- Eco 1976. A Theory of Semiotics [Introduction]
- Kull 2009. Vegetative, Animal, and Cultural Semiosis
- Higuera; Kull 2017. The Semiotic Threshold
Eco, Umberto 1976. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. [lg]
The aim of this book is to explore the theoretical possibility and the social function of a unified approach to every phenomenon of signification and/or communication. Such an approach should take the form of a general semiotic theory, able to explain every case of sign-function in terms of underlying systems of elements mutually correlated by one or more codes. (Eco 1976: 3)
The social function of a scientific approach?
Therefore a first chapter will be devoted to the analysis of the notion of 'sign' in order to distinguish signs from non-signs and to translate the notion of 'sign' into the more flexible one of sign-function (which can be explained within the framework of a theory of codes). This discussion will allow me to posit a distinction between 'signification' and 'communication': in principle, a semiotics of signification entails a theory of codes, while a semiotics of communication entails a theory of sign production. (Eco 1976: 4)
How is the notion of "sign" not flexible? How does adding "function" make it more flexible?
It is not by chance that the discriminating categories are the ones of signification and communication. As will be seen in chapters 1 and 2, there is a signification system (and therefore a code) when there is the socially conventionalized possibility of generating sign-functions, whether the functives of such functions are discrete units called signs or vast portions of discourse, provided that the correlation has been previously posited by a social convention. There is on the contrary a communication process when the possibilities provided by a signification system are exploited in order to physically produce expressions for many practical purposes. (Eco 1976: 4)
And these are not equivalents for "language" and "speech?
Even if the theory of codes and the theory of sign production succeed in eliminating the naive and non-relational notion of 'sign', this notion appears to be so suitable in ordinary language and in colloquial semiotic discussions that it should not be completely abandoned. [|] It would be uselessly oversophisticated to get rid of it. (Eco 1976: 4-5)
Were semioticians using the notion of "sign" in a non-relational way before this? (Peirce's sign is a relation... precedes this by a century.)
There are 'co-operative' limits in the sense that various disciplines have elaborated theories or descriptions that everybody recognizes as having semiotic relevance (for instance both linguistics and information theory have done important work on the notion of code; kinesics and proxemics are richly exploring non-verbal modes of communication, and so on): in this case a general semiotic approaches should only propose a unified set of categories in order to make this collaboration more and more powerful; at the same time it can eliminate the naive habit of translating (by dangerous metaphorical substitutions) the categories of linguistics into different frameworks. (Eco 1976: 6)
Kinesics and proxemics both died with their progenitors. What is rich, though, is descrying the translation of linguistic into different frameworks from the guy who applied Jakobson's scheme of linguistic functions on architecture.
By natural boundaries I mean principally those beyond which a semiotic approach cannot go; for There is non-semiotic territory since there are phenomena that cannot be taken as sign-functions. But by the same term I also mean a vast range of phenomena prematurely assumed not to have a semiotic relevance. These are the cultural territories in which people do not recognize the underlying existence of codes or, if they do, do not recognize the semiotic nature of those codes, i.e., their ability to generate a continuous production of signs. (Eco 1976: 6)
Like the physical world of causality?
Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else. This something else does not necessarily have to exist or to actually be somewhere at the moment in which a sign stands in for it. Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used 'to tell' at all. I think that the definition of a 'theory of the lie' should be taken as a pretty comprehensive program for a general semiotics. (Eco 1976: 7)
Actually made me think of how O.S.'s novel is a substitution for the 18thM's history of mankind. The actual thing (might) exist(s someday) but what we have is a reduced version that got partly lost in the transmission (transtemporal telepathy not a reliable means of communication?).
Semiotics is of the limits and laws of semiotics must begin by determining whether (a) one means by the term 'semiotics' a specific discipline with its own method and a precise object; or whether (b) semiotics is a field of studies and thus a repertoire of interests that is not as yet completely unified. If semiotics is a field then the various semiotic studies would be justified by their very existence: it should be possible to define semiotics inductively by extrapolating from the field of studies a series of constant tendencies and therefore a unified model. If semiotics is a discipline, then the research ought to propose a semiotic model deductively which would serve as a parameter on which to base the inclusion or exclusion of the various studies from the field of semiotics. (Eco 1976: 7)
The latter, it's a field. Excluding some because they don't use "a semiosic model" would be... hegemonic?
One cannot do theoretical research without having the courage to put forward a theory, and, therefore, an elementary model as a guide for subsequent discourse; all theoretical research must however have the courage to specify its own contradictions, and should make them obvious where they are not apparent. (Eco 1976: 7)
History of semiotics now barred because it does not put forward a new theory.
At first glance this survey will appear as a list of communicative behaviors, thus suggesting one of the hypotheses governing my research: semiotics studies all cultural processes as processes of communication. Therefore each of these processes would seem to be permitted by an underlying system of signification. (Eco 1976: 8)
The fundamental premise of the semiotics of culture.
So let us define a communicative process as the passage of a signal (not necessarily a sign) from a source (through a transmitter, along a channel) to a destination. In a machine-to-machine process the signal has no power to signify in so far as it may determine the destination sub specie stimuli. In this case we have no signification, but we do have the passage of some information.
When the destination is a human being, or 'addressee' (it is not necessary that the source or the transmitter be human, provided that they emit the signal following a system of rules by the human addressee), we are on the contrary witnessing a process of signification - provided that the signal is not merely a stimulus but arouses an interpretive response in the addressee. This process is made possible by the existence of a code. (Eco 1976: 8)
According to this, what we call a transmission of information (sharing files between devices, uploading files to a cloud, etc.) is communication, and what we usually call communication is "a process of signification". Got it. This must have been written before the digital age when transmission was analogic; no-one today, not even Tom's uncle Richards' buddy Harry, would say that computers run... without a code.
A code is a system of signification, insofar as it couples present entities with absent units. When - on the basis of an underlying rule - something actually presented to the perception of the addressee stands for something else, there is signification. In this sense the addressee's actual perception and interpretive behavior are not necessary for the definition of a significant relationship as such: it is enough that the code should foresee an established correspondence between that which 'stand for' and its correlate, valid for every possible addressee even if no addressee exists or even will exist. (Eco 1976: 8)
Very... virtual. If trees fall in a forest over a lengthy period of time in a sequence spelling out "SOS" in morse code, it's a significant relationship even if there's no-one there to perceive and interpret it. The code itself foresees that the correlation is there. (A "virtual addressee", a God, would appreciate the correlation.)
Zoosemiotics: it represents the lower limit of semiotics because it concerns itself with the communicative behavior of non-human (and therefore non-cultural) communities. But through the study of animal communication we can achieve a definition of what the biological components of human communication are: or else a recognition that even on the animal level there exist patterns of signification which can, to a certain degree, be a defined as cultural and social. (Eco 1976: 9)
Oh, good, the lower animals have a use after all.
Musical codes: the whole of musical science since the Pythagoreans has been an attempt to describe the field of musical communication as a rigorously structured system. (Eco 1976: 10)
Seemingly no book goes without a mention of them. The phraseology here is not bad. A rigorously structured system flows over and through us and we do not perceive it.
As a matter of fact music presents, on the one hand, the problem of a semiotic system without a semantic level (or a content plane): on the other hand, however, there are musical 'signs' (or syntagms) with an explicit denotative value (trumpet signals in the army) and there are syntagms or entire 'texts' possessing pre-culturalized connotative value ('pastoral' or 'thrilling' music, etc.). In some historical eras music was conceived as conveying precise emotional and conceptual meanings, established by codes, or, at least, 'repertoires' (see, for the Baroque era, Stefani, 1973, and Pagnini, 1974). (Eco 1976: 11)
As I understand it, even the most tedious techno/house music has its codes and conventions. They are perhaps merely too complicated to be verbalized.
Text theory: the exigencies of a 'transphrastic' linguistic and developments in plot analysis (as well as the poetic language analysis) have led semiotics to recognize the notion of text as a macro-unit, ruled by particular generative rules, in which sometimes the very notion of 'sign'" - as an elementary semiotic unit - is practically annihilated" (Barthes 1971, 1973; Kristeva 1969). (Eco 1976: 12)
Text without signs?
Cultural codes: semiotic research finally shifts its attention to phenomena which it would be difficult to term sign systems in a strict sense, nor even communicative systems, but which heading the Soviets bring in myths, legends, primitive technologies which present in an organized way the world vision of a certain society (see Ivanov and Toporov 1962; Todorov 1966) and finally the typology of cultures (Lotman 1964, 1967a), which study the codes which define a given cultural model (for example the code of [|] the mentality of medieval chivalry); [...] (Eco 1976: 12-13)
Eco not really getting the gist of TMS modelling theory.
Saussure's definition is rather important and has done much to increase semiotic awareness. As will be shown in chapter 1 the notion of a sign as a twofold entity (signifier and signified or sign-vehicle and meaning) has anticipated and promoted all correlational definitions of sign-function. Insofar as the relationship between signifier and signified is established on the basis of a system of rules which is '!em"la langue, Saussurean semiology would seem to be a rigorous semiotics of signification. But it is not by chance that those who see semiotics as a theory of communication rely basically on Saussure's linguistics. Saussure did not define the signified any too clearly, leaving it half way between a mental image, a concept and a psychological [|] reality; but he did clearly stress the fact that the signified is something which has to do with the mental activity of anybody receiving a signifier: according to Saussure signs 'express' ideas and provided that he did not share a Platonic interpretation of the term 'idea', such ideas must be mental events that concern a human mind. Thus the sign is implicitly regarded as a communicative device taking place between two human beings intentionally aiming to communicate or to express something. (Eco 1976: 14-15)
This ambiguity of the signified served it well - we all know what it is, and yet we do not know what it is exactly. An engram?
I shall define the 'interpretation' better later (chapter 2), but it is clear that the 'subjects' of Peirce's 'semiosis' are not human subjects but rather three abstract semiotic entities, the dialectic between which is not affected by concrete communicative behavior. (Eco 1976: 15)
These "subjects" are "a sign, its object and its interpretant", or, by their real names, Signe, Olev and Indrek.
It is true that the same interpretation could also fit Saussure's proposal; but Peirce's definition offers us something more. It does not demand, as part of a sign's definition, the qualities of being intentionally emitted and artificially produced. (Eco 1976: 15)
Which is perhaps why Peirceanism is becoming increasingly hegemonic in biosemiotics.
We are able to infer from smoke the presence of fire, from a wet spot the fall of a raindrop, from a track on the sand the passage of a given animal, and so on. All these are cases of inference and our everyday life is filled with a lot of these inferential acts. It is incorrect to say that every act of inference is a 'semiosic' act - even though Peirce did so - and it is probably too rash a statement to assert that every semiosic process implies an act of inference, but it can be maintained that there exist acts of inference which must be recognized as semiosic acts. It is not by chance that ancient philosophy has so frequently associated signification and inference. A sign was defined as the evident antecedent of a consequent or the consequent of an antecedent when similar consequences have been previously observed (Hobbes, Leviathan, 1,3); as an entity from which the present or the future or past existence of another being is inferred (Wolff, Ontology, 1952); as a proposition constituted by a valid and revealing connection to its consequent (Sextus Empiricus, Adv. math., VIII, 245). Probably this straightforward identification of inference and signification leaves many shades of difference unexplained: it only needs to be corrected by adding the expression 'when this association is culturally recognized and systematically coded'. (Eco 1976: 17)
I should really reread Hobbes' Leviathan. It is probable that if Spinoza has a theory of signs, per Derrida, then he should have got it from Hobbes. (A theory of signs is, in this case, like a contagious disease.)
An event can be a sign-vehicle of its cause or its effect provided that both the cause and the effect are not actually detectable. Smoke is only a sign of fire to the extent that fire is not actually perceived along with the smoke: but smoke can be a sign-vehicle standing for a non-visible fire, provided that a social rule has necessariy and usually associated smoke with fire. (Eco 1976: 17)
The murderer standing by the body with a bloody knife saying "I did it" does not require a detective.
One must undoubtedly exclude from semiotic consideration neurophysiological and genetic phenomena, as well as the circulation of the blood or the activity of the lungs. But what about the information theories that view sensory phenomena as the passage of signals from peripherical nerve ends to the cerebral cortex, or genetic heredity as a coded transmission of information? Probably it would be prudent to say that neurophysiological and genetic phenomena are not a matter for semioticians, but that neurophysiological and genetic informational theories are so. (Eco 1976: 21)
Semiotics deals with theories only?
The difference between saying culture 'should be studied as' and 'culture is', is immediately apparent. In fact it is one thing to say that an object is essentialiter something and another to say that it can be seen sub ratione of that something. (Eco 1976: 22)
First time seeing these expressions, I think.
However, these conditions do not even imply that two human beings actually exist: the situation is equally possible in the case of a solitary, shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe. It is necessary, however, that whoever uses the stone for the first time should consider the possibility of passing on the information he has acquainted to himself the next day, and in order to do this should elaborate a mnemonic device, a significant relationship between object [|] and function. A singe use of the stone is not culture. To establish now the function can be repeated and to transmit this information from today's solitary shipwrecked man to the same man tomorrow, is culture. The solitary man becomes both transmitter and eceiver of a communication (on the basis of a very elementary code). It is clear that a definition such as this (in its totally simple terms) can imply an identification of thought and language: it is a question of saying, as Peirce does (5.470-480) that even ideas are signs. But the problem appears in its extreme form only if one considers the extreme example of a shipwrecked individual communicating with itsef. (Eco 1976: 23-24)
Autocommunication and culture.
For my own part, I share the same skeptical opinion that all enquiry is 'motiated'. Theoretical research is a form of social practice. Everybody who wants to know something wants to know it in order to do something. If he claims that he wants to know it only in order 'to know' and not in order 'to do' it means that he wants to know it in order to do nothing, which is in fact a surreptitious way of doing something, i.e. leaving the world just as it is (or as his approach assumes that it ought to be). (Eco 1976: 29)
Knowing and even feeling are meaningless, there is only doing.
Hjelmslev (1943), for instance, proposed to divide semiotics into (1) scientific semiotic and (b) non-scientific semiotic, both studied by (c) metasemiotic. A metasemiotic studying a non-scientific semiotic is a semiology, whose terminology is studied by a metasemiology. Insofar as there also exists a connotative semiotic, there will likewise be a meta(connotative) semiotic. This division, however, does not take into account (for historical reasons) many new approaches to significant and communicative phenomena. For instance, Hjelmslev called 'connotators' such phenomena as tones, registers, gestures which, not being at that time the object of a scientific semiotics, should have been studied by a metasemiology, while today the same phenomena fall within the domain of paralinguistics, which would seem to be a 'scientific semiotic'. Hjelmslev's great credit was that of having emphasized that there is no object which is not illuminated by linguistic (and semiotic) theory. (Eco 1976: 30, n 1)
First time someone has made Hjelmslev appear interesting for me.
Semiotics will therefore be presented as the axiomatic meting-place of all possible knowledge, including arts and sciences. This proposal is developed by Kristeva in "Pour une sémiologie des paragrammes" (1967) and in "Distance et anti-representation" (1968), where she introduces Linnart Mall, "Une approche possible du Sunyayada!, whose study of the "zero-logical subject" and the notion of 'emptiness' in ancient Buddhist texts is curiousy reminiscent of Lacan's 'vide'. (Eco 1976: 31, n 3)
Linnart Mäll keeps on popping up in my recent readings. // Mäll töötas 1983-1991 "ajaloo ja semiootika laboratooriumis", mille aadress oli Tiigi 78-100 (vb samad ruumid kus semiootika osakond asus enne 2012. aastat). Laboratooriumisse kuulus ka ajaloolane Herbert Ligi, kelle artiklitest ilmub kogumik oktoobris, st järgmine kuu.
It is sufficient to maintain that all this must apply to the first being which performed a semiotic behavior. This could mean - as Piaget (1968, p. 79) suggests - that intelligence precedes 'language'. But this does not mean that intelligence precedes semiosis. If the equation 'semiosis = verbal language' is eliminated, one can view intelligence and signification as a single process. (Eco 1976: 31, n 5)
Relevant for the absurd question: Is telepathy semiosic? (Never mind why one should even ask such a question.)
Kull, Kalevi 2009. Vegetative, Animal, and Cultural Semiosis: The semiotic threshold zones. Cognitive Semiotics 4: 8-27. DOI: 10.1515/cogsem.2009.4.spring2009.8 [De Gruyter Mouton]
The basic features which go together with semiosis include the possibility to make mistakes (or fallibility), and an intentionality in a very broad [|] sense. Thus it is worthwhile, when speaking about semiosis in organisms, to demonstrate as clearly as possible the existence of these features. (Kull 2009: 8-9)
Instead of (Eco's) lying, making mistakes.
Before the life process or semiosis (that has lasted and functioned uninterruptedly for about two billion years) started, there could have been an intermediate series of events, which brought together the necessary components of the entire semiosic machinery. This view is close to a contemporary common understanding of the beginning of life, according to which life did not take its origin through a single unique step, but through a multitude of steps (and possibly several branches, some of which were temporal and later disappeared entirely). As such, the border between life and non-life turns quite fuzzy in principle. (Kull 2009: 9)
Relevant for the time-scale as well as for framing O.S.'s biological program for seeding the galaxy with material that could evolve into life in suitable conditions.
With the introduction of the concept of the lower semiotic threshold, certain problems involving its correspondence to C. S. Peirce's approach appear. For Peirce, semiosis starts from the situation of lawless chaos; laws then develop as habits. Thus Peirce does not accept universal laws in the sense that modern physics does - since the latter assumes something which in principle (by definition) can never err. The universal physical laws (like the conservation of energy and the conservation of momentum) are described in contemporary physics as certain fundamental symmetries (according to Noether's theorem) that are strict and unavoidable conditions for all processes. (Kull 2009: 12)
Habits are fallible.
A relation is anything that cannot by itself affect, neither be directly recognized by, anything except another relation. [|] This is exactly what is true for a meaning - meaning exists only for another meaning, or a sign only for another sign. Or, as Jakob von Uexküll once (slightly sarcastically) remarked: "those who cannot see the meanings seemingly lack the appropriate organ [...]" Or, with another formulation: a sign is anything that requires for its detection a living device; whereas in order to recognize it as a sign, to recognize a relation as a relation, no less than a semiotic animal (= human) is needed. (Kull 2009: 12-13)
A much more cogent approach to this metalevel issue than Eco's example of a shipwrecked man teaching himself tomorrow how to use a rock (above).
In this case, the major types or levels of evolutionarily or ontogenetically established relations, i.e., of the sign relations that life can create - will be,A history of this typology ultimately goes back to the classical Aristotelian distinction between anima vegetativa, anima sensitiva, and anima rationale. The doctrine of Thomas Aquinas, similarly, included the view that in the first stage of embryonic development, the vital principle has merely vegetative powers; then a sensitive soul comes into being, and still later this is replaced by the perfect rational soul (Kull 2000). (Kull 2009: 15)
- Vegetative, which is capable of recognition - iconic relations;
- Animal, capable for association - indexical relations;
- Cultural, capable for combination - symbolic relations.
That's the stuff I like.
Stjernfelt (2003: 488-489) characterized (not without his good sense of humour) the iconic threshold (in the sense we use it here) as "the Sebeok theshold", the indexical threshold (in the sense of the current study) as "the Merleau-Ponty or Lakoff threshold", the symbolic threshold as "the Eco threshold", and the lack of the lower threshold as "the Peirce threshold". (Kull 2009: 15)
All of these make a lot of sense except Merleau-Ponty and Lakoff - I don't know what exactly they were about (self-perception? cognitive metaphors?).
A common problem faced in the case of vegetative semiosis is that although it is often accepted that cells may have a functional cycle and an umwelt, the same seems not to be true of a multicellular vegetative organism like a plant as a whole. Indeed, it can be so that a colony-like set of cells has less rich organismic behaviour than its constituent cells, but nevertheless a plant as a whole may also have at least some of it, if, for instance, a relation between the sensing processes in leaves' cells and the behaviour of rhizome growth or root behaviour is inherited (thus memory-based). (Kull 2009: 20)
Something something Martians.
These relations - the code relations - are not deterministic in the physical sense, because, unlike physical laws, they have exceptions, meaning that they are fallible, errors happen. However, in the case of vegetative semiosis it is not yet deception (that would require an animal sign system with its indexical relations), nor lying (which would require any form of language, the usage of true symbols). (Kull 2009: 21)
Another valuable addition to the lying/mistaking complex.
What we will see with the appearance of language is the creation of time - of a temporal umwelt with its distinctive past and future together with an ability for chronesthesia, or mental time travel. This corresponds to the emergence of new types of memory in humans that is necessary for narration, for building narratives. (Kull 2009: 22)
"In psychology, mental time travel is the capacity to mentally reconstruct personal events from the past (episodic memory) as well as to imagine possible scenarios in the future (episodic foresight / episodic future thinking)."
- Tulving, Endel 2002. Chronesthesia: Conscious awareness of subjective time. In: Stuss, D. T.; Knight, R. T. (eds.), Principles of Frontal Lobe Functions. New York: Oxford University Press, 311-325. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195134971.003.0020 [alicekim.com, PDF]
The appearance of language becomes possible due to the apparance of signs that signify a relation itself, relation as a relation. Such is, for instance, the connecting sign "and" - whose object is just a relation, a free relation-as-such, a relation that can be universally built between anything and which is independent of the objects between which this relation takes place. Such signs of relation can be called 'syntactical signs', and it is perhaps in this sense that Sebeok claimed syntax to be uniquely characteristic of human language (e.g., Sebeok 1996: 108). Syntactic aspects can be noticed in any sign systems, but the syntactic signs as such are a characteristic feature of language. Syntactic signs are absent in animal and vegetative sign systems. The capacity to use syntactic signs is evidently necessary for the creation of propositions and sentences. Thus, propositional, linguistic, and cultural semiosis are closely tied. (Kull 2009: 23)
An example of a purely syntactical sign.
Higuera, Claudio Julio Rodríguez; Kull, Kalevi 2017. The Biosemiotic Glossary Project: The Semiotic Threshold. Biosemiotics 10: 109-126. DOI: 10.1007/s12304-017-9289-4 [ResearchGate]
The concept of 'semiotic threshold' has been both influential and productive within the biosemiotic literature. First proposed by Umberto ECo (1976) with at least two variables, an upper and lower threshold, the concept has helped delimit and shape the whole area of semiotic studies. [...] However the extension of semiotic theories can lead us to posit challenges to the threshold view, via pansemiotism on the lower end of the spectrum, or by extending the reach of the high-complexity branches of cultural semiotics at the higher end. Interestingly, the idea of a semiotic threshold is not only limited to determining where sign action is possible, but also what areas of scholarship can semiotics cover, as a general discipline. (Higuera; Kull 2017: 110)
Semiotics of culture with its wholes/totalities.
That there is no consensus on the location of these possible thresholds should be taken as an advantage in discussing issues on the possibility of sign action; for the ongoing discussion on the split between the semiotic and the non-semiotic has been a productive tool in modeling and revisiting our positions on the role of meaning in biology. (Higuera; Kull 2017: 110)
Here's an absurd question: is telepathy semiotic or non-semiotic?
The concept of threshold does not present clear-cut synonyms that can replace it so easily within semiotic discourse. However, related terms such as hierarchies and levels present some relevant degree of similarity with the idea of a threshold that separates some aspects of what we may consider as semiotic (either by epistemological apprehension or by ontological assumption) from something beyond or below it. Hierarchical views of the semiotic are not a unified theory, and one may find different flavors to it. (Higuera; Kull 2017: 112)
I suspect that if one were to attempt to do the opposite and replace hierarchical models (such as Jakobson's scheme of linguistic functions) with a threshold-based approach, it may turn out that the phatic function, for example, is almost non-semiotic (not really but so close).
The caveat here is that this idea of semiotic transition hinges on the idea of intersemiosis, a term related to Jakobson's semiotics and the related semiotics of translation as developed by Torop (2003). However, the cultural scope of the concept sets it further away from the more specific biosemiotic claims that we have seen before. (Higuera; Kull 2017: 113)
Läbisemioositud.
The idea of a semiotic barrier is also related to the concept of the semiotic threshold. Lotman talks of "semiotic barriers" that must be overcome in acts of communication (Lotman 1990: 143). These barriers are to be understood as qualitative difference between communicative capacities. Lotman illustrates it with the example of a mother and her baby, which can be approached by biosemiotics through the understanding of biological organisms as textual systems (Kull 1999: 126). (Higuera; Kull 2017: 113)
Perhaps actually useful for my current topic.
Alternatively, de Mattos and Chaves argue that in the transition from youth to adulthood, individuals develop their own semiotic barriers to inhibit the development of new meanings (Mattos; Chaves 2013: 97). What can be surmised from these different, psycholinguistic meanings is that semiotic barriers are readily available as a concept for making a qualitative assessment of meaning generation and boundaries that appear within specific context, be those psychological or social. (Higuera; Kull 2017: 113)
"And once again it is the most paradoxical property of the habitus, the unchosen principle of all 'choices', that yelds the solution to the information needed in order to avoid information." (Bourdieu 1990: 61)
One of the more interesting proposals, however, comes from Stjernfelt's multiple thresholds associated to different positions in philosophy and semiotics, where instead of a 'lower' or a 'higher' threshold, there is a "whole ladder of thresholds of increasing biosemiotic complexity" (Stjernfelt 2007: 272). Among those we may find the Searle threshold as linguistic competence, the Uexküll threshold as zoological features, or the Peirce threshold, comprising all forms of protosemiotic processes in the universe (Stjernfelt 2007). (Higuera; Kull 2017: 121)
Now without Merleau-Ponty and Lakoff!
Coming up with specific gradients of sign action is also dependent on the context of semiotic theories, but generally speaking, biosemioticians are capable of distinguishing that, behind an evolving conception of semiosis, there can also be distinguishing features along the levels that can be differentiated through it, be it in specific referential capabilities or semiospheric integration of meaning-making features. These differences, in any case, are generally taken as qualitative distinctions between semiotic organisms. (Higuera; Kull 2017: 124)
Semiospheric integration?
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