This paper describes the semiotic process by which parents, as attachment figures, enable infants to learn to make meaning. It also applies these ideas to psychotherapy, with the therapist functioning as transitional attachment figures to patients where therapy attempts to change semiotic processes that have led to maladaptive behavior. Three types of semiotic processes are described in attachment terminology and these are offered as possible precursors of a neuro-behavioral nosology tying mental illness to adaptation. Non-conscious biosemiotic processes in infant-parent attachment (...) are the basis for early adaptation as well as adaptation or maladaptation in adulthood. Mother-infant interaction can be described as a series of signs, each interpreted so as to dispose the behavior of the other interactant towards the goal of protecting the infant from danger and distress. Regulating arousal, scaffolding infants’ behavior in the infants’ zone of proximal development, and repairing ruptures in the interaction are crucial to infants’ development and adaptation. In semiotic terms, each person activates multiple interpretants to make meaning of sensory stimulation. Non-verbal semiotic synchrony establishes the relationship whereas shared repair of ruptures promotes change. Attachment strategies, as learned adaptations to threat, are neuro-psychological strategies for making meaning of sensory information so as to dispose protective behavior. Type A privileges cognitive-temporal information, Type C affective information, Type B has no bias. Type A and C limit semiotic freedom by using ‘short-cuts’ in processing that produce quick protective behavior in the short-term. Type B includes more representations, and thus more semiotic freedom, resulting in slower responses and long-term flexibility. Attachment strategies function as meta-interpretants for applying one semiotic process to most incoming information about danger. A, B, and C case examples are analyzed in semiotic terms. Psychotherapy can be considered a helping process embedded in a transitional attachment relationship. For psychotherapy to be successful, both somatic stabilization and a therapeutic relationship are needed. Treatment that uses scaffolded semiotic processes in each patient’s ZPD to repair moment-to-moment ruptures holds the potential to reorganize attachment strategies and transfer that potential to reflective language and relationships outside the therapy. The outcome should be greater semiotic freedom such that the individual can trust their own mental processes and use them to establish safe relationships. Language can speed the process, but premature reliance on verbal transformations of non-conscious information can carry misattributions into a second layer of misconstrued meaning and maladaptive behavior. Even when dangerous family relationships and external danger cannot be changed, patients can come to know their own minds and use information to regulate their behavior. The goal of psychotherapy is to free patients from their past by enabling them to be secure about the functioning of their own minds, so that they can both avoid eliciting harm and also establish supportive relationships. (shrink)

How semiotic freedom emerges in the evolution and development of organisms through semiotic scaffolding is a core problem for biosemiotics. There is a paradox in explaining this semiotic emergence: reduction in (semiotic) freedom leads to the creation of new semiotic freedom. Semiotic emergence is a species of dynamic emergence. Accordingly, the paradox of semiotic emergence is a species of the paradox of dynamic emergence. The latter paradox claims that reducing lower-level freedom generates new freedom at a higher level. The solution (...) to the paradox lies in clarifying the ambiguity in the term freedom. The conceptual inconsistency in the paradox comes from confusing two types of freedom. One type of freedom means the possibility a system could have, while the other refers to the capacity of a system to access a specific (range of) state(s). There is an inverse relation between the two types of freedom. With the clarification, the conceptual inconsistency is explained away. This understanding of semiotic emergence may help us further understand core ideas in biosemiotics and provide a conceptual foundation for empirical studies of biosemiotics. (shrink)

This edited volume provides a biosemiotic analysis of the ecological relationship between food and medicine. Drawing on the origins of semiotics in medicine, this collection proposes innovative ways of considering aliments and treatments. Considering the ever-evolving character of our understanding of meaning-making in biology, and considering the keen popular interest in issues relating to food and medicines - fueled by an increasing body of interdisciplinary knowledge - the contributions here provide diverse insights and arguments into the larger ecology of organisms’ (...) engagement with and transformation through taking in matter. Bodies interpret molecules, enzymes, and alkaloids they intentionally and unintentionally come in contact with according to their pre-existing receptors. But their receptors are also changed by the experience. Once the body has identified a particular substance, it responds by initiating semiotic sequences and negotiations that fulfill vital functions for the organism at macro-, meso-, and micro-scales. -/- Human abilities to distill and extract the living world into highly refined foods and medicines, however, have created substances far more potent than their counterparts in our historical evolution. Many of these substances also lack certain accompanying proteins, enzymes, and alkaloids that otherwise aid digestion or protect against side-effects in active extracted chemicals. Human biology has yet to catch up with human inventions such as supernormal foods and medicines that may flood receptors, overwhelming the body’s normal satiation mechanisms. This volume discusses how biosemioticians can come to terms with these networks of meaning, providing a valuable and provocative compendium for semioticians, medical researchers and practitioners, sociologists, cultural theorists, bioethicists and scholars investigating the interdisciplinary questions stemming from food and medicine. (shrink)

We argue that constructive approaches in epistemology and systems science, which are focused on normativity, knowledge, and communication of organisms and emphasize the primacy of activity, self-construction, and niche-construction in the cognitive agents, fit naturally to the both methodology and theory of biosemiotics. In particular, constructive view was already present in the works of the major precursors of biosemiotics: von Uexküll and Bateson, and to some extent Peirce. Biosemiotics has a chance to function as a mediating field in the theoretical (...) integration of semiotics with its construction-related sister disciplines (e.g., second order cybernetics, autopoiesis, constructivism, enactivism, and interactivism) because of its explicit assumption of the semiotic nature of life and agency and its objectified “first person” view to biosemiotic agents, the view that nevertheless avoids the agnostic attitude towards reality. (shrink)

The article discusses evolutionary aspects of mimicry from a semiotic viewpoint. The concept of semiotic scaffolding is used for this approach, and its relations with the concepts of exaptation and semiotic co-option are explained. Different dimensions of scaffolding are brought out as ontogenetic, evolutionary, physiological and cognitive. These dimensions allow for interpreting mimicry as a system that scaffolds itself. With the help of a number of mimicry cases, e.g. butterfly eyespots, brood parasitism, and plant mimesis, the evolutionary dynamics of mimicry (...) in the open bio-semiosphere is investigated. The main argument is that biological mimicry largely develops through sign relations and communicative relations between organisms. It is proposed that mimicry systems should be described as two-layered structures composed of the ecological composition of the species involved and the semiotic structure of their communication. (shrink)

In disciplines traditionally studying expertise such as sociology, philosophy, and pedagogy, discussions of demarcation criteria typically centre on how and why human expertise differs from the expertise of artificial expert systems. Therefore, the demarcation criteria has been drawn between robots as formalized logical architectures and humans as creative, social subjects, creating a bipartite division that leaves out animals. However, by downsizing the discussion of animal cognition and implicitly intuiting assimilation of living organisms to robots, key features to explain why human (...) expertise is crucially different from robot expertise are neglected. In the absence of clarification of fundamental cognitive principles of LOs, cognitively robots may appear persuasively closer to humans when they are in fact not. In this paper, I will discuss essential features of organic cognition to emphasise why animals are not like robots at all. The purpose is to add a third category when comparing humans and robots to make a tripartite division that consists of humans LOs, and machines. I will argue that LOs, adapted to ever-changing circumstances, are qualitatively different from robots. Humans, in the sense of belonging to the biological class of LOs, also share this central feature. In addition, however, humans alone possess and use language in a way that turns cognition from a predominantly online to off-line activity, 625–635 2002) that introduces truly abstract thinking. In the end I introduce the concept of ‘Linguification’ to dissect the particular mechanisms sustaining abstract thinking in the explanation of what makes humans distinct from robots and LOs. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw a parallel between aspects of René Thom’s topological program understood as semiophysics, and Jakob von Uexküll’s theory of meaning. Through the use of Thom’s semiophysics, I believe that it is possible to interpret Uexküll’s intuition that meaning unfolds a kind of transformation in an organism’s transactions with the environment: that is, meaning incorporates topological spaces. The central idea in question is that beyond the semantic, syntactical and pragmatic human use of language, meaning incorporates specific topologies (...) by expressing the spatial interaction between organism and environment. This is what I mean by René Thom’s reading of Jakob von Uexküll. (shrink)

A sign is something that refers to something else. Signs, whether of natural or cultural origin, act by provoking a receptive system, human or nonhuman, to form an interpretant (a movement or a brain activity) that somehow relates the system to this "something else." Semiotics sees meaning as connected to the formation of interpretants. In a biosemiotic understanding living systems are basically engaged in semiotic interactions, that is, interpretative processes, and organic evolution exhibits an inherent tendency toward an increase in (...) semiotic freedom. Mammals generally are equipped with more semiotic freedom than are their reptilian ancestor species, and fishes are more semiotically sophisticated than are invertebrates. The evolutionary trend toward the production of life forms with an increasing interpretative capacity or semiotic freedom implies that the production of meaning has become an essential survival parameter in later stages of evolution. (shrink)

We develop a semiotic scheme of time, in which time precipitates from the repeated succession of punctuating the progressive tense by the perfect tense. The underlying principle is communication among local participants. Time can thus be seen as a meaning-making, semiotic system in which different time codes are delineated, each having its own grammar and timekeeping. The four time codes discussed are the following: the subjective time having tense, the objective time without tense, the static time without timekeeping, and the (...) inter-subjective time of the E-series. Living organisms adopt a time code called the E-series, which emerges through the local synchronization among organisms or parts of organisms. The inter-subjective time is a new theoretical dimension resulting from the time-aligning activities of interacting agents. Such synchronization in natural settings consists of incessant mutual corrections and adjustments to one’s own punctuation, which is then constantly updated. Unlike the third-person observer keeping the objective time while sitting outside a clock, the second-person negotiators participate in forming the E-series time by punctuating and updating the interface through which different tenses meet at the moment of “now.” Although physics allows physicists to be the only interpreters, the semiotic perspective upends the physical perspective by letting local participants be involved in the interpretation of their mutual negotiations to precipitate that which is called time. (shrink)

This article explores how De-sign can be utilized as a navigational trajectory toward the integration of cultural sensitivity and environmental sensibility. It affirms that intentionality makes it possible for human beings to make meaning of their world. Navigating through trajectories for the purpose of seeking desired outcomes is a reiterative de-sign process that is constantly adjusting pragmatically. Because de-sign outcomes are only invariant aspects of the unfolding process of synechism and palingenesia, every de-sign situation is a unique journey toward infinite (...) possibilities of creation. De-signers, as agents of intentional change, become envoys of meaning-making that can integrate cultural sensitivity and environmental sensibility. De-sign intentionality makes our trajectories move toward envisioning a meaningful reality, one that goes beyond the schism between culture and nature, between built environment and natural environment. Trajectories innate to the de-sign process transform us into not only lifelong-learners competent of questioning absolute knowledge but also changing agents capable of moving beyond merely being inquisitive, to being reflective, contemplative knowers, genuinely integrating all aspects of the great biosemiosphere. (shrink)

Natural mimicry is ubiquitous. Plants mimic animals, animals mimic plants, animals mimic each other and animals may even mimic counterfactual states that deceive or distract other animals. Almost all natural mimicry is based on iconicity which hence anchors it in real world resemblances. The vast majority of natural mimicry is done unconsciously but when humans mimic, they know what they are doing. As Merlin Donald suggest, mimicry may in fact have played a crucial role in the emergence of the human (...) condition, allowing new forms of cognition to emerge. Here it is suggested that the role played by mimicry may have involved the evolution of a capacity for metaphorical perception, where an object may not only be seen ‘as is’ but also ‘as if’ it was a functional mimic of something else. This new form of mimicry made possible new forms of communication, co-operation and creative engagement with the environment. Once these developed to the point where they produced symbolic systems and other cultural tools, the nature of human mimicry expanded radically. No longer anchored in resemblance, it became detached and qualitatively distinct from natural forms. The consequences of this detachment are now becoming clear. (shrink)

The course of biological evolution is regarded by many authors as an ascending path toward higher levels of variety, complexity and integration. There are similar but partly conflicting accounts of the nature and causes of this ascending course. With the aim of reaching a unified conception I start by summarily reviewing three notable examples. These are, in their latest presentations, those of Hoffmeyer and Stjernfelt 2015, Szathmáry 2015, and Lane 2015a. Comparison of their commonalities and divergences, combined with further reflections, (...) leads to the following views: 1) cooperation between preexistent traits and processes is the primary determinant in the emergence of evolutionary novelty; 2) cooperation is a triadic relation similar to semiosis ; 3) regulation, the key element of both metabolism and replication, results from the cooperation of energetic and semiotic causation; 4) conceptual generalization and concrete generalization are fruits of cooperation. Conceptual generalizations spring from the cooperation of ideas. I believe these realizations supply essential elements for a unified view of the ascent of biological evolution towards higher levels of organization. Some of these conceptions are also applicable to similar ascending trajectories through the stages of cultural and technological evolution. (shrink)