signals "punctuation signs" or "commas" (Jacob 1966). In the linguistic model, Jakobson stressed that they correspond to the delineation processes used in the phonological division of a statement into sentences, and of sentences into clauses and parts. They are borded signals (Grenzsignale), i.e. the limits of the informative message (Jakobson 1973; Trubetskoy 1936). (Katz 2008: 61)

One the unsolved issues with Jakobson's phatic funtction is the identity of the so-called contoural features, which fulfil the above-described function of punctuating and segregating (much like Bateson's meta-communication).

Language was always believed to be a product of culture. Could it be a product of nature? According to the genetic protolanguage hypothesis, 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. In other words, the hypothesis of a genetic protolanguage could be more than just an anthropomorphic metaphor. The genetic code may represent "the Code of Codes" (Kevles and Hood 1992), i.e. the original matrix of all natural languages. This hypothesis led to Jakobson's censorship, because his approach emphasized the teleological properties of genetic code (Jakobson 1974). The Harvard professor was denied publication of an article submitted in 1973 to The New York Review of Books on the grounds that he was advocating a teleological approach that challenged the prevailing neo-Darwinian interpretation (Kay 2000). (Katz 2008: 66)

This must be Jakobson's "Life and Language" (DOI: 10.1515/ling.1974.12.138.97).

Deacon, Terrence W. 2007. Shannon – Boltzmann – Darwin: Redefining information (Part I). Cognitive Semiotics 1: 123-148. DOI: 10.1515/cogsem.2007.1.fall2007.123

The concept of information is a central unifying concept in the sciences. It plays critical roles in physics, computation and control theory, biology, cognitive neuroscience, and of course the social sciences. It is, however, employed somewhat differently in each, to the extent that the aspects of the concept that are most relevant to each may be almost entirely non-overlapping. Additionally, there are both highly technical and restricted uses of the term that while allowing precise quantitative analyses, entirely ignore the representational aspect of the concept that is its ultimate base, and is the foundational notion of semiotic theory. More seriously, the most precise and technical definition used in communication engineering, computational theory, and physics is potentially applicable to a vast range of physical differences that effectively could characterize almost any physical relationship of difference, even quantum differences. This promisquity threatens to make it either so ubiquitous that it provides no insight into the physical distinctiveness of semiotic relationship, or else licenses flights of pan-psychic fantasy. (Deacon 2007: 124)

Is there a representational aspect to information? One of my pet peeves is the interpretation of phatic communion with the concept of "information" forced into it. While Malinowski uses the verb, "to inform", his definition by no means excludes information (small talk may exchange information, but the value of such information is most likely trivial).

Although not all semiotic relationships convey information, in the sense of previously unavailable content or novel representations, the possibility of semiosis is itself dependent on prior information conveying the constraints on dynamic organization that are sufficient to establish this interpretive dynamic. For an organism or mind to be able to interpret something as representing some object or content, it must already be organized with respect to that absent feature in some way or other, and that requires that information with respect to their relationship has already linked them, at least indirectly. But the nature of this dynamical linkage is not at all clear or simple. (Deacon 2007: 124)

Concerning the "newness" of information; if it's not news then it's not information. Here, the point appears to be that for information to take hold the receiver must be in some sense predisposed to it; i.e. to fully receive a message you have to know the code, perhaps some context, and be able to place it in a broader scheme of things.

Similarly, we will be required to give up substantialist thinking about information and representation in order to develop them into scientifically useful concepts. Neither the physical identification of information with pattern nor the phenomenological conception of an irreducible intentional relationship that is "always already there", will survive this reformulation. (Deacon 2007: 126)

The problem is similar with "meaning", which is often described as a substance, as if meaning were a thing and not, as the proponents of global semiotics describe it, a relation.

But in the case of information, this is even more fundamental and more counterintuitive than for energy, because the very nature of information is a relationship between something present or proximate and something absent or distal. To put this in even more enigmatic terms: what makes something information is its relationship to something that it is not. (Deacon 2007: 126)

Again the feeling that information is confused with signs. In a definition of information like "facts provided or learned about something or someone", something present is facts (statements?) and something absent is the Something, which the information is about.

Unlike nothingness, absence has extension, because it is bounded by contrast to what is present. Not only does an absence have a specific locus in space and time, it is often implicitly understood with respect to something quite specific that is missing. This often involves specific physical materials and properties that happen to be missing, such as the dirt missing from clothes after they've been washed, the hole at the wheel's hub, or the space within a container. In this contrastive sense, an absence can correspond to definite physical properties. This particular sense of absence is the sort of 'nothing' that can help us to make sense of information at many levels, and ultimately re-link the semiotic world to its physical foundations. (Deacon 2007: 127)

I'm still not sure if "extension" comes from Descartes' discussion of wax, or something like that. (Is the mind extended? - here, does it correspond to definite physical properties?) The whole ordeal reminds me of the various dissections of silence, where a perceived absence is one of the varieties, and Jakobson's zero sign, which amounts to pretty much the same - the absence of something becomes significant (a rigid rhyme scheme ends suddenly without following the regular pattern, thus subverting expectations).

So-called sins-of-omission can also have significant social consequences. Consider the effect of the "thank you" note not written or the RSVP request that gets ignored. Omissions in social contexts often prompt deliberations about whether the absence reflects the presence of malice or merely a lack of social graces. And we are all too familiar with omissions of preparation or attentiveness that can be the indirect cause of a disaster. (Deacon 2007: 128)

Touching upon politeness: "Every civilised man and woman feels, or ought to feel, this duty; it is the universal accomplishment which all must practice, ad as those who fail signally to attain it are punished by the dislike and neglect of society" (Mahaffy 1888: 2).

Though we tend to define function in terms of what the machine is designed to achieve, because that is the purpose for which it was built, this notion of function is entirely parasitic on human mentality, and merely begs the question of the efficacy of the nonexistent state of a represented goal. (Deacon 2007: 129)

Makes me think of how linguistic functions, too, are imputed, according to the purposes they seemingly fulfil.

And the converse - creating function by eliminating a class of dynamical possibilities - is an equally counterintuitive way of thinking about function, but this is the critical figure/background flip that we will need to consider. Nor is it just machines that exhibit this paradoxical negative existence; life does as well. Disease and death are not the diminishment or less of some special essence; they are a gain in degre of freedom. Diverse spontaneous chemical reactions and organismal activities that are prevented or precisely controlled during life are no longer constrained after death. So life is as much about what is prevented from occurring - what it is not - as it is about the special improbable habits that we associate with it. (Deacon 2007: 130)

Cancer is a good illustration of this: it nullifies programmed cell death and lets cell with faulty genes proliferate; normal functioning, in this sense, prevents the body from growing in certain ways.

To summarize, many phenomena can be described as having an existence partially defined with respect to something physically absent: function, adaptation, agency, purpose, reference, meaning, value, experience. What these and all intentional relationships share is the property of existing with respect to [|] something else, something not immediately present, and possibly something not in existence or even possible. I propose the term constitutive absence to indicate this genetic property characterizing everything from biomolecular function to semiotic activities. Constitutive absence can be defined as the property of being structurally or dynamically organized with respect to (or by virtue of) attributes present (also potential or projected) in some extrinsic object or process. It characterizes mental processes whose existence and organization is constituted by their relationship to external objects and events or to possible or even imaginary states of affairs. (Deacon 2007: 130-131)

There already is a (linguistic) term for this phenomenon, though: displacement (cf. Danesi 1998: 43). This version, I presume, is simply more general ("can also describe a significantly wider class of systems" - next sentence).

He based his analysis on the model of transmission channel such as a telephone line with a fixed limit to the variety and rate of signals that it could carry. This model system will be used throughout the discussion to the consistent with Shannon's terminology, but the analysis equally applies to anything able to convey information, from text on a page to clues used in a criminal investigation. (Deacon 2007: 133)

I'm taking the term "model system". In phatics, Jakobson uses this exact model system of telephone call; Malinowski's model system was either a crowd gathering (the Durkheimian connection, implicit) or people sitting around campfire; La Barre's model system is mostly dyadic like Jakobson's but spans throughout the whole gradient of communication systems.

Without reference to this absent background of possible alternatives, the amount of potential information of a message cannot be measured. In other words, the background of un-chosen signals is a critical determinant of what makes the received signals capable of conveying information. No alternatives = no uncertainty = no information. (Deacon 2007: 134)

Possibly why the "to inform" is generalized to an intuitive concept of information: greetings and other such linguistic acts are "ritualistic", prescribed by some determinacy; what else besides "Hi!" are you going to say to a stranger? - the options are few (how many polite ways there are to finish an e-mail?). That is, the information concept introduced into phatic metadiscourse has a tangible relation with the mechanization of speech.

Brandt, Line 2008. Literary Studies in the Age of Cognitive Science. Cognitive Semiotics 2: 6-40. DOI: 10.1515/cogsem.2008.2.spring2008.6

Literary expressivity is a form of externalized communication which relies on the semiotic resources inherent in everyday enunciation and its extensions beyond the everyday, practical realm by virtue of playful pretense (see also Collins 1991). Humans have evolved a semiotic culture which proliferates communication not just for purposes of coordination and negotiation, i.e. socially and materially practical purposes, but for the sake of momentary enjoyment - jesting banter, story-telling, nonsense-making and other non-pragmatic communication scripts, or "language games", not governed by a principal concern for factual states of affairs. (Brandt 2008: 7)

There's a long history of associating phatic communion with playfulness. Literature, art, and other activities thus share this aspect; hence why they're treated as commensurate by Dewey in Art as Experience (i.e. conversation as a type of aesthetic experience).

Non-deceitful pretense also occurs in everyday communication, for the sake of amusement (e.g. uttering absurdly irrelevant or nonsensical utterances simply to enjoy the absurdity of a meaningless speech act) and for pragmatic purposes (e.g. in ironic statements). Utterances issued in pretense mode direct attentional focus on the enunciation itself and to its expressive qualities (as opposed to merely focusing attention on the represented content, e.g. the enunciator's framing of some state of affaris). This is also the case in literature. (Brandt 2008: 9)

Reflexivity. Being about itself, without an external purpose.

The integrated view of literature and mind was apparent in Reuven Tsur's work in the 1970s which incorporated formalist, structuralist and perception-oriented research. A frontrunner in the study of literary creations in a cognitive perspective, Tsur delved into the relation between literary structure and effect, continuing the work of Russian formalists and Czech and French structuralists, as he was working toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics (Tsur 1992). (Brandt 2008: 10)

Toward a theory of cognitive poetics sounds interesting because it's in the same tradition as Jakobson and Lotman, but there's no copy online, nor in Estonian libraries, and even a used copy on Amazon costs over 50 eur. (The next paragraph even says that it was "precipitated by the semiotics of the late 70s, most notably by the work of Umberto Eco and Yury Lotman".)

Though the view of literary language as continuous with common language calls for elaborative clarification, it will by the least contentious interpretation imply that literary language relies on the ability to creatively exploit resources that are already in place. By contrast to the more romantic notion of divine inspiration and genius, this framework ascribes the originality of an author to "an exploitation of the dominant unoriginal apparatus at his disposal" (Turner 1991: 19) - an anti-romantic idea, inasmuch as the creativity is thought to lie not in ingenious poetic invention but in the exploitation of available means. (Brandt 2008: 12)

This I've seen from Malinowski's so-called terminological "invention". Originality is a fable. What amounts to originality in any practicable sense of the word IMO is exposure to as varied sources as possible, increasing the means at one's disposal to such an extend that novel patterns emerge.

Semino's cautionary comment indirectly calls attention to the issue of meaning as related to its occurrence in discourse: the immediate contextual environment of signifying elements ("co-text") and the contextual staging of the text as belonging to a (e.g. literary) genre and a specific authorship. (Brandt 2008: 17)

I recall vividly how this came up in the 2013 summer school on semiotics. Jakobson's (especially his, other contexts may vary) context is co-text in the sense that the referential function really refers to referends (cf. Hiż 1969: 138), that is, other parts of speech (Jakobson's illustrations include: what the other person just said and what the speaker is intending to say next; that is, his context is primarily verbal and temporal, as opposed to the nonverbal and spatial context implied in, for example, Malinowski's "context of situation").

Constitutional incompatibility preemptively closes off the possibility for scientific dialogue between advocates for different theories in precluding sustained negotiation of theoretical developments. And what, after all, does a field of study consist in if not sustained negotiation of theoretical developments? The incompatibility label in effect removes the conditions for a joint enterprise. (Brandt 2008: 21)

One of the few uses of "negotiation" that I agree with. (For example, I'm not completely on board with the general dictum that people "negotiate meanings" when communicating, but that's another topic.)

There is an underlying premise of intersubjectivity in Benari's approach to literary studies. The implied intersubjectivity is a form of objectivity, in that all humans share the world as it presents itself to us, given our cognitive faculties. These faculties do not vary substantially, though of course there is some degree of variation in the way we employ them, individually or as a group, i.e. within a particular community. Insofar as the subject matter is not private (e.g. one's favorite color), one person's subjectivity is not in principle inaccessible to another subjectivity; we cannot through joint attention and communication. (Brandt 2008: 23)

Is this an accidental slip or does this imply a reversion to "faculty psychology" (cf. Mace 1931)? [As a sidenote, looking back it makes eminent sense that Mace is discussing McDougall.]

Richard Rorty's pragmatism, for instance, holds a basic tenet that neither text nor reading have a nature (Rorty 1992: 105). Sympathetic to deconstructionist philosophy, Rorty also rejects the philosophical distinction "between language and fact, between signs and non-signs" (p. 98). According to this philosophy, assertions cannot be checked against states of affairs, but only against other assertions. (Brandt 2008: 25)

It would appear that when the likes of Jordan Peterson speak of "post-modernism" what they really have in mind is Rorty's textualist essentialism and not, for example, the idea that everything has been said before (cf. Tarasti 1998: 125).

Epistemic force is manifestly replaced by the social force of a group with a joint agenda or individual momentary whims: "[...] some particular purpose, some particular intentio which we happen, at the moment, to have" (p. 98; italics in original). You can join in the camaraderie, befriend the group, and do and say what "we like" (p. 97), or you can hold on to your idea and be excluded. This is the logic of social force, when rationality is set out of motion. (Brandt 2008: 26)

A pretty commonsensical conception of social force, this. Though it makes me as the Foucaultian question: is this the power of discourse?

Much in line with these observations, Culler points out (in Eco 1992) that an unfortunate and self-contradictory corollary of the abandonment of impersonal standards for evaluating ideas proposed in a scholarly setting is the implicit hypocrisy of proponents of this abandonment enjoying a paid position at a university while claiming to adhere to no standards for acquiring knowledge - while indeed denying the possibility of achieving any knowledge at all. (Brandt 2008: 27)

This is like watching right-wing conservative youtube videos today. It's the very hypocrisy the likes of Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Haidt relish repeatedly pointing out (while simultaneously lumping all of their perceived ideological enemies into one lump sum of "post-modern marxists social justice warriors" and the like). I'm not sure why a paper on cognitive poetics is talking about these things, though (this paper is too damn long).

The reproducibility of an analysis does not consist in its replication (the production of identical analyses) but rather in a notion of unobjectionability: the notion that other scholars be able to reproduce one's arguments in their minds and not find them objectionable. Finding the claims in a given analysis unobjectionable implies that hypothetically, other analyses of the same material would conceivably produce these same claims, or at least would not contradict them. (Brandt 2008: 32)

Unobjectionability is IMO a big part of why Malinowski's term, phatic communion, is so popular; it's a better term for the "intuitivist" argument I've been building.

Here I address the technical aspects of critiquing an analysis: a three-part summary of the viable methods of demonstration a cognitive-poetic critic may have at his disposal in challenging a textual analysis. A critique might:
  1. show that aspects of the text not have been taken into account and that the omissions cast doubt on a proposed interpretation rather than support it;
  2. argue that certain interpretive assumptions rest on faulty premises, that is, show that certain cognitive operations implicitly or explicitly assumed in justifying a given interpretation are not replicated by other component readers, or are inconsistent with findings in cognitive science which suggest a different account from the one assumed in the analysis;
  3. show that rather than being the product of intersubjective cognition certain interpretations are determined by arbitrary ideology or idiosyncratic associations.
While any of these critical strategies are grounded in methodological thinking and serve to 'test', or try, the validity of a given analysis, it would seem misleading to classify them as methods of 'falsification'. These critical strategies are more in line with a judicial norm of 'weighing' the evidence. (Brandt 2008: 35)

Finally something useful... for criticising Malinowski's analysis of social conversation and its subsequent interpretation in the academia. First, parts of the text are ignored because what even are sentiments, sympathy, and instincts? Secondly, it is evident that the premises are merely subversions of good principles of conversation. And thirdly, the ethologist was interested in his conversation partners as informants, not as equals.

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