C. S. Peirce defined the sign as a means to communicate a form or habit embodied in the object to the interpretant, thus constraining (through a sign) the behavior of an interpreter to a limited series of effects. This is part of the process of “semiotic scaffolding” in which sign relations interlock and reinforce one another, providing directionality to the process. In biological evolutionary studies canalization is defined as the adjustment of developmental pathways by natural selection to bring about a (...) uniform result despite genetic and environmental variations. Establishing parallelism between the two concepts allows the possibility of understanding how semiotic processes introduce information from the environment resulting in canalization (and assimilation), determining “fixed” pathways to elaborate signal repertoires for particular species adapted to particular environments sensed by particular organs. This kind of sign action can produce an “encapsulation” process of the sign meaning, further affecting the meaning-making process developing in the receiver, a process affecting signal usage by animals, constraining agency of biological systems’ behavior towards a definite sequence of events or signals and providing a certain orientation of the process (“semiotic canalization”). Therefore, we can also say that signs could potentially be built by senders (i.e. by the sign-vehicle) in a sort of pre-determined way and not extracted by the receiver from a “neutral” sender. Semiotic canalization is seen as a part of a more general process of scaffolding during development, acting mainly during some information exchanges between communicating subjects, providing adaptive responses to some standard communicative situations. (shrink)

This thesis presents a communicative account of personhood that argues for the inseparability of the metaphysical and the practical concepts of a person. It connects these two concepts by coupling the question “what is a person” with the question "how does one become a person". It argues that participation in social interactions that are characterized by mutual recognition and giving-and-taking reasons implied by the practical concept of a person is in fact an ecological and developmental condition for an entity to (...) possess the kind of characteristics and capacities such as reflexive self-consciousness addressed by the metaphysical concept. The chief theoretical contribution of the dissertation research lies, accordingly, in demonstrating that an adequate metaphysical concept of a person has to make reference to the kind of social processes that are necessary for the emergence and development of the distinguishing attributes of persons among other moving, perceiving, desiring and cognizing agents. Methodologically, it undertakes an original philosophical analysis that is enriched by an interdisciplinary investigation of several notions and insights from semiotics, comparative and developmental psychology, cognitive science and anthropology. The main argument of the thesis is that one becomes a person through internally recreating a social, communicative process; namely, that of dialogical transformation of habits. We find the paradigmatic case of this social process in mutual persuasion. The internalization of this process in the form of an inner dialogue cultivates a social self that is in ongoing communication with the embodied, organismic self of uncritically habituated attitudes, convictions and desires. This inner dialogue can be conceived as a temporally extended process of self-persuasion, which is characterized by an ongoing strive for attaining higher degrees of self-control; that is, for achieving a more coherent alignment between our habits and the kind of person we would like to be. It starts with self-interpretation and self-evaluation, and culminates in the formation of higher-order desires that facilitate habit-change and novel habit formation in accordance with certain social, moral, aesthetical or intellectual categories and norms one comes to endorse. For this reason, self-induced, deliberate habit-change is also a process of appropriation or self-appropriation, through which we strive to cultivate habits of feeling, thinking, acting that we can deem more truly ours. The thesis demonstrates that the capacity for engaging in this kind of self-persuasion consists chiefly in the capacities for metasemiosis, perspective-taking, and for cultivating habits of reflexivity. It explicates how all these capacities have a social origin and ultimately a social function by showing that they all presuppose certain higher-order communicative patterns that arose through an evolutionary and cultural history, and develop through the internal reconstruction of these patterns as cognitive-semiotic processes. The thesis concludes that becoming a kind of being who can engage in self-persuasion, thus a person, consists ultimately in internalizing the patterns of communicative social interactions in the form of an ongoing auto-communication. (shrink)

The paper deals with the theory of gesture from the point of view of relational sociology. On the one hand, the thesis of the ‘complete gesture’ developed by Giovanni Maddalena is appreciated as a significant step forward from classical pragmatism. On the other hand, since theories based essentially on phenomenology and semiotics are at risk of nominalism and constructivism, if we want to understand the gesture from a critical realistic perspective, we need to complement the theory of gesture with a (...) relational social ontology. This means that the theory of the gesture as action (unit act) must be placed within an ontological and epistemological framework, in which Peirce’s triangle is related to the latent value of the real as indicated by the sign. A relational alternative to Peirce's semiotic triangle is presented here with the aim of connecting the sign of the gesture to the underlying reality. (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)

New discoveries in the life sciences have affirmed that the virtual script as well as its context-dependent reading and interpretation determine the final living creature. An extended understanding of Darwinian Theory is crucial for understanding life as semiosis in terms of Peirce and Eco’s semiotic models. The semiosis of living systems is potentially unlimited. Genes are not static and unchangeable scripts, but can always be reinterpreted by new interpretants that illuminate them from different points of view, depending on which properties (...) are relevant in a particular context. The encyclopedia is a term, in Umberto Eco’s semiotics, which represents the multidimensional space of semiosis that is governed by a self-sustaining production of interpretants. The paper will present the idea of understanding the Extended Synthesis in terms of a biosemiotic enyclopedia. (shrink)

The article deals with the notion of the genetic code and its metaphorical understanding as a “language”. In the traditional view of the language metaphor of the genetic code, combinations of nucleotides are signs of amino acids. Similarly, words combined from letters represent certain meanings. The language metaphor of the genetic code, 171–200, 2011) assumes that the nucleotides stay in the analogy to letters, triples to words and genes to sentences. We propose an application of mathematical linguistic methods on the (...) notion of the genetic code. We provide quantitative analysis of mRNA strings and natural language texts. This analysis is sensitive to the detection of the code units hierarchy. We also take into consideration a representative quantitative analysis of DNA, RNA and proteins. Our analysis of mRNA confirms an assumption that the design of the genetic code cannot analogize DNA bases and letters. The notion of the letter is much more appropriate if analogized with triplets or amino acids, 187–191, 2017). (shrink)