At the turn of 1960s and 1970s, Stanisław Lem devoted some of his non-fiction writing to a discussion and considerations of semiotics. Most of them were expressions of a critical approach mainly directed against structuralism. However, Lem also formulated some positive statements although they were not developed systematically. The article offers an analysis of Lem’s semiotic ideas from the perspective of semiotic functionalism of Jerzy Pelc, mainly considering its two main components: contextualism and typological approach. Special attention (...) is paid to the latter because both Pelc and Lem proposed some original solutions in this respect. What is meant here is the multidimensional typology of symbolic uses of signs developed by Pelc and Lem’s multidimensional typology of the situations of the reception of texts. Although they are independent form each other, these proposals show some convergence both in their ways of construction and roles they are supposed to perform. Henceforth, one can say that Lem was a crypto-functionalist. (shrink)

The sociological models of functionalism and conflict are introduced and utilized to analyze professionalism in the accounting profession as it is manifest in the American Institute of Certified Public Accountant's Code of Conduct. Rule 203 of the Code and provisions of the Code related to the public interest are examined using semiotic analysis to determine if they are most consistent with the functionalist or conflict models. While the analysis does not address intent of the Code, it is determined (...) that the Code contains semantic defects which result in different interpretations of the Code to different readers. The defects found are most consistent with the conflict model of professionalism. This has implications for the public and for individuals within the profession, making the Code less useful to both groups. The defects are seen as a potential battleground for the self-interest vs the public interest orientation of the accounting profession. (shrink)

One of the leading concerns animating current philosophy of mind is that, no matter how good a scientific account is, it will leave out what its like to be conscious. The challenge has thus been to study or at least explain away that qualitative dimension. Pursuant with that aim, I investigate how philosophy of signs in the Peircean tradition can positively reshape ongoing debates. Specifically, I think the account of iconic or similarity-based reference we find in semiotic theory offers (...) a more promising variant of the phenomenal concept strategy. Philosophers who endorse this strategy think that the difficulties we have fitting conscious qualia into a scientific picture may owe to the peculiar nature of indexical concepts. They point to the fact that, when we try to convey the feel of our experiences, we employ context-dependent gestures and/or utterances that are indexed to perspectives unique to each person. However, according to the theory I defend, there are three ways signs can refer, namely by convention, causal contact, and similarity. Since similarity is not reducible to proximity, I argue that a theory of reference that turns on shared quality can bypass some of the implausible consequences that plague indexical accounts. In the first chapter, I describe the apparatus needed to make sense of this claim. In the second chapter, I present my account of iconic reference. In the third chapter, I justify my reliance on a distinction that is less than real yet more than nominal. In the fourth chapter, I sketch a trinitarian metaphysics well-suited to house the foregoing account of qualia. (shrink)

This essay argues that the pervasive twentieth century understanding of meaning — a sign stands for an object — is incorrect. In its place, it offers the following definition, which is framed not in terms of a single relation, but in terms of a relation between two relations : a sign stands for its object on the one hand, and its interpretant on the other, in such a way as to make the interpretant stand in relation to the object corresponding (...) to it own relation to the object. Using this definition, it reanalyzes key concepts and foundational arguments from linguistics so far as they relate to anthropology and psychology. Such terms include: concept, intentional state, motivation, ground, iconicity, speech community, norm, performativity, joint-attention, embodiment, intersubjectivity, agency, role, functionalism, pragmatics, social construction, realism, and natural language. (shrink)

It is often thought that consciousness has a qualitative dimension that cannot be tracked by science. Recently, however, some philosophers have argued that this worry stems not from an elusive feature of the mind, but from the special nature of the concepts used to describe conscious states. Marc Champagne draws on the neglected branch of philosophy of signs or semiotics to develop a new take on this strategy. The term “semiotics” was introduced by John Locke in the modern period – (...) its etymology is ancient Greek, and its theoretical underpinnings are medieval. Charles Sanders Peirce made major advances in semiotics, so he can act as a pipeline for these forgotten ideas. Most philosophers know Peirce as the founder of American pragmatism, but few know that he also coined the term “qualia,” which is meant to capture the intrinsic feel of an experience. Since pragmatic verification and qualia are now seen as conflicting commitments, Champagne endeavors to understand how Peirce could (or thought he could) have it both ways. The key, he suggests, is to understand how humans can insert distinctions between features that are always bound. Recent attempts to take qualities seriously have resulted in versions of panpsychism, but Champagne outlines a more plausible way to achieve this. So, while semiotics has until now been the least known branch of philosophy ending in –ics, his book shows how a better understanding of that branch can move one of the liveliest debates in philosophy forward. (shrink)

This volume presents the semiotic and linguistic theory of extended axiomatic functionalism, focusing on its application to linguistic description.

Read through semiotic analysis, the narrative intrigue of (the evenemential and cognitive dimension of) the anthropologist’s work reveals the epistemological configuration encasing some central and interrelated questions in anthropology: the communication-interaction between anthropologists and other inter-actants, their invention-application of some metalanguages and the subsequent intercultural translations of concepts and processes. To explore this configuration, I compare a foreword written by Malinowski and another one written by Geertz. In these forewords, they resort to refined stories to frame complex argumentations. In (...) Malinowski’s foreword, two superposing stories are told: (1) a tale of a subject’s performance newly endowed with professional competences (the ethnologist) and a discipline possessing a more modern and positive knowledge (Functionalist ethnology) and (2) a symmetric tale of exchanged messages (with relative sanction and counter-sanction) between an enunciator (who has to lay the foundations of this science) and an addressee (who has to confirm the validity of messages). To lay these foundations, the enunciator implicitly proposes an epistemology based on some values (such as ‘penetration’, ‘progression’, and the‘overcoming of limits’) privileging the metaphor of space and the cumulative aspect of process. As far as Geertz’s foreword is concerned, the enunciator has recourse to two different stories: (1) one concerning the interaction between Geertz and his editor (rather than with natives) to justify his hermeneutic position and (2) another one, larger and including, concerning the reversal of causality relationships to reaffirm the value of coincidence. If in Malinowski’s foreword, stories are used to redefine some programmatic principles (‘discontinuity’ and the combination of ‘three different oxymora’) through which ethnology can be given a scientific nature and a new foundation, in Geertz’s foreword, on the contrary, value is given to ‘coincidence’ and ‘writing’ in its multiple forms and (paradoxically, for an interpretativist) a binary discursive epistemology and a style of thought privileging the nonterminative and imperfective process have been combined. (shrink)

This paper addresses the concept of semiotic scaffolding by considering it in light of questions arising from the contemporary challenge to the humanities. This challenge comes from a mixture of scientistic demands, opportunism on the part of Western governments in thrall to neo-liberalism, along with crass economic utilitarianism. In this paper we attempt to outline what a theory of semiotic scaffolding may offer to an understanding of the humanities’ contemporary role, as well as what the humanities might offer (...) to the elucidation of semiotic scaffolding. We argue that traditional humanist positions adopted in defence of the humanities fail to articulate the enhancement of humanity that semiotic scaffolding represents. At the same time, we note that the concept of scaffolding is sometimes in danger of taking on a functionalist perspective which understanding the humanities modus operandi is likely to dispel. Putting forward these arguments, we draw on the work of Peirce, Cassirer and Sebeok in elucidating the structural and ‘future-orientated’ benefits of the scaffolding process as it suffuses the humanities. (shrink)

Human music and language are two systems of communication and expression that, while historically considered to overlap, have become increasingly divergent in their approach and study. Music and language almost certainly co-evolved and emerged from the same semiotic field, and this relationship as well as co-origin are actively researched and debated. For the sake of evaluating the semiotic content of zoomusicology, we investigate music from a ‘bottom-up’ biosemiotic functionalist account considering iconic, indexical, and symbolic forms of meaning not (...) in a hierarchy but according to their effects on agents. Such an approach avoids overintellectualizing the representational aspects of music, and instead inverts, as it were, the traditional hierarchy of semiotic categories to produce illocutionary effects. Understanding aesthetics and action not as a priori separate but rather fundamentally co-arising elements of the same events. The focus of musicality again returns to interpretation and how semiosis precipitates expression. (shrink)

As an answer to the humanistic, socially oriented critique of the information-processing paradigms used as a conceptual frame for library information science, this article formulates a broader and less objective concept of communication than that of the information-processing paradigm. Knowledge can be seen as the mental phenomenon that documents (combining signs into text, depending on the state of knowledge of the recipient) can cause through interpretation. The examination of these “correct circumstances” is an important part of information science. This article (...) represents the following developments in the concept of information: Information is understood as potential until somebody interprets it. The objective carriers of potential knowledge are signs. Signs need interpretation to release knowledge in the form of interpretants. Interpretation is based on the total semantic network, horizons, worldviews, and experience of the person, including the emotional and social aspects. The realm of meaning is rooted in social-historical as well as embodied evolutionary processes that go beyond computational algorithmically logic. The semantic network derives a decisive aspect of signification from a person’s embodied cultural worldview, which, in turn, derives from, develops, and has its roots in undefined tacit knowledge. To theoretically encompass both the computational and the semantic aspects of document classification and retrieval, we need to combine the cybernetic functionalistic approach with the semiotic pragmatic understanding of meaning as social and embodied. For such a marriage, it is necessary to go into the constructivistic secondorder cybernetics and autopoiesis theory of von Foerster, Maturana, and Luhmann, on the one hand, and the pragmatic triadic semiotics of Peirce in the form of the embodied Biosemiotics, on the other hand. This combination is what I call Cybersemiotics. (shrink)

This paper traces developments in Jeffrey Alexander’s cultural sociology. The aim is to introduce the reader to the key components of this theory as it developed from a functionalist focus on societal values through semiotics and linguistic structuralism to a theory of cultural trauma and collective performance.

In this paper, I discuss the neo-Aristotelian approaches, which usually reinterpret Aristotle’s ideas on form and/or borrow the notion of formal cause without engaging with the broader implications of Aristotle’s metaphysics. In opposition to these approaches, I claim that biosemiotics can propose an alternative view on life’s form. Specifically, I examine the proposals to replace the formal cause with gene-centrism, functionalism, and structuralism. After critically addressing these approaches, I discuss the problems of reconciling Aristotelianism with the modern view of (...) life’s organization. I claim that the notion of the final cause proposes a cosmological hierarchy and that this is the main problem with applying the formal cause to biology. An alternative categorization of conceptualizing life’s form involves the processual identity, relational property clusters, and context-dependent transmission of representational units. The third category points to a semiotic basis of the form of life. In this context, I offer to readjust the focus of the problem of matter-form duality by pointing out that form is primarily an issue of the subject-object relation. Biosemiotics helps to understand the constructive role of symbolic representation in living systems, which is crucial to extend the analysis of the form from cognitive representations to external phenomena. Emergence of subjectivity and perspectivity of interactions are key elements to bridge the form and actual processes within a non-hylomorphic account. To demonstrate transitions from the physical influence of shapes to the organic recognition of forms, I address the biological studies on the synchronization of coincidental inputs and enzyme specificity. (shrink)

Most literature on religious beliefs and disagreements among traditions focuses on a bit of mainstream assumptions: religions should be construed in substantive terms; religions are to be individuated by their core belief systems; adherents to a single tradition assent to the same belief system; religious beliefs have factual content; incompatible religious beliefs cannot be both true; and so on. In my work I question all these claims in order to defend a non kantian approach to deep pluralism. In the first (...) part I develop a narrative theory of doxastic practices. My fundamental intuition is that ambiguity, vagueness, and indeterminacy of meaning are non amendable features of any ordinary belief. Consequently, no proposition has a definite meaning, and there is no a priori reason to assume that if two believers assume the same belief, they both hold the same content. What I'm trying to do is to argue in support of a realist epistemology, without assuming a normative and rationalist stance. My evidential body is mainly drawn from psychology and psychoanalysis. In the second part I apply such a narrative theory to the study of the doxastic character of religions. I reject both functionalist and substantive approaches to religion, and I defend my own viewpoint which I label experentialism. After providing a characterization of religious beliefs, I refute how Alston, Ward and Hick account for the the doxastic features of religions. I then propose a definition of religious diversity which turns out to be alternative to the mainstream one. I work by empirical evidence from semiotics, sociology of religion and history of religions. In the third and conclusive part of my book, I give reasons against the mainstream approach to religious diversity, and I explain how my definition can be more appropriate to the sociological study of religious beliefs than the mainstream one. Finally, I provide an account of deep pluralism, I show that my approach to religious epistemology and religions is compatible with (and recommended by) deep pluralism, I differentiate kantian from non kantian pluralism, and I explain why non kantian deep pluralism resists the traditional objections to pluralism. Throughout the book I discuss relevant materials from Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. (shrink)

Uses the architectural design of a house to show the principles of structuralism and a possible reaction against traditional functionalism.

C. S. Peirce is often credited as a forerunner of the verificationist theory of meaning. In his early pragmatist papers, Peirce did say that if we want to make our ideas clear(er), then we should look downstream to their actual and future effects. For many who work in philosophy of mind, this is enough to endorse functionalism and dismiss the whole topic of qualia. It complexifies matters, however, to consider that the term qualia was introduced by the founder of (...) pragmatism himself. Peirce was adamant that only triadic relations can support language and cognition. Even so, he insisted on purely logical grounds that, when we analyze triadic signs all the way, we are left with a qualitative residue he called Firstness. Such an isolated relatum could never be studied experimentally. Yet, given that this primitive state can be confirmed by means of a formal or prescissive distinction, I believe the Peircean account can do justice to many of the intuitions that generate the so-called hard problem of consciousness. My goal, then, is to show that Peirce's semiotic commitment to qualia is compatible with his foundational statements about pragmatism. (shrink)

Translators as members of a certain culture, generally that of the target culture, base their translation-relevant decisions on their own culture, while the decisions are motivated by the (alien) source culture. In the translation process, cultural differences may lead to various decision-making conflicts and the translator has to find a compromise between the author of the source text, the target recipient and finally, of course, the translator him/herself. In this article, proceeding from functionalist approaches to translation, the discussion focuses on (...) the decision conflicts related to translating culturespecific elements. Culture-related decision conflicts, as considered here, refer to the translator’s inner indecision with reference to his/her goals, interests, values, beliefs, methodological approach, or any consequences thereof, attributable to the different cultural embeddings of the source text and the target text. In general, decision conflicts are perceived as subjective translation problems. The translator has to be able to constantly act between separate perspectives, continuously see things from different viewpoints. The conflicts arise when the translator attempts to bring together two incongruent cultures without prejudice to any of the parties involved in the process. Acting within the interface of two different cultures, bearing in mind the interests of several participants, is what makes translation-relevant decisions a highly complex matter. (shrink)

This book puts forward a harmonious analysis of similarities and differences between two concepts—human minds and cultures—and strives for a multicultural spectrum of philosophical explorations that could assist them in pondering the striking pursuit of envisaging human minds and cultures as an essential appraisal of philosophy and the social sciences. The book hinges on a theoretical understanding of the indispensable liaison between the dichotomy of minds and objectivity residing in semantic-ontological conjectures. -/- The ethnographic sense of cultures confines the scope (...) of cultural scientism, an evolutionary paradigm on the functionalist turn, where one could enthral the cultural phenomenon from the contentment of the conflict of scientific quandaries. Hence, cultural relativism concedes that cultures have some descriptive contents, like customs, beliefs, moral codes, other minds, etc., that are followed by an individual or a group of people. However, the notion of societal semiotics embarks on the ‘semiotic conception of culture’ that deploys modernity and values centred on ethical conjectures. -/- Human Minds and Cultures conspicuously attune the cultural edifice of moral minds and cope with the enduring prospects of ethics, genders, laws, and socio-political affairs. Essential reading for anyone with a sparkling interest in human minds and cultures. (shrink)

Poetry does not have a history; it has many histories. By tracing the history of poetry in the West, in conjunction with genre studies and research on concept formation, it is evident that the genre “poetry” is contingent on the various rhetorical situations of its production. Such an approach reveals that the concept “poetry,” like all concepts, is always in flux. Yet, despite the fact that “poetry” means different things to different people in different times and places, studies of oral (...) poetry have yielded insights into traits that might be considered universal to poetry, such as its performativity and categorization as ritual language. Other common aspects include the use of parallelism, analogy and metaphor, musicality, and how poems function as metapragmatic symbols that reflect the values of their cultural production. This functionalist approach to poetry reveals that the evolution of poetry is at once historically contingent and culturally universal, and recognizes that poetry’s multiplicity and continual becoming operate with the primary goals of generating and sharing culturally relative meaning. (shrink)

Building on a functionalist framework for decision-making in legal translation, a holistic approach to quality is presented in order to respond to the specificities of this field and overcome the shortcomings of general models of translation quality evaluation. The proposed approach connects legal, contextual, macrotextual and microtextual variables for the definition of the translation adequacy strategy, which guides problem-solving and the rest of the translation process. The same parameters remain traceable between the translation brief and the translation product both in (...) pre-delivery revision and in post-delivery assessment. They are the yardstick for identifying predictable evaluative criteria and competence requirements for translators and quality controllers. The implications of the approach on quality assessment and quality management practices are also discussed. Overall, the model illustrates the potential benefits of enhancing predictability and reducing subjectivity on the basis of specific legal translation methodologies. It supports the need for legal translation expertise in quality evaluation and the relevance of Legal Translation Studies to raising standards in professional practice. (shrink)

Theorists of legal translation generally describe it as an interdisciplinary activity whose methodology draws deeply upon comparative law. In practice, how can we apply this theoretical paradigm to translator training? This article examines methods of integrating comparative law with the acquisition of knowledge and know-how that constitute the translator’s core competences, emphasizing the resolution of legal terminology problems resulting from incongruencies between legal systems. Given that the goal is to compare law for the purposes of translation, it is useful to (...) approach these problems from a functionalist viewpoint, principally through confronting a range of cases and situations likely to challenge the professional translator. Therefore, the author proposes including, along with other teaching methods, targeted work on terminological problems which necessitate the study of comparative law. A set of learning activities is presented for that purpose. (shrink)

I will be talking today about the limits of cognitive science. I won’t be talking about contingent shortcomings that could perhaps be remedied with, say, more time, resources, or ingenuity. Rather, I will be concerned with limitations that are “baked into” the very enterprise. The main blind spot, I will argue, is consciousness—but not for the reasons typically given. Current work in philosophy of mind can sometimes seem arcane, so my goal today will be to answer the question: why bother? (...) I have spent a whole book and several articles trying to make sense of the qualitative dimension of consciousness, but there is no point in trying to sell a solution unless we have first established (independently of any academic literature) that there is a real problem to solve. So, if I can’t convey my position in under an hour, I can at least convey the issue that motivates it. (shrink)

The functionalist view of the nature of the mind is now widely accepted. Like behaviorism and physicalism, functionalism seeks to answer the question "What are mental states?" I shall be concerned with identity thesis formulations of functionalism. They say, for example, that pain is a functional state, just as identity thesis formulations of physicalism say that pain is a physical state.

The paper aims to give a comprehensive cognitive and semiotic analysis of translation strategies implied in the translation of the film “Darkest Hour”. Regarding a film as a communicative process mediated by certain semiotic features makes it possible to analyze the semiotic character of film discourse in translation. Thus, it was decided that translation is not just a speech-oriented process but a communicative act taking place within a definite semiotic space in a cross-cultural perspective. The (...) class='Hi'>semiotic model of cinematic discourse has a complicated structure and is analyzed based on semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic criteria. The choice of the semiotic system primarily depends on the communicative situation and its recipients. As the semiotic system of the film “Darkest Hour” is both socioculturally and situationally conditioned, the translator reconstructed the sense of the source language text by implying the translation transformations that assured the accuracy and adequacy of its translation into the target language text. (shrink)

The interpretation of many texts in the everyday world is concerned with their truth value in relation to the reality around us. The recent publication experiments with computer-generated texts have shown that the distinction between true and false, or reality and fiction, is not always clear from the text itself. Essentially, in today’s media space, one may encounter texts, videos or images that deceive the reader by displaying nonsensical content or nonexistent events, while nevertheless appearing as genuine human-produced messages. This (...) article outlines certain problems with artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content, and frames the issue as a problem of recognising its proper referential reality. Examples include generative texts, deepfakes and their functioning in contemporary culture. The article makes use of the concepts of mimicry and nonsense to reveal the elements and counterparts in the communicative processes involving generated media. (shrink)

This paper lists and discusses the fundamental characteristics of tourism, suggesting it is essentially a semiotic activity. In this respect, it deals with works such as Dean MacCannell's The Tourist and Roland Barthes's Empire of Signs. Considering the relationship between tourism and postmodern theory, it contrasts the everyday and the exotic, discusses Baudrillard's theories on simulations and hyperreality as they relate to tourism, and compares modernist and postmodernist perspectives on tourism, critiquing the widely held notion that tourists always seek (...) authenticity and situating tourism within consumer culture. (shrink)

This paper constitutes a critical exploration of the functional features underpinning the unconscious of institutional attachment—namely an attachment which is understood in terms of the subject-infant’s love for his institutional parent-power holder, and the indefinite need for a subject to remain within its infantile condition under the parenthood of the State. We venture beyond the Paternal metaphor and move towards the neglected metaphor of the Mother, so focal in the individual process of identification, assumption of language and the permanent attachment (...) to the space of prohibition and Law. A new position in Language is defined. To understand how the psychic space of the infant is artfully subjugated in the making of the Western culture and domination of the Western system of legal interpretation, an enquiry into the legal emblematic history of representations is necessary to map the process through which the subject learns its legal self and relationship with otherness through what Pierre Legendre coined as the Occidental Mirror and the triangular logic of reflexivity. A final enquiry interrogates the way the legal institution places itself in the position of the specular image that captivates the subject-infant within a procreated legal order, a law-giving and law abiding life starting from the laws of the familial structure reinforced by the role of the parents and by analogy, by the State assuming that role in the institutional life of the ad infinitum infant. (shrink)

Since the Reformation and Enlightenment, the Western world has witnessed the incremental decline of religious influence. Yet, key legal protections and duties incumbent on civilians and state actors in both avowedly secular states and ruling theocracies, predominantly Islamic, are to a lesser or greater extent determined by religious values. Although it is often claimed that the modern secular state encourages the adoption of liberal values and allows for the formulation of general law according to the free will of its people, (...) the historical legacy of law and particularly its synthesis with the Judeo-Christian heritage is apparent. In the UK, the continuing centrality of religion in what purports to be a secular system of laws, is demonstrated by the introduction of elements of Sharia law. In an increasingly culturally-diverse society, the recognition of Islamic law may be interpreted as the tacit acknowledgement of the existing inherent faith influences which continue to inform many legal innovations, and represents an explicit attempt to rebalance the privileging of one set of precepts above another. It is suggested that religion continues to occupy a central position in lawmaking; performing a cultural, political, institutional and, importantly, symbolic role and this is evidenced for instance by the narratives which are imposed on individuals in relation to areas of topical significance such as matrimony, terminal illness, abortion, gender and sexual morality. This paper argues against those pronouncements of the retreat of religion in state affairs and, rather, reveals a set of key structural relations and signifiers which are informed by opinions redolent of, not least of all, a peculiar generic proscriptive religiosity. (shrink)

As the accompanying articles in the Special Issue on Semiotic Scaffolding will attest, my colleagues in biosemiotics have done an exemplary job in showing us how to think about the critically generative role that semiotic scaffolding plays “vertically” – i.e., in evolutionary and developmental terms – by “allowing access to the upper floors” of biological complexity, cognition and evolution.In addition to such diachronic considerations of semiotic scaffolding, I wish to offer here a consideration of semiotic scaffolding’s (...) synchronic power, as well – and in particular the ability that it can afford its users to access new and other sign relations “horizontally” as a function of the way that multiple semiotically scaffolded relations intertwine to result in a “definite semantic topology that determines the ways that symbols modify each other’s referential functions in different combinations”.Taking up, in turn, Terrence Deacon’s later challenge that what the sciences of cognition – and biology more generally – needs to “come to grips with [is] the process of semiosis; the dynamic of interpretive activity by which semiotic relationships emerge from other semiotic relationships [as] intrinsically dynamic phases in a generative process”, I attempt here to show how Deacon’s own Peirce-inspired matrix of referential sign relations as presented in The Symbolic Species, when viewed as a semiotic scaffold of interactional constraints and possibility biases, provides the key to understanding the essentially thirdness-manifesting nature of symbol reference, formation and growth. (shrink)

The large number of writers who have in recent years attacked the problem of the logical nature of commands appear generally in agreement in accepting the distinction of common grammar between imperative and declarative sentences as representing, albeit in no clear one-to-one manner, some real difference in the logical character of the two types of expression, and possibly in the psychological sign-functioning mechanism itself. The crucial logical difference adduced is that commands can apparently rot be classified as true or false. (...) One is then, however, confronted with the problem of interpreting arguments involving imperatives which appear syllogistic in form, such as:Keep your promises!You promised to pay on Wednesday.Pay on Wednesday! (shrink)

Based on the conception of life and semiosis as co-extensive an attempt is given to classify cognitive and communicative potentials of species according to the plasticity and articulatory sophistication they exhibit. A clear distinction is drawn between semiosis and perception, where perception is seen as a high-level activity, an integrated product of a multitude of semiotic interactions inside or between bodies. Previous attempts at finding progressive trends in evolution that might justify a scaling of species from primitive to advanced (...) levels have not met with much success, but when evolution is considered in the light of semiosis such a scaling immediately catches the eye. The main purpose of this paper is to suggest a scaling of this progression in semiotic freedom into a series of distinct steps. The elleven steps suggested are: 1) molecular recognition, 2) prokaryote-eukaryote transformation, 3) division of labor in multicellular organisms, 4) from irritability to phenotypic plasticity, 5) sense perception, 6) behavioral choice, 7) active information gathering, 8) collaboration, deception, 9) learning and social intelligence, 10) sentience, 11) consciousness. In light of this, the paper finally discusses the conceptual framework for biosemiotic evolution. The evolution of biosemiotic capabilities does not take the form of an ongoing composition of simple signs into composite wholes. Rather, it takes the shape of the increasing subdivision and control of a primitive, holophrastic perception-action circuit already committed to “proto-propositions” reliably guiding action already in the most primitive species. (shrink)