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A Leading Principle

Smith, W. John 1969. Displays and Messages in Intraspecific Communication. Semiotica 1(4): 357-369. DOI: 10.1515/semi.1969.1.4.357

Any environmental feature can become a source of information. An obvious source for any individual animal is another animal. For instance, if the other individual is strange it may be dangerous. If it is a customary associate, some of its activities (e.g., fleeing) may also indicate a source of danger in the environment. (Smith 1969: 357)

An aspect of phatic communion that translates over into animal communication.

All activities are potentially informative. For instance, Altmann (1965: 492) treats as "communicative" any behavior pattern whose occurrence changes the probability of behavior patterns of other individuals in the social group. Most acts, however, are not specialized to be more informative. (Smith 1969: 358)

"It is generally the case for all species that when two individuals meet they modify each other's behaviour." (Østergaard 2007: 112)

Ritualized iterations appear to involve primarily social acts, or acts that were social in the phylogenetic lineage concerned. That is, their evolutionary sources appear to be behavior patterns performed by at least two interacting individuals. The relationship between the individuals may have to be bonded - i.e., one in which the individuals remain socially inter-related with conventionally defined statuses, and recognize each other individually. (Smith 1969: 359)

Bonding here involves something like Goffmanian "consensus" (cf. Laver 1975).

Our prehuman hominoid ancestors must have evolved this new approach at the same time they were communicating by other means. Whatever novel features linguistic communication has, they initially supplemented and were at least partially in competition with an already existing mode of communication. This prelinguistic mode must, therefore, have had some influence in shaping at least the directions of the origins of linguistic communication. (Smith 1969: 364)

Linguistic communication appeared alongside nonverbal means of communication, which have remained in place.

The zoosemiotic forms of human communication may be important in a number of ways. First, they are the only stylized communicative tools available to prelinguistic infants, and some children (e.g., the deaf) who remain prelinguistic for relatively long periods. They may be the only tools left to certain aphasic adults, they may be the only reliable tools left to, say , schizophrenics. (Smith 1969: 365)

The phatic function "is also the first verbal function acquired by infants; they are prone to communicate before being able to send or receive informative communication" (Jakobson 1960d: 24) and Weston La Barre has written extensively on the phatic communication of schizophrenics (cf. La Barre 1954).

Lowe, Ivan 1969. An Algebraic Theory of English Pronominal Reference (Part I). Semiotica 1(4): 397-421. DOI: 10.1515/semi.1969.1.4.397

It seems that 'social acceptability' is difficult to define here. The utterance-response pair of (6) would not be acceptable under circumstances of serious social intercourse, but might well be acceptable in the case of a deliberate joke, etc. (Lowe 1969: 399)

What makes a social intercourse serious?

There are, indeed, good reasons for choosing the utterance "I said to you" (or any utterance with 1st person subject and 2nd person object) as basic. In the first place all communication subsumes the existence of some sort of source-receptor or speaker-addressee relationship, be such communication in the form of a business letter, a simple conversation, a preface to a scholarly book, or a political harangue. (Lowe 1969: 401)

There is no communication without contact and communication about relationship.

So far we have restricted ourselves to a very simple situation in which there is a cast of just three participants each of whom assumes one of the roles of speaker (first person), addressee (second person) and background (third person), no two participants assuming the same role at the same time, and all participants restricting themselves to the use of singular personal pronouns in their speech. (Lowe 1969: 413)

They are in the background.

Chebanov, Sergey V. 1998. Totality of semiosphere. Sign Systems Studies 26: 417-424.

The point is that Peirce's in Hoffmeyer's treatment) understanding of sign involves the question, what is not a sign? After all, any measuring device satisfies the definition of a sign as "a relation between three factors: (1) [...] the sign vehicle [...]; (2) the object [...] to which the sign vehicle refers [...]; and (3) 'the interpretant' i.e., the system which construes the sign vehicle's [|] relationship to its object" (p. 19). But measuring devices are only physical objects and hardly signs, although they are calibrated. There exist some purely physical processes, in which a kind of calibration takes place, for example the selection of particles by oscillation when building into a crystal under certain conditions. (Chebanov 1998: 417-418)

Goes to show that the interpretant is still the least understood aspect of Peirce's sign model.

This is the point where de Saussure's approach to the sign, as based on the idea that the sign is not a mere conjunction of two fragments of the world thanks to 'the interpretant', but an intersection of two different worlds, one of which is the world of sense, seems to be preferable. In such an approach, there will be nos ign where there is no sense, as in physical or chemical processes. (Chebanov 1998: 418)

Goes to show that I am very, very fallible: just recently I protested against treating the Saussurean poles as "worlds" (cf. Neuman & Nave 2008: 99).

It is characteristic for many branches of biosemiotics and semiotics in general that the historical aspect is ignored. This is especially common in semiotic studies of genetic code, which is the best object for biosemiotic studies. Genetic code is viewed as though it has appeared in its final form; attempts to search for its origin meet with serious problems. The book under review is very interesting in this respect, since it includes biosemiotics in the framework of evolutionary biology and evolutionary science as a whole (beginning with the big bang (p. viii) and ending with the appearance of ethics (Ch. 10)). (Chebanov 1998: 420)

How many branches of biosemiotics are there? From what I've read so far from the journal of Biosemiotics, evolutionary history (and the origin of the genetic code) are discussed rather frequently.

On the other hand, the book is unfortunately quite typical in its scarce referencing of Russian materials. The reason for this is obviously the same barrier plus the iron curtain not so long ago. For example, the works of A. S. Famintzin and I. V. Baranetsky (1860's - 1912) or C. S. Mereschkovsky (1905-1909) are not mentioned when discussing the theory of symbiogenesis. There are no echoes of the 70s Tartu discussions on biosemiotic problems (Morozov 1978), or their follow-up in the late 80s in Moscow University (Sharov 1990). (Chebanov 1998: 423)

In Olev Remsu's Kurbmäng Paabelis (1989), which I consider to be the Estonian Nineteen Eighty-Four, the protagonist is a proponent of neo-morozovism. The citation: Morozov, Vladimir P. 1978. Self-understanding of the symposium. Znanie - Sila 10: 39-41 (in Russian).

Drechsler, Wolfgang 1998. The philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Sign Systems Studies 26: 425-436.

This is not to say that the other ones are bad; if anything, they mostly suffer from a certain pedestrianness, if this is a word. In general, and not surprisingly, Gadamer's replies make the most interesting and profound reading in the book, although their translation from the German is occasionally too close to the words. (Drechsler 1998: 426)

Having just read a paper that I myself had to describe as "pedestrian" (cf. Collins 2008: 58), I'd say that it's definitely a word and would IMO describe papers that are lackluster, treading very well trodden grounds, presenting popular myths or reiterating philosophical commonplaces.

The basis of Gadamer's account is Plato's Philebus, a grossly understudied and undercommented work. (422) Davidson traces the difference between Politeia and Philebus (427-428), addresses the development of Plato as "a matter of emphasis, of 'highlighting'" (429) and arrives at the idea of Plato's development [...] (Drechsler 1998: 427)

An old translation.

Cheng, Chung-Ying 1966. Peirce's Probabilistic Theory of Inductive Validity. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 2(2): 86-112.

Peirce conceives inference as a passage from certain ideas or beliefs to certain other ideas or beliefs according to a leading principle. In [|] other words, for Peirce there are three things which are relevant for an inference and its validity: the premises, the conclusions, and the leading principle. What needs explanation here is the leading principle of an inference. The leading principle of an inference is a rule which we are conscious of following when we make an inference, a rule by which the premises of the inference are related to its conclusion. (Cheng 1966: 86-87)

Is this "leading principle" the equivalent to thesic affection? It looks rather like habit.

We know that an inference is valid if we know that its leading principle is true. We believe that the conclusion of an inference must be, or is likely to be true if we believe that its leading principle and premises are true. In this sense of being capable of fixing true belief from true belief or beliefs, a leading principle is essentially a belief-habit, or "a cerebral habit," as Peirce calls it, which we have accepted as leading in general from truth to truth. A "cerebral habit" should be distinguished from a "physiological habit," according to Peirce. When we respond to physical stimulus by way of physiological reaction, we follow a "physiological habit." A "cerebral habit," on the other hand, is something which we follow when we relate beliefs to beliefs. It cannot be described in terms of physiological reactions. (Cheng 1966: 87)

My hunch was correct.

Peirce has also made a distinction between a "logical" leading principle and a "factual" or "material" leading principle (2.589). A "logical" leading principle, according to Peirce, is a formal or logical proposition which, when explicitly stated, adds nothing to the premises of the inference it governs. In this sense, a logical leading principle is simply a logical truth, or a statement of logic, which is ascertainable as true on the gorund of logic. A "factual" or "material" leading principle, on the other hand, is a nonlogical leading principle. It is, in other words, a material proposition, which, if it is true, must be ascertained as true on ground other than logic. (Cheng 1966: 88)

Reminiscent of the term "extra-linguistic", i.e. searching for meaning in the "material" world outside of language. Presumably, a material proposition is indexical.

Holmes, Larry 1966. Peirce on Self-Control. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 2(2): 113-130.

Self-control, according to Peirce, is the very essence of rationality; it is what more than anything else "has served to elevate man above all the rest of the fauna of our globe." Only through self-control is any action other than the normal, determined course possible (4.540).
Man comes from the womb in actuality an animal little higher than a fish; by no means as high as a serpent. His humanity consists in his destination. He becomes not actual man until he acquires self-control and then he is so in the measure of his self-control. [...] Man's existence qua man [...] consists solely in his growing to act from rational self-conduct.
I cannot explore all the ramifications of this key concept in Peirce's philosophy, nor refer to more than a few of the many writings, both published and unpublished, in which he treated it. (Holmes 1966: 113)

"If, adopting an ideal of character opposed to his instincts, a man resolve to live in conformity with that ideal, and at cost of self-denial live accordingly, his practical life is initiated and controlled by his conscious mind, and is truly a personal life." (Clay 1882)

The notion of self-control enters into and helps explain his views on the process of inquiry; the meaning of pragmatism and its essential reference to the future; the meaning of consciousness and the self; the nature of reasoning and the difference between reason and instinct; the purpose and relation of the normative sciences; and even the foundation of the categories of phenomenology. (Holmes 1966: 114)

Habit-formation?

The realization of intentions or purposes also must lie in the future, and the self-control necessary to achieve one's purpose "affects future conduct exclusively." Another such reference to the future is that an important aspect of the process of self-control is accomplished by a kind of dialogue or discourse of the mind to one's future self: a variant of Peirce's belief that thought itself takes the form of a dialogue. "The most striking ingredient of self-control, and certainly an indispensable one, is that giving of a command to, and obedient fulfillment by, a future self." (Holmes 1966: 117)

This must be that famous excerpts about how "a person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts are what he is "saying to himself," that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time." (CP 5.421) - if commands figure heavily here it may be different but compatible with Clay's incommunication, which involves a question "which the mind puts to itself".

Ambiguity in the term "self-control" may arise either of the components. To take the easier one first, "control" can mean either governance or correction. If this division is still unclear, it can be refined into (1) "holding to a norm or ideal," "inhibiting change," [|] or "keeping from straying" - circumlocutions designed to emphasize the conservative aspect of control; or (2) correction, to mean the active process of returning to the norm if teh control in sense (1) has permitted variation of deviation. The meaning that Peirce seems most often to have been using is the second one, as might be expected from the human situation, in which we seldom operate at the ideal, but are concerned rather to minimize the difference between our conduct (whether rational or moral) and an ideal. (Holmes 1966: 120-121)

That's a valuable insight. The dictionary, on the other hand, gives a more volitional definition: "the power to influence or direct people's behaviour or the course of events", though the meaning intended here is embodied in the second definition: "a person or thing used as a standard of comparison for checking the results of a survey or experiment" (i.e. a "scientific control").

The ambiguity of "self" is easy to state, but very difficult to clear up, because it involves one's whole philosophy. When "self-" is used as a prefix with reflexive meaning, it can convey the meaning either of (1) designating a person or thing that is both the subject and the object of the action; or (2) designating something that performs certain operations without outside agency, i.e., automatically. The first meaning, when applied to our term, leads one to believe that there must be a self to control, and further to think that there must therefore be a self which controls; i.e., a self in the agent or substantive sense, or in the dictionary definition "a permanent subject of successive and varying states of consciousness" (Oxford Universal Dictionary, Third Edition). The second meaning contains no such implication: considering it as "auto-," as used in names of self-acting devices such as "automobile," with emphasis on the reflexive but with no commitment about anything there at which the reflexive is aimed, we can take self-control to mean not the control of a self (substantively), but simply auto-control, the control from within or whatever kind of organism the human being is found to be. (Holmes 1966: 121)

Selfhood is difficult. This distinction makes me wonder if there could be any substance to the seemingly trivial difference between Morris' "self-communication" and Lotman's "autocommunication". The latter, after all, is ascribed to culture, which is more of a "self-acting device" (metaphorically an artificial intelligence) than a self. For the purposes of distinguishing these two, this insight is incredibly valuable.

There is not space to argue the position extensively; let me recapitulate briefly, in Peirce's own words, some of the many pronouncements he made, ranging in date from 1868 to 1908, concerning the unreality of a substantial self. First, from an unpublished manuscript:
As to the existence of a person my opinion is decidedly that a person's being is somewhat of the same mode as the being of abstract Truth and Right, which are unquestionably, in some sense, powers in the world, and that its difference from that mode of being lies chiefly in its limitations and in its power of improvement. I regard a man's naïve notion that he exists as being in the main a delusion and a vanity.
And from the published volumes: "Personality is some kind of coördination or connection of ideas" (6.155). "The identity of a man consists in the consistency of what he does and thinks" (5.315). "The self is only inferred" (5.462); "feelings coördinated in a certain way, to a certain degree, constitute a person; on their being dissociated (as habits do sometimes get broken up), the personality [|] disappears" (6.585); "a person is only a particular kind of general idea" (6.270); "all that is necessary [...] to the existence of a person is that the feelings out of which he is constructed should be in close enough connection to influence one another" (6.271); "the selfhood you like to attribute to yourself is, for the most part, the vulgarest delusion of vanity" (7.571); "the barbaric conception of personal identity" (7.572); "a person is not absolutely an individual" (5.421); man is a sign or symbol (7.583, 5.283, 5.314, 6.344). (Holmes 1966: 125-126)

Beautiful. I can only add Sage Francis' lyrics: "if you're a poor man's version of anything, it's your self-perception".

Pattee, H. H. 2008. Physical and Functional Conditions for Symbols, Codes, and Languages. Biosemiotics 1(2): 147-168. DOI: 10.1007/s12304-008-9012-6

There are classical epistemic problems that have troubled the greatest minds for over 2,000 years without reaching any consensus. This is the case for conceptual dualisms, like discrete and continuous, chance and determinism, form and function, and especially the mind-body problem that has persistently puzzled philosophies, and is still a central issue for philosophy, psychology, artificial life, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. It is also closely related to fundamental issues in physics, the information-energy relation and what is known as the measurement problem. All of these problems are related to a category I have generalized as symbol-matter problems. Biosemiotics, virtually by definition, cannot escape these problems. (Pattee 2008: 148)

Yup, I believe I have sufficiently material (here on this blog) on all these problems to get absolutely nowhere, as is common.

In other words, physical laws must give the impression that events do not have alternatives and could not be otherwise (Winger 1964), while informational symbolic structures must give the impression that they could be otherwise, and must have innumerable ways of actually being otherwise. Semiotic events are based on an [|] endless choice of alternatives, not only in symbolic sequences but also in codes that interpret the symbols. It is just those innumerable alternatives, selected by heritable propagation, that are prerequisites for evolution as well as for creative thought. (Pattee 2008: 149-150)

"Semiosis always presupposes the presence of a C[ode]-space, since it is always a triadic process, where C-space is a time interval, a space of possibility that permits some degree of freedom." (Violi 2007: 70)

The problem also arises in the symbol-grounding problem in artificial intelligence (e.g., Harnad 1990), and in criteria (like the Turing test) for deciding whether a computer can think. There is a current belief in artificial life research that any empirical sense of "meaning" or "knowing" can occur only when symbol systems are connected by sensory inputs and outputs to material systems that in turn are immersed in a realistic physical environment. This area of research is often called situated robotics (e.g., Clark 1997). (Pattee 2008: 155)

I read about this extensively last year, and from I gathered the inability to connect nascent A.I. with the material world set such developments back by several decades.

While the language of physics is reasonably simple and unambiguous, I discovered quickly that the terminologies of semiotics are so complicated and controversial that I could not hope to find consensus on primitive symbol system terminology. As I stated earlier, linguistic terminology originated at the highest levels with human language and human behavior. Not only that, but in the recent past it was believed that symbolic language was what distinguished humans from lower animals. Consequently, the idea of a symbolic language at the origin of life was simply resisted by many linguists, anthropologists, and philosophers as unreasonable except as a vague metaphor or distant analogy. (Pattee 2008: 158)

This is still the case, it appears. (See how difficult it is to nail down the interpretant in various semiotic approaches.)

Conceptually and logically it is also necessary to separate the description from what it describes, the measuring devices from what it measures, and the controller from what it controls if these concepts are to make any sense. The basic meaning of a symbol, a description, a measurement, and a control is that they stand for, or act on, something other than themselves. This necessary separation I have called an epistemic cut, following a discussion of complementarity by Pauli (1994: 41). (Pattee 2008: 159)

Also called displacement and "constitutive absence" (cf. Deacon 2007: 130-131

Furthermore, where and how natural language symbol sequences are transformed in the brain to produce images or actions is unknown. I have suggested that some functional analog of folding must occur in the n-dimensional network of neurons to remove the degeneracy of one-dimensional symbol strings of speech or text (Pattee 1980) but so far we know too little of how brains generate symbols and transform speech and text to action or meaning to make any comparison. (Pattee 2008: 162)

"What, moreover, in neurophysiological terms, are the respective semantic loads? Neuron transmission is an activity of relative potential changes in potassium and sodium ions; what is the microphysiology of semeion?" (Count 1969: 80-81)

One problem about these modern sources of information is that the selective pressures that would normally discriminate between adaptive and destructive information are being virtually eliminated. The cost of production, communication, and storing information is now so low that we are accumulating more information than we can ever hope to selectively recall. This lack of discrimination is increasing not only for our culture as a whole, but also for many individuals who have access to the Internet. Because of this technology, the amount of information in our modern culture is growing exponentially. By contrast, genetic information is sparse and strongly selected [...] (Pattee 2008: 166)

The total cultural pattern has not been able to "selectively recall" ever since the printing press, at the very least (see "The Consequences of Literacy"), but I think our new communication technologies have exacerbated this exponentially. Not only do I have a vague awareness of the limits of my knowledge, I can access databases full of knowledge no one human can ever hope to completely take in. (There's enough reading material worth multiple human lifetimes on the hard-drive of any proper researcher.)

Hoffmeyer, Jesper 2008. The Semiotic Body. Biosemiotics 1(2): 169-190. DOI: 10.1007/s12304-008-9015-3

Intellectually, dualism was based upon a quite natural but nonetheless unsubstantiated argument: 'From the hard-won observation that there can be matter without spirit, dualism inferred that spirit can also be without matter' as Jonas put it (Jonas 2001[1966]: 16). The main problem, with this argument, is not that spirit without matter remains an unobservable and thus basically speculative entity. The main problem is that it is not obvious what the matter-spirit distinction is all about. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 170)

The body, as Socrates put it, is an abhorrant thing (that you have to feed, clean, rest, etc.), so the idea of "living" on without this material baggage is quite appealing in itself.

From birth we humans are in fact skin more than we are anything else. The skin of the newborn is, as Thure von Uexküll says, a kind of 'pre-actual atmosphere' (vorwirkliche Atmosphäre; Uexküll 1999), and what enters the awareness of the newborn infant is only qualities or differences between qualities, grades of intensities of touch, taste, and smell. In a certain sense, then, the newborn child's skin is a type of brain, in the sense that it is the place where encounters with the world first freeze into the vague structuring of knowledge. And, not coincidentally, the skin and the brain both originate from the same germ material, i.e., from the embryo's ectoderm layer. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 171)

The popular sayings that the skin is man's largest organ, and the brain his largest sex organ, come to mind. Iterated on the next page: "the skin is the largest and most diversified organ of the human body".

By way of an extremely simple example, consider a mother who sketches the number two on her child's back, and asks the child to guess the number that she just drew. The mother's light touch causes small deformations of the child's receptors (the sensory cells that lie close together just under the surface of the outer skin) and these deformations, in turn, cause a depolarization of the nerve endings. If the depolarization exceeds a certain threshold limit, an electrical impulse (i.e., an action potential) is transmitted through the nerve to the central nervous system, where a longer lasting pressure causes a series of impulses whose frequency is function of the pressure's intensity. [↩] And already even at this level, the organism's own most current contextual situation becomes a relevant factor in the phenomenon, in that the threshold limit is defined by biochemical parameters that reflect the general condition of the organism. Thus the sense of pain, for example, is greatly influenced by so-called prostaglandins that lower the threshold values and thereby increase sensitivity. Prostaglandins are produced in connective tissues, and their production is increased in case of inflammation. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 173)

"Prostaglandins are powerful locally acting vasodilators and inhibit the aggregation of blood platelets. Through their role in vasodilation, prostaglandins are also involved in inflammation. They are synthesized in the walls of blood vessels and serve the physiological function of preventing needless clot formation, as well as regulating the contraction of smooth muscle tissue." (Wiki)

Signal transduction is a remarkable process because it does not, as one might perhaps naively suspect, imply that signals from the outside somehow find their way into the cell and successively instruct the cellular machinery to initiate distinct activities. What happens is, semiotically seen, much more interesting and typically consists in the following three steps: (a) the primary molecular signal is received at the surface of the cell because it is recognized by a specific glycoprotein, a receptor, and (b) the receptor responds to the signal by changing its conformation which then activates a 'mediator-protein' in or at the cell membrane, (c) the mediator again activates a second signal at the inside of the membrane. Taken together what occurs is a kind of translation of the signal caught at the cell surface to a message formed in the intracellular molecular sign system of the cell and the process may be seen as a case of what Barbieri has called 'an organic code', here a signal transduction code (Barbieri 2003). (Hoffmeyer 2008: 176)

I definitely wish to read more about this. So far I've met the phenomenon in plant physiology, where the focus was on how elicitor molecules "activate particular genes as a part of defense response through signal transduction pathways, resulting in the synthesis of secondary metabolites" (Largia et al. 2015a: 10).

The emotional reactions are spontaneous, in the sense that they occur without any interference from consciousness and are released by the so-called limbic system in the subcortical region of the brain, primarily by the structure called amygdala (LeDoux 1996). What is established through the emotions are characteristic functional states of the body, or rather a kind of readiness, connected to basic survival functions such as defense against dangers, reproduction, foraging, or aggression. Emotions are released either [|] endogenously or as a result of inputs from the surroundings. The emotions may therefore be seen as bodily interpretants, that immediately release further interpretants in the form of characteristic kinds of behavior. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 179-180)

In Peircean lingo, emotional interpretants determine energetic interpretants.

But while the emotional response to a high degree is the same in all vertebrate animals, feelings, in Damasio's use of language, are far more specific for humans, for feelings consist in the experience of emotions. The experience of fear, for instance, appears as the conscious recognition of the emotional response to a dangerous situation. As such, feelings are much more varied and subtle than emotions, since they integrate the emotions into the rich repertoire of nuances available for conscious awareness - the danger may be imminent or more distant, it may be life-threatening or just inconvenient etc. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 180)

Here it may be said that the previous sequence further determines a logical interpretant; e.g. humans are capable of assigning verbal labels to their emotions or emotional reactions.

The idea of super-organisms has a long prehistory in biology, especially in the study of social insects. Both the ant hill and the bee hive have been suggested as example of superorganisms, with the implication that individual insects were seen as just subunits, 'mobile cells' in the superorganism. In the biological world, the delimitation of an individual is far from being always as clear-cut as it may seem in the world of vertebrate animals, and I have no wish to take side in this quarrel. [|] From a semiotic point of view, one might perhaps suggest the criterion that, if a system's semiotic interaction with its environment presupposes a finely elaborated internal semiotic activity (a protoendosemiotics) the system deserves to be counted as an organism. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 182-183)

I think I prefer La Barre's "meta-organism", but in substance it vibes with Lotman's cybernetics of culture.

Kjørup, Frank 2008. Grammetrics and Cognitive Semantics: Metaphorical and force dynamic aspects of verse-syntax counterpoint. Cognitive Semiotics 2: 83-101. DOI: 10.1515/cogsem.2008.2.spring2008.83

For, as observed by Eliot, "[v]erse, whatever else it may or may not be, is itself a system of punctuation" (Eliot in Ricks 1987: 89). Indeed, it seems, this is how the structural situation is intuited in the most perceptive accounts of the phenomenon. As theorised by Ricks, following Eliot: "[T]he poet has at his command this further 'system of punctuation'. The white space at the end of a line of poetry constitutes some kind of pause" (Ricks 1987: 89). (Kjørup 2008: 85)

Verse consists of contours?

So conceived, the first two lines of Eliot's would be performed (prosodic features notated: major pause //, minor pause /, non-pausing >):
In my beginning is my end. // In succession >
Houses rise and fall, / crumble, / are extended, /
But, without the pause in the middle of syntax, as if punctuating the end of the line, there can be no beginnings of verse-syntax counterpoints. (Kjørup 2008: 86)

Here I like the notation (/, //, >). Otherwise meh.

Freeman, Margaret H. 2008. Reading Readers Reading a Poem: From conceptual to cognitive integration. Cognitive Semiotics 2: 102-128. DOI: 10.1515/cogsem.2008.2.spring2008.102

On the other hand, I argue that critical interpretations of a poem's meaning fail to capture the essence of a poem because they fail to recognize the experiential dimension of responding to a poem as "formulated feeling" (Langer 1953). (Freeman 2008: 103)

I have to say, formulated feeling is a much better term than "Feeling-Concern" (Worth 1969: 286-287).

The terms intention and motivation are sometimes conflated and used interchangeably, although I see them as two distinct cognitive processes (Freeman 2007). As Gibbs (1999: 80) notes, "An intention is a mental representation caused by a desire for a goal which itself causes action to bring about the goal". Intention thus refers to the "goal" or meaning - the "what" - the writer or reader wishes to communicate; motivation to the "desire" or emotion - the "why" - that invests meaning with significance. (Freeman 2008: 111)

Well, that's one version; another - etymological - relates it to attention (cf. Brandt 2007: 49; Violi 2007: 65-66).

Gibbs's (1999: 328) cognitive intentionalist premise states that one can determine "through empirical means the possible ways that assumptions about intentionality shape understanding". The problem in poetry interpretation, Gibbs claims, lies in the difficulty of inferring the poet's "subjective intentions". To address this problem, Gibbs suggests that readers create what he calls "hypothetical intentions": an idealized version of what the poet has written. This idealized version is arrived at through 1) the text itself, 2) consideration of the conditions under which it was created, and 3) the existence of sufficient common ground between writer and reader. (Freeman 2008: 112)

Reminiscent of Lotman's (1981) model, where Gibbs's (3) would correspond with Lotman's (1) - communication between writer and reader; (2) with (2) - communication between readership and the cultural tradition; and (1) with (4) - communication of the reader with the text; obviously the author's intentions cannot be inferred from the reader's communication with himself through the text nor from the relations between the text and the cultural context, which would impute a higher-level purpose to the text.

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A Signification Community

Werner, Oswald 1969. The Basic Assumptions of Ethnoscience. Semiotica 1(3): 329-338. DOI: 10.1515/semi.1969.1.3.329

Ethnoscience is the ethnography and/or ethnology of knowledge, or ethno-epistemology, or descriptive epistemology, ethnographic ethnoscience includes such sub-areas as ethno-anatomy, ethnobotany, and ethnozoology. Ethnologic ethnoscience is a theoretical science which is comparative in the sense that it seeks to formulate universal laws of knowledge. It is meta-epistemology because it deals with formal and substantive constraints of particular descriptions in ethnographic ethnoscience. (Werner 1969: 329)

Don't we already have sociology of knowledge for that? Do we also need an anthropology of knowledge, a semiotics of knowledge, and so on?

Ethnoscience deals with the ideational order (in the sense of Goodenough 1964b), primarily with cultural knowledge rather than cultural behavior; observation is used predominantly to generate further questions about the informant's knowledge. At some point, knowledge and behavior must fit consistently. (Werner 1969: 330)

All natives must immediately relinquish their emic ideas to the closest ethnoscientist at hand.

Explicit Culture which is Language - Linguistic ethnographic ethnoscience deals with that part of cultural knowledge which is accessible through the language of the informants. The implicit parts of a culture are considered neither unimportant nor unnecessary; they are simply outside of the self-imposed limitations. Since very large parts of any culture are transmitted through language, this restriction seems not too limiting. (Werner 1969: 330)

If language is explicit culture, what is implicit culture? The signified? Or behaviour? Moreover, is language as a system of signs explicit? I would think that the products of language, e.g. speech and texts, are.

Language may be defined as a potentially infinite set of sentences. Sentences are neither grammatical or ungrammatical. Ungrammatical sentences differ among themselves in the degree of their ungrammaticality or deviance from theoretical wellformedness. (Werner 1969: 330)

I might start collecting unnecessarily long words like this and unobjectionability. Possibly for a spoof written completely in unnecessarily long words. Let such instances be designated with the tag unwellformedness.

Part of human language competence is the ability to interpret sentences which are slightly ungrammatical, for example, much of ordinary conversation or the speech of foreigners speaking English. (Werner 1969: 311)

Those darn uneducated classes know not how to speak properly.

Culturally appropriate sentences considered for a description in ethnographic ethnoscience must be available for judgement by informants. [|] That is, they must be potentially 'true' or 'false', with possibly a third class of undecidable sentences. Thus culturally appropriate sentences must be in the form of propositions. Sentences of undecidable status are neither unimportant nor uninteresting. They present a complicated problem which is also beyond the scope of this paper. (Werner 1969: 331-332)

Aletheism (cf. Hiż 1969: 147). The ending here is neat - proclaim an idea "neither unimportant nor uninteresting" and push it beyond the scope of your own work (let someone else handle it?). It's a very high-minded academic way of saying "F it".

All occasional sentences may be converted into appropriate generic ones. This is perhaps better stated the other way: Generic sentences are prerequisite to the understanding and interpretation of specific and/or occasional sentences. Many generic sentences are probably axiomatic, that is, they are either learned by an informant or unknown to him. (Werner 1969: 332)

Looks like generic and occasional sentences follow the token/type dualism. The dictionary definition of "axiomatic" says "self-evident or unquestionable". May add something to Clay's definition of axiomatic knowledge.

Ethnoscience, in common with standard ethnography and linguistics, is potentially exhaustive (holistic). Exhaustiveness of description is a principle which, in practice, may be only approximated to some degree. [↩] The knowledge of informants varies with their intelligence, interest, opportunity, and with the facts of the social division of labor. No informant has a total knowledge of his culture. A full description approaching a 'complete' description must be a composite picture of the cultural [|] competence of many informants. Such a complex picture is conceivable only as the supra-individual record of an ideal 'omniscient' native speaker-hearer. (Werner 1969: 332-333)

A point made in "The Consequences of Literacy", which I need to re-read to get it on here.

One possible solution may be concentration on semantic field properties rather than lexical domains; in other words, concern for the organization of knowledge rather than the substantive extent of knowledge. [↩] Limiting the analysis to the highest, or near highest, level terms embedded in folk taxonomies may be another possible method for a systematic reduction of bulk and complexity. (Werner 1969: 334)

Breadth and depth? (cf. Savan 1965: 36).

Masing, Uku 1969. Review of The New Comparative Mythology: An Anthropological Assessment of the Theories of Georges Dumézil by C. Scott Littleton. Semiotica 1(3): 339-355. DOI: 10.1515/semi.1969.1.3.339

[...] he [Dumézil] seems to think that F. Cumont (1956) was the first one to point out some parallels between Mazdaism and Judaism). (Masing 1969: 339)

Something I've only met in Olev Remsu's Kurbmäng Paabelis (1989).

He often mitigates or retracts his own justified criticisms; has nothing to say against "another example of the mutability of D's thinking" (L 135) where 'unsettledness' would be a more suitable term; a great many of D's errors and shortcomings are accepted by him without the least reserve. (Masing 1969: 340)

Unwellformedness.

A representative of the 1 f(unction) can be treated as a representative of the 3 f when he is bathing, since "the act of bathing is conductive to a sense of physical relaxation and well-being [...] a bather is, for the moment at least, neither sovereign nor possessed of effective physical prowess, and would indeed seem to relate to the thirst function" (D 1956b, L 124). (Masing 1969: 342)

Manifesting the same logic as one of the poems in Tyler Fugazzie's Hool (2013): if a man sits down he ceases to be human because the common iconic image of humankind is a standing person.

Bernard, Jeff 1998. Conceptions of life and man - basics of "social communications" (as exemplified by the "Charter on the (re-)presentation of disabled people in the midea"). Sign Systems Studies 26: 372-391.

"World vision" and the "vision of man" cannot be separated from one another. Their common denominator is the factor "image", a simplifying formula for an infinite number of interwoven projections which, first of all, necessarily have to be correlated appropriately to achieve a correct "vista". "Image" means at the same time that one refers to something else: societal facts, structures, interactions (as pertinent fundamental instances, i.e., if religious-metaphysical foundations are excluded from a scientific-logical point of view, without their individual-motivational importance being denied). (Bernard 1998: 372)

In the first instance image has the quality of simplification in common with model; in the second instance it has the standing for quality in common with signs and, evidently, information (cf. Farina 2008: 77).

The "image" is a sign. A sign is something which stands for something else, being as such interpreted by something or somebody. It is a relationship S = R (O, M, I), whereby S is the sign, O is the object (the signified), M is the means (the signifying), and I is the interpretant (a further sign) or the interpreter himself (his interpreting consciousness). The means M, or sign vehicle, or representamen, is at the same time the means of communication. Communication without sign use is by definition impossible. (Communication is, according to Ch. W. Morris, the formation of a signification community, or, as stated by F. Rossi-Landi, "sign exchange".) (Bernard 1998: 372)

Similar formulae have been constructed by Nauta (1972) and Lotman (1976). Not at all sure if "a signification community" is Morris's - it doesn't sound like him (he had "interpreter-family" for what Jakobson called a "speech community". Also, he had a pretty systematic definition of communication in which the construction of a community did not figure.

Against merely mentalistic orientations in semiotics it should be emphasized, in the end, that here M and O are to be understood in the sense of Rossi-Landi's socio-semiotic theory, that is, M serves the identification of an already socialized piece, part, fragment of society (= O). The intended transformations of O (i.e. O1, O2, O3, ... , On) are contrived by sign work which by mediacy is, at the same time, consciousness work. Non-profit PR can therefore, appropriately adjusted, play an active and even initial role in this consciousness work - it cannot be the one and only agent, however, if it does not want to unfold mere illusion over deficient reality. (Bernard 1998: 385)

Fairly convoluted paper with too many formulas and initializations.

Randviir, Anti 1998. Sign as an object of social semiotics: evolution of cartographic semiosis. Sign Systems Studies 26: 392-416.

The current essay attempts to view a possible distinction between social and cultural semiotics, and finally their interconnectedness via the semiotics of sign. On the basis of maps, viewed below as manifestations of culturally accepted social representations, we shall try to demonstrate the interrelated nature of the semiotics of the code and that of the sign in the manner that it is exemplified in a cultural semiotic system. (Randviir 1998: 392)

One may venture a guess that Peirce represents the semiotics of sign and Saussure the semiotics of code.

Now, the two general categories would be 'cultural semiotics' and 'social semiotics' (in line with hypothetic statements e.g. 'semiotics of literature belongs to the sphere of cultural semiotics, semiotics dealing with mass communication - to the one of social semiotics'). (Randviir 1998: 392)

An implicit reference to "The Social Semiotics of Mass Communication" (Jensen 1995)

However, this may also be expressed by a conditional contrast - while cultural semiotics sets its object into the light of the context of cultural tradition, sociosemiotics looks at a cultural object within social dynamics (for the latter, see e.g. Riggins 1994: 111). We can also say that cultural semiotics deals with the object 'as a structure', treating relations between objects as structural, too. Hence, one can state that this point of view is ontological; meaning and code are ontological, whereas for sociosemiotics, objects and relations between them are not ontological but processual and semiosic as the latter (semiosis) conjoins the semiotics of the sign and the semiotics of the code. (Randviir 1998: 393)

Thus, a series forms between several antinomies: cultural/social; diachronic/synchronic; and structural/processual.

Also, the structural tradition can be taken as following Saussure's doctrine in the sense that meaning emerges or emanates from differences between intrasystemic signs. Still - meaning would, in this respect, as if belong to the realm outside that of signs, since its locus is, so to speak, in-between signs; the meaning (of a message consisting of more than one sign) is directed by relations between signs, but not as much by the relationship between the signifier and the signified, as one could interpret from has been ascribed to Saussure. (Randviir 1998: 394)

Interestingly, Peirce's semosis follows an obverse logic, where meaning emerges, so to say (because Peircean semiotics does not substantialize "meaning") from similarities between (extrasystemic) signs. At least this can be inferred from the definition of sign given in some instances, e.g. "anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which itself refers (its object) in the same way" (Lenzen 1965: 3).

In the current paper space is proposed as such a 'natural semiotic system'. Space is a matter where socium's general principles of code usage, therefore also 'regularities of modeling', are laid open. At the same time, space is a wholly ordinary environment of everyday life and a naturally signified dimension. It is commonplace that the cultural behavior of an individual is largely dependent on how his/her mental map has developed and has been made to develop. (Randviir 1998: 396)

Presumably, "natural semiotic system" is a Greimasianism. Recording this for a future list of what phenomena are considered as "sign systems" in Sign Systems Studies.

At this point one can distinguish between so to speak primary (or initial) and secondary semiosis, the first of which is related firsthand to signgenesis and the latter to interpretation. (Randviir 1998: 396)

Synonymous with the so-called front- and "the tail end of the semiotic chain" (Violi 2007: 68).

In connection with the symbol as a means of construing a model, we have to refer to a treatment of model by E. T. Hall, who asserts the function of the model for an artist (the authors of the maps viewed here were definitely artists, too) to be an instrument for filling gaps in visual memory. For this reason a model is a pseudoreality (compare with Merrell's treatment of 'semiotic reality', see e.g. Merrell 1992: 39-40, 44-45) created in the course of communication (see Hall 1981: 12). For Hall this is connected with the 'screening function of culture' which lies in socium's self-defense against informational overload (Hall 1981: 85). Taking this treatment into account, symbol, as an information carrier, has hence quite an ambivalent constitution, comprising of informational condensation on the one hand, and on the other 'postponing' the decoding of information (as a 'minus device'). (Randviir 1998: 406)

Reminiscent of the bio-anthropological perspective, in which "symbolic forms are to be understood as collective coping devices" (Oakley 2007: 28-29). Makes me wonder if a proposition like "A surprisingly large part of every culture is merely the phatic sharing of common emotional burdens, and has no relevance at all to the outside world" (La Barre 1954: 306) could similarly be translated into explicitly semiotic theory.

On the basis of this, we can create the following branching range of the sign:
→ Signal - Index - Icon - Symbol | Sign.
Here sign appears as an individual synthetic category. (Randviir 1998: 408)

How is semiosis different from general synthesis?

Melvil, Yuri K. 1966. The Conflict of Science and Religion in Charles Peirce's Philosophy. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 2(1): 33-50.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) has recently become one of the most fashionable philosophers in the U.S.A. Almost unknown during his lifetime, having tried unsuccessfully for decades to obtain a position at a university, failing to publish a single book on philosophy, and dying penniless and in complete obscurity, he has unexpectedly become the subject of honor and veneration (Melvil 1966: 33)

I wouldn't say complete obscurity, as the likes of Josiah Royce (cf. Kernan 1965) were very much fascinated with him, and had Royce not passed away prematurely, he would have brought Peirce's manuscripts to a larger decades earlier than they were. Also, the posthumous Chance, Love and Logic: Philosophical Essays (1923) appeared a decade after his death, which was pretty soon, considering.

It is to Peirce's credit that semiotics (the teaching of symbols) has been established as an independent scientific branch, the importance of which needs no proof in our time. (Melvil 1966: 34)

The what now?

But Peirce was not only a man of science. Like the American scientific intellectuals of his time he remained a religious man until the very end of his day. Peirce was convinced that "all realty [sic] is due to the creative powers of God" (6.505), that science is "knowledge of God's truth" (1.239), that for the support of the social order and morality "the great catholic church is wanted" (6.443). (Melvil 1966: 35)

God, the omnipotent real estate agent.

The highest principle of reason which, according to Peirce, should direct the scientist, is the following: "In order to learn, you must desire to learn" (1.135). This thesis seems to be rather trivial, but its meaning is more profound than it would appear. (Melvil 1966: 37)

At no time has this been a truer truism than now, when anyone with a device able to connect to the world wide web has immediate access to nearly all science. (Thank you, sci-hub!)

According to pragmatism, "inquiry" does not proceed at all from no knowledge to knowledge, but only from doubt to belief. It does not assume either knowledge or truth. Peirce rejects as being a groundless fancy the idea that man strives not simply toward an opinion but toward the true opinion. He claims that the truth or falsity of belief does not have any connection with the goal of inquiry, "for as soon as a firm belief is reached we are entirely satisfied, whether the belief is true or false" (5.375). (Melvil 1966: 40)

Isn't this related to Peirce's fallibilism? ("the principle that propositions concerning empirical knowledge can be accepted even though they cannot be proved with certainty"; "the philosophical claim that no belief can have justification which guarantees the truth of the belief")

In this way the explanation here, too, consists of an equation of the phenomenon to be explained with the peculiar nature of mind which apparently needs no explanation, since for the idealist, mind is "the sole self-intelligible thing" (6.61). (Melvil 1966: 44)

The brain named itself.

Fisch, Max and Atwell Turquette 1966. Peirce's Triadic Logic. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 2(2): 71-85.

Alonzo Church expresses essentially the same points in the following way:
Using three truth-values instead of two, and truth-tables in these three truth-values, Łukasiewicz first introduced a three-valued propositional calculus in 1920. He was led to this by ideas about modality, according to which a third truth-value - possibility, or better, contingency - has to be considered in addition to truth and falsehood; but the abstract importance of the new calculus transcends that of any particular associated ideas of this kind. Generalization to a many-valued propositional calculus, with υ + 1 truth-values of which μ + 1 are designated (1 ≦ μ > υ), was made by post in 1921 [...]
Chuch points out further that 1921 denotes the date of the published version of Post's dissertation of 1920. (Fisch & Turquette 1966: 72)

The excluded middle and abduction.

The suggestion becomes even more plausible in the light of the fact that just prior to the period when Peirce was developing his triadic logic, he was giving serious consideration to problems of trichotomy or triadic modality. For example, under the date of January 1908, The Prescott Book (Ms. 277) deals with modality in terms of the triad "potentiality," "actuality," and "necessitation." Peirce characterizes these as follows:
Potentiality is the absence of Determination (in the usual broad sense) not of a mere negative kind but a positive capacity to be Yea and to be Nay; not ignorance but a state of being [...] [↩] Actuality is the Act which determines the merely possible [...] [↩] Necessitation is the support of Actuality by reason [...]
On August 28, 1908, Peirce records in his Logic Notebook (Ms. 339) an account of the co-reality of the three universes: "1) of Ideas, 2) of Occurrences [...], and 3) of Powers." He then argues that the "mode of being" of an Idea is that of "Real Possibility," that of an Occurrence is "Actuality," and that of a Power is "Real Necessity." Then, in the same Logic Notebook (Ms. 339) on December 27, 1908, Peirce lets "1" denote Idea, "2" denote Occurrence, and "3" denote Habit, which is presumably a kind of Power. (Fisch & Turquette 1966: 78)

The origin of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. Thus: Potentiality - Ideas; Actuality - Occurrences; Necessitation - Powers - Habit. On the latter point, habit being a kind of power, think of the phrase "the power of habit".

Cowley, Stephen J. 2008. Meaning in Nature: Organic Manufacture? Biosemiotics 1(1): 85-98. DOI: 10.1007/s12304-008-9003-7

Far from representing 'knowledge', language may be grounded in deeds. In Maturana's (1978) terms, languaging may be structural coupling whereby a system brings about changes in its own state. What Turing (1950) called our 'intellectual powers' may arise from the biomechanics of languaging. Skills that derive from acting, speaking and hearing may be precisely what transform human observers into world-modellers. (Cowley 2008: 87)

Language, says Malinowski, is a mode of action; soon followed by Austin and Wittgenstein with elaborations.

From cell to culture, organisms are regulated by history. For older and newer traditions alike, it matters that self-organizing, adaptive agents model the world. In the qualitative tradition, with Peirce and von Uexküll, semiosis is traced - not just to sign and world - but also to models (or interpretants). (Cowley 2008: 87)

...or habit.

In contrast to the DEEDS tradition, biosemiotics can draw on its own self-constructed history. The field is less reliant on negative argument, currents of fashion, technological change, or careerism. Conversely, it can seem isolated, disconnected from current debates, and redolent of discarded views. To the uninformed, this raises fears about its scientific status. (Cowley 2008: 88)

Exactly why semiotics is so darn appealing.

A history of organism-environment relations gave rise to two-way structured couplings. Semiotic causation makes nutrient concentration meaningful to the cell. By contrast, Varela explains similar facts by appeal to autopoiesis (roughly, self-organization). (Cowley 2008: 89)

Earlier, "Howard Pattee finds an epistemic cut between physics and biology" (ibid, 87). Does the concept of causation not make that cut too shallow?

Whether called semiosis or self-organization, adaptation is the basis for sense-making. Contra Hoffmeyer, the communicative world is one of (inter)action. (Cowley 2008: 89)

Both "learning" and "habit-formation" could be added to this list of near-synonymous terms.

In Inner Representations and Signs in Animals, Stephen Pain sketches how such views might be built into empirical work. To this end, he suggests attributing sentience to a system that integrates information across modalities: its indicators are thus signs of interest (and, presumably, decline in interest). Accordingly, sentience arises in - not bacteria - but perhaps jellyfish and, almost certainly, in earthworms. (Cowley 2008: 94)

"The microscopist looks to see whether the motions of a little creature show any purpose. If so, there is mind there" (CP 1.269; in Nöth 1998: 338) - replace purpose with interest.

Neuman, Yair and Ophir Nave 2008. On the Semio-Mathematical Nature of Codes. Biosemiotics 1(1): 99-111. DOI: 10.1007/s12304-008-9004-6

Biosemiotics is an emerging field of theoretical biology that involves "the study of signs, of communication, and of information in living organismS" (Smith 1997: 72). A basic tenet of biosemiotics is that the behavior of biological systems should be studied as a mediated realm (Barbieri 2003; Hoffmeyer 1996; Neuman 2008) in which signs or codes establish a correspondence between two different worlds (Barbieri 2003). Codes are described as having three unique characteristics: (1) they connect two independent worlds; (2) they add meaning to information; and (3) they are conventions (ibid.). (Neuman & Nave 2008: 99)

Pretty vague - what worlds are these? That of the living and non-living? Physical and semiotic realities? In Saussurean semiology, the signifier and signified ary by no means "worlds"; and in Peircean semiotics the sign certainly mediates, but does it mediate between worlds or between sign-vehicles and objects?

The central dogma portrays genetic coding as a linear, one-way flow of "information" from DNA to RNA to protein. We put the word "information" in quotation marks because the meaning of biological "information" is far from clear. The term "information" originated in Latin and entered the English language around 1450 in the sense of "knowledge communicated" (Online Etymology Dictionary). In modern scientific discourse, however, "information" is commonly associated with information theory and Shannon's definition and mathematical measure of information. (Neuman & Nave 2008: 101)

Very true, and conversely, communication originally had the connotations of information, i.e. the Queen was received communication from a diplomatic envoy, in which we today would say "received information". Communication, of course, also had the connotation of transportation (e.g. water and rail communication; the term "channel" originates from the water-way figure).

RNA self-replication suggests that RNA can serve as a template for its own replication. That is, RNA has the ability to act as both genes and enzymes. This incredible property was proven by Nobel laureate Thomas R. Cech (Cech 1986) and is one of the theoretical justifications for the "RNA world" hypothesis (Gesteland et al. 1999; Gilbert 1986) - the hypothesis that the modern DNA world was preceded by an RNA world. (Neuman & Nave 2008: 103)

Ah! Those worlds.

The interesting thing is that the shift from the alphabet (e.g., RNA units) to higher-order combinatorial structures (e.g., codons) involves a qualitative shift that infuses "information," in the sense of differentiation, with "meaning." "Dog" and "God" have the same informational value when taken as mere collections of the letters G, O, and D. However, combining the letters to form higher-order structures adds "order" to the differentiated tokens and thus infuses them with meaning. (Neuman & Nave 2008: 108)

Is double articulation really the primary mechanism of meaning-making? Mere otherness does not sense-discrimination make.

Collins, Christopher 2008. Palaeopoetics: Prefatory notes toward a cognitive history of poetry. Cognitive Semiotics 2: 41-64. DOI: 10.1515/cogsem.2008.2.spring2008.41

But then, of course, the follow-up question becomes "what is poetry?". A convenient first answer would be: "Poetry" is what most people around the world and down through the ages have assumed it to be, namely, the practice of making self-contained, formally patterned verbal compositions. (Collins 2008: 41)

Self-contained, implying "closure" (cf. Sonesson 1998: 99-100).

Over the past two million years it was culture, that is, "collective mentality" that drove cognitive evolution. "Cultures are more efficient than individuals at exploiting the fitness value of genetic variations, which might otherwise have a negligible impact" (Donald 2001: 259). (Collins 2008: 42)

What's the difference between collective mind and collective mentality? The latter term has two distinct meanings: "the characteristic way of thinking of a person or group" and "the capacity for intelligent thought". Presumably the second one is relevant here, as the first one approaches "attitude" and is rather derogatory.

His [Donald's] four stages are, in brief:
  1. The Episodic, associated with the perception and storage of whole events. This evolved with the primate apes.
  2. The Mimetic, associated with the communication of thoughts through actions, for example, gestural representation and the teaching of skills through showing. This began among early hominids and became fully developed in Homo erectus.
  3. The Mythic, associated with linguistic communication - telling, as distinct from showing; symbolic signs, as distinct from indices and icons. This appears at the beginning of our own subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens, at some point between 100 thousand and 50 thousand years ago.
  4. The Theoretical, associated with the trascription and external storage of symbolic signs, viz., writing. Begun some 5 thousand years ago, this led to the development of literate cultures and what we customarily refer to as "civilizations".
(Collins 2008: 43)

The second one is problematic: "imitation is based on a conceptual understanding of the imitated behaviour, in contrast to mimicry" (Østergaard 2007: 116). Were this distinction taken seriously, the mimetic stage could not involve "teaching of skills" - they would not stick, would die out with individuals.

In modern humans, such episodes can extend in duration well beyond the interval we identify with "working memory" - 7 items, plus or minus two, within a period of 20 seconds (Miller 1956). (Collins 2008: 44)

A popular psychological myth.

The analog mind, which up till then had been the sole cognitive operating system, receives impressions and rearrances its neural networks accordingly. These networks "form impressions in essentially the same way a time-exposed astronomical photograph does, by passively gathering data over time. (Collins 2008: 45)

The analog/digital distinction is again something that is outdated by at least half a century, if not more (cf. Ruesch & Kees 1956). The distinction is still valuable, e.g. "digital-analogical consensus" (Bruni 2008: 126-127), but digital and "analog mind" is a patented absurdity.

One kind of episode that even our pre-hominid ancestors understood well was social play. Our mammalia nforebears must have had a mutual awareness that some threatening displays might not be what they seem, enough skill in mind-reading to interpret outwardly aggressive behavior, under certain circumstances, as non-aggressive in intent. We assume so because they and we still exhibit this awareness. "How do animals read play intention in any conspecific? Cooperative social play may involve rapid exchange of information on intentions, desires, and beliefs" (Bekoff & Byers 1998: xvi). Gregory Bateson has his own term for this pre-play exchange he called it a "metacommunication" (Bateson 1972, Collins 1991: xxiii-xxiv). This was a signal that invites the addressee to enter into what Bateson called a "play frame" within which actions, for example, chasing, nipping, and sparring, would not indicate the sort of hostility that might otherwise lead to injury or death. (Collins 2008: 47)

A bold simplification because that is not all that metacommunication embraces. Cf. Communication, the Social Matrix of Psychology (Ruesch & Bateson 1951) for the definition of metacommunication.

This is also quite different from episodic play, which involves two sociall identified individuals engaged in enacting a socially recognized play script - two dogs, for example, barking and taking turns chasing one another, or two humans exchanging soft punches to one another's shoulder to communicate good-natured bonhomie. (Collins 2008: 48)

Define: "cheerful friendliness; geniality"; synonymous with conviviality.

When forms imitate themselves, their repetitive structure constitutes what Roman Jakobson (1960) called "iterative form" and saw operating in verbal compositions on the levels of semantics, syntax, and phonological expression. Even earlier, Suzanne Langer (1953) declared rhythmic patterning to be the form of feeling and, as such, an aesthetic universal across all the arts. (Collins 2008: 50)

Never noticed this. He probably has better means to treat rhythms.

The iterative aspects of these two - on the one hand, a rapid rhythmic repetition of movements and sounds and, on the other hand, a slower, visual representation of past events - correspond rather closely to Nietzsche's well-known distinction in The Birth of Tragedy between the Dionysian and Apollinian factors at the heart of Greek tragedy and modern music drama. These two gods represent for him the polar oppositions of self and selflessness, reason and [|] rapture, dream and dance, vision and music. At the Apollinian pole, we enjoy an illusory, yet stabilizing, belief in the unique wholeness of our self, a belief grounded in the principium individuationis (the principle of individuation). The latter, as he understood from Schopenhauer, was formed by our sense of existing in time and space - in particular moments and particular places. At the Dionysian pole, this sense of separate individuality surrenders to a mystical participation in a larger reality. (Collins 2008: 51-52)

I have no idea how this is related to rhythms, but, knowing that Malinowski wrote his very first (preserved) essays on this very text (cf. Malinowski 1904/05), it now makes a bit more sense why he protested so much against "collective consciousness" and similar formulations.

With population growth, skill-based divisions of labor must have been introduced and, to the extent that every individual needed to share in the work of the community in order to share in its benefits, the principle of reciprocal altruism became the governing ethos. This was the Paleolithic golden rule: I will do unto others a kindness (whatever the immediate cost to myself) with the understanding that, if ever I need the same, those others will do that unto me (whatever the immediate cost to them). Persons unwilling to abide by this rule would be banished from the group; those found to be slackers or cheaters would be punished. (Collins 2008: 58)

Tediously iterative content: haven't I read this paragraph in this very journal? (cf. Brandt 2007: 53) What a pedestrian paper this is. It made absolutely no head-way into anything and contained infuriating pot-holes. Ragequit a few pages before the conclusion.

Ross, Haj 2008. Structural Prosody. Cognitive Semiotics 2: 65-82. DOI: 10.1515/cogsem.2008.2.spring2008.65

The crucial problem that year (1965, I think) was poetics. I knew nothing about it, had never availed myself of the rich literature that Jakobson had already written on poetics. (Ross 2008: 66)

I have to say, for a journal titled Cognitive Semiotics, it contains an unexpected amount of poetics instead of, say, psychology or neurology.

I have never met anyone who had the ability to speak in a fashion as concentrated as could Roman. I think that that density was one of kinds of bait with which he sweetened the hook on which I was impaled. I had found out for myself that syntax was bottomless; he showed us that poetics was equally, or perhaps more, so. I had the supreme good fortune to not only be able to hear him talk on many subjects, for the last twenty years of his amazingly productive life, but to become his colleague and friend. I once proposed to him that we collaborate on the analysis of a poem, he agreed - but as is so often the case in life, I thought there were other things of greater urgency to accomplish, and then he grew ill, and was gone. (Ross 2008: 67)

I, too, think that Jakobson was a linguistic genius, but this here is bordering on verbal fellatio.

While even higher-order sectionings are theoretically possible, I have not encountered many, and I tend to doubt that they can exist productively. After all, we are getting close to George Miller's famous Magic Number Seven ± 2. (Ross 2008: 70)

Tediously iterative content: the quality of "cognitive science" in this here cognitive semiotics. I'm seriously considering dropping this journal.

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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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