Words are indispensable linguistic tools for beings like us. However, there is not much philosophical work done about what words really are. In this paper, I develop a new ontology for words. I argue that words are abstract artifacts that are created to fulfill various kinds of purposes, and words are abstract in the sense that they are not located in space but they have a beginning and may have an end in time given that certain conditions are met. What (...) follows from this two-fold argument is that words, from an ontological point of view, are more like musical works, fictional characters or computer programs, than numbers or sets. (shrink)

In his semiotic system Peirce distinguished between two interpretants and two objects of a sign: an immediate and a dynamical interpretant, and an immediate and a dynamical object. It is argued that Peirce’s immediate object can be interpreted a qua-object which has the dynamical object as its basis, and the dynamical interpretant consists of an interpreter’s conception of the object of the sign. Peirce semiotic system is compared with the accounts given by Frege, Husserl, Meinong, and the Stoics.

Bacterial chemotaxis is often considered to be a textbook example of the rudimentary semiotic process. As such, it gives an excellent opportunity to better understand both semiosis and biology. Our study reviews this phenomenon in the light of up-to-date scientific knowledge to answer the most basic semiotic questions: what is the sign? What types of signs are there? What is the meaning understood on the molecular level, and by what means can it grow with time? As a case study, the (...) bacterial chemotaxis toward glucose in E. coli species is chosen, and the semiotic framework of Charles Sanders Peirce applied. The analyses provide us with the following results: the sign, in its ultimate nature, is a general process. Bacterial chemotaxis can be understood in terms of Peircean type, symbol, and argument. The meaning on the molecular level is entirely pragmatic and, in this case, reduced to a bacterial response to glucose. A sign can grow through sign generalization, the emergence of different sign categories, the integration of these categories in functional cycles, and the introduction of contextuality. The sign of bacterial chemotaxis extends from the cell signaling pathways up to the population level. The presented results advance our knowledge of sign processing in the context of semiotic evolution. (shrink)