Jesper Hoffmeyer

From language to nature: The semiotic metaphor in biology

The teleonomic character of living systems continues to challenge the conception of life prevailing among biologists. No matter how forcefully vitalistic or finalistic explanations have been defeated through developments in experimental biology, such attitudes apparently never totally disappear, even among professional biologists. Rather, they reappear in new guises for every new generation. In the history of science, controversies of this kind going on for centuries have rarely, if ever, been resolved through the unambiguous victory of one of the sides. In the first decades following the neo-Darwinistic synthesis of the 1940s, however, most biologists considered the matter settled once and for all. The purposeful character of living organisms was seen as an inevitable consequence of evolution to be causally explained by the mechanism of natural selection gradually favoring the spread of adaptive mutations within populations. This provisional cease-fire, however, did not survive the 1970s. Severe criticism from areas ranging from paleontology to embryology and molecular biology succeeded in provoking a renewed theoretical debate on the role of natural selection in evolution, and thus the gradual and adaptive character of this process (Gould 1982, 1985; Vrba and Eldredge 1984; Webster and Goodwin 1982; Goodwin 1984; L0vtrup 1987; Ho and Saunders 1979; Dover 1982). At the deepest level, this renewed criticism concerns the question of biological form. Is the development of form to be explained simply through the gradual improvement of function? Do organisms and parts of organisms develop their characteristic forms just because such forms were the most functional (the most successful)? This problem is an old one: what is the relation between substance and form? In reflecting on Korzybskis famous statement, Gregory Bateson traces the problem back to Pythagoras:

Semiotic Scaffolding Of Living Systems

The apparently purposeful nature of living systems is obtained through a sophisticated network of semiotic controls whereby biochemical, physiological and behavioral processes become tuned to the needs of the system. The operation of these semiotic controls takes place and is enabled across a diversity of levels. Such semiotic controls may be distinguished from ordinary deterministic control mechanisms through an inbuilt anticipatory capacity based on a distinct kind of causation that I call here “semiotic causation” to denote the bringing about of changes under the guidance of interpretation in a local .context. Anticipation through the skilled interpretation of indicators of temporal relations in the context of a particular survival project (or life strategy) guides organismic behavior towards local ends. This network of semiotic controls establishes an enormously complex semiotic scaffolding for living systems. Semiotic scaffolding safeguards the optimal performance of organisms through semiotic interaction with cue elements which are characteristically present in dynamic situations. At the cellular level, semiotic scaffolding assures the proper integration of the digital coding system (the genome) into the myriad of analogical coding systems operative across the membranes of cells and cell organelles

Life and reference

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

THE BIOLOGY OF SIGNIFICATION

Signification is not a term one often meets in biological literature, and few scientists seem to have paid much attention to the question of how there can possibly be such a thing as signification in the world. According to Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (1996), to signify means: “to make known by signs, speech or action” or “to be a sign of.” That signification in this sense is constitutive for human life is hard to deny, since the very act of denying it would itself be a linguistic and thus significative act. Being linguistic animals, we are incurably suspended in a world of signification. But language is not the only or even the primary key to the world of signification. Small children do not speak, but it would be absurd to claim that they are not yet conscious about things around them. Most of the time, in fact, our understanding of what goes on is based on the myriad of nonlinguistic signs entering our perceptive fields. Even when our consciousness is not aware of it, our body and brain continue to interpret the world around us, alerting our consciousness only when necessary. The science devoted to the exploration of this world of signification is called or the theory of signs or semiotics (from the Greek for “sign,” sēmeion). Due to tradition and to the influential work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who was exclusively concerned with that peculiar sign system which is language [1], semiotics generally has been considered a part of the humanities, but there seems to be no good reason to believe that only human beings are admitted into the world of signification. The existence of signification therefore challenges biological theory to find out what are the roots for this phenomenon in pre-human nature. This challenge has been met often enough by a reductive strategy, in which semiotic processes are identified as signals unambiguously releas-

The semiome: From genetic to semiotic scaffolding

Abstract The fact that agency is an essential aspect of life introduces new explanatory avenues into the map of evolutionary thought. There is hardly any process in animate nature that is not, in one way or another, regulated communicatively, i.e., through the ability of living systems to read and interpret relevant signs in their environment. Semiotics – the science of signs – therefore ought to become a key tool for the “life sciences” in general and biology in particular. The paper analyzes the ways semiotic interactions in nature have been developed to scaffold the web of physiological, developmental, and ecological pathways. Semiotic scaffolding is only very indirectly based on genetic scaffolding. The gene products, the proteins, are not just molecules, but are always also semiotic tools, and what the genes really do is to specify the efficiency of semiotic modulators. In addition to the concept of the genome we need in biology a concept of the semiome: the entirety of an organisms semiotic tool set: i.e., the means by which the organisms of this species may extract significantly meaningful content from their surroundings and engage in intraor interspecific communicative behavior. The semiome thus defines the scope of the organisms cognitive and communicative activity. The theoretical question raised in this paper is the question of the interconnectedness between genomic and semiomic changes.

Code-duality and the epistemic cut.

Abstract: Howard Pattee has claimed that an epistemic cut separates the world from observers and therefore from organisms. The epistemic cut imputes a linguistic mode of operation to living systems. Among evolutionary systems‐theorists on the other hand there seems to be a tendency to consider living systems as just one among many other kinds of evolutionary systems that, in principle, can all be described on the basis of thermodynamics or infodynamics. This paper searches a third position, in which the epistemic cut position is defended without adopting Patteees distinction between a dynamic and a linguistic mode. It is observed that even the dynamic mode in living systems is always a semiotic mode although index‐ and analog‐coded rather than symbolic and digitally coded. The analog‐coded messages corresponds to a kind of tacit knowledge hidden in macromolecular structure and shape (e.g., molecular complementarity), and in organismic architecture and communication, that is, in the semiotic interactions of the body.

Semiotic Scaffolding: A Biosemiotic Link Between Sema and Soma

While organic life is the product of myriads of biochemical processes, it usually escapes notice that the chemistry of life cannot be understood exclusively in terms of chemistry. What must be added is an understanding of the particular organized dynamics, which makes the integration of all these processes into real living creatures possible. This dynamics, however, itself is not a part of chemistry, but is evolutionarily tailored to suit a communicative or semiotic (= sign theoretical) logic (Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics. An examination into the signs of life and the life of signs, 2008a; A legacy for living systems: Gregory Bateson as precursor to biosemiotics, pp. 27–44, 2008b). Reframing our biological thinking in terms of semiotics, i.e., biosemiotics, deeply challenges basic ontological intuitions that for centuries have informed our thinking in philosophy as well as science. It is claimed that the taboo against final causation (in science) and the rejection of the possibility to know the “thing in itself” (in phenomenology) are interconnected errors reflecting a general failure to recognize the fundamentally semiotic nature of life and cognition. While Cartesian dualism has often enough been criticized, such criticism has rarely touched upon one of its core elements: the belief that our understanding of the world around us is based on sensory mechanics, a belief that is still widely held by scientists and thinkers of today. Replacing sensory mechanics with sensory semiotics opens hitherto not fully explored ways of integrating life and cognition. Human interaction is embedded in semiotic activity that easily penetrates to processes deep in the body and brain and back again. One of the main structuring and enabling principles in the semiotic dynamics across levels has been called semiotic scaffolding a concept that relates to psychological catalyses in interesting ways to be further explored.

The Unfolding Semiosphere

In 1891 the American chemist and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce published five articles in The Monist which in many ways anticipates present day paradigmatic discussions of science. They also present an evolutionary cosmology which, as I shall try to show, fits well into modern scientific conceptions. Thus in ’The Architecture of Theories’ we can find the following: “Uniformities are precisely the kind of fact that need to be accounted for. That a pitched coin should sometimes turn up heads and sometimes tails calls for no particular explanation; but if it shows heads every time, we wish to know how this result has been brought about. Law is par excellence the thing which wants a reason. Now the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature and the uniformity in general is to suppose them results of evolution. This supposes them not to be absolute, not to be obeyed precisely. It makes an element of indeterminacy, spontaneity, or absolute chance in nature” (Peirce, 1955 [1891], p. 318). Peirce in this section goes on to launch an attack on Herbert Spencer’s ideas of evolution based on mechanical principles. Among other things he points out, that “exact law obviously never can produce heterogeneity out of homogeneity” and that “the law of conservation of energy is equivalent to the proposition that all operations governed by mechanical laws are reversible; so that an immediate corollary from it is that growth is not explicable by those laws, even if they be not violated in the process of growth” (ibid.).

The Semiotic Body

Most bodies in this world do not have brains and the minority of animal species that do have brained bodies are descendents from species with more distributed or decentralized nervous systems. Thus, bodies were here first, and only relatively late in evolution did the bodies of a few species grow supplementary organs, brains, sophisticated enough to support a psychological life. Psychological life therefore from the beginning was embedded in and served as a tool for corporeal life. This paper discusses the semiotically controlled dynamics of bodily existence that has allowed the evolution of these seemingly ‘unnatural’ mental and even linguistic kinds of species. It is shown how the skin, on the one hand, makes us belong in the world, and on the other hand, is part of the huge landscape of membranes across which the semiotic self incessantly must be reconstituted. The discussion moves on to the intracellular world of signal transduction through which the activity of single cells are put to service for bodily needs. The paper further considers the mechanisms behind homeostasis and the semiotics of the psycho-neuro-endocrine integration in the body. The concept of semiotic emergence is introduced and a holistic marker hypothesis for why some animals may have an experiential life is suggested.

The Natural History of Intentionality. A Biosemiotic Approach

Our lives cannot but implant the knowledge in our souls that the mind is one thing and the world is another. Out of this separation arises the problem of intentionality, that our minds necesarily occupy themselves with things in the world, or that mind processes are always “about” something. In the scholastic tradition from Thomas Aquinas this “aboutness” is still seen as an immaterial or intentional direct union between the knower and the known. To know about things, e.g. a storm or a flower, implies that these things exist in the mind of the knower as intentional beings, and the nature of this kind of being is that of a relation or interface. This understanding is radically different from the cognitive theories that came to dominate in the course of the scientific revolution. According to Descartes the exterior world is grasped through the mechanical work of the senses, which then required some intermediate entity, a concept or an idea, to stand between the outside world (reality) and the mind. Henceforward the mind lost its direct access to the world, and logically enough this line of thought ended up in the conception that we can never understand the world as it is in itself. The idea of intentional being was taken up once again by Franz Brentano in 1874, who claimed that “Mental phenomena … are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves”. To Brentano – and the phenomenological tradition he thus initiated – mind should be seen as real, irreducibly intentional, and inexplicable naturalistically. Philosphers of the analytic tradition rejected this whole notion claiming that whatever is real is nonintentional and explicable naturalistically. Unnoticed by most thinkers a third position was suggested by Charles Peirce, who agreed with Brentano that mind is real and irreducibly intentional but in the same time maintained, contra Brentano, that mind is explicable naturalistically. This chapter takes the semiotic realism of Charles Peirce as a starting point and discusses a biosemiotic approach to the problem of intentionality. Intentionality is seen as implicit to semiosis (sign processes) and semiosis and life is seen as co-existant. The needs of all living beings for expressing a degree of anticipatory capacity is seen as an evolutionary lever for the development of species with increased semiotic freedom. Human intentionlity is not therefore unique in the world but must be understood as a peculiar and highly sophisticated instantiation of a general semiotics of nature. Biosemiotics offers a way to explicate intentionality naturalistically.