Abstract
This essay argues that stable, heritable, habituated semiotics on one scale of life allows for opportunism, origination, and the solving of novel problems on others. This is grounded in how interpretation is neither caused nor determined by its object, such that success at interpretation simply cannot be defined by any comparison between an interpretation and its object. Rather, an interpretation is a reciprocated incorporation of a living thing and its environment, and successful if it furthers the living, interpreting thing. By applying biosemiotic theory to seemingly disparate studies of parasitic infections (Jaroslav Flegr), autonomic nervous systems (Stephen Porges), and social change (Charles Tilly) as well as the classical pragmatic notion that biology, psychology and sociology are disparate approaches to the singular, radically continuous, and perennial question of who (or what) am I (Dewey, James, Mead). I argue that the distinction (e.g.,) between voluntary and autonomic behavior is but a ghost of older dualisms, the pseudo-contradictions of matter v. mind, body v. soul, but also self v. not self. Moreover, all such pseudo-contradictions (individual v. social, sensation v. response, parasite v. host, and etc.) are resolved as scale thick, self-similar examples of semiotic transaction wherein degeneration or habituation on one scale of life allows for generative or novel interaction on another.
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Notes
Richard Burger in Hitt (2005)
To steal a phrase from Kauffman (2002)
Havel (1996): distinct scales appear in nature when the assessing of a phenomena requires a separate set of metrics: a thing is scale thick when it can be measured by multiple sets of metrics and is consequential on multiple scales of being, and scale thin when it is not.
Lhotský et. al. (Publication pending) Symbioses from the point of reciprocal re-forming
Flegr (2007)
Morgan (1903). p. 59.
Darwin (1859). P. 490
James (1956) pg. 216–254
Flegr (2007)
Flegr (2007)
Ingram et al. (2013)
Porges (2003)
Porges (1995)
Portes (2009)
E.g., Langley (1921)
Austin et al. (2007)
Peirce (1998) EP 2.222, italics added
Tilly (1998b), pg. 456
Tilly (1996), pg. 7
Tilly (2000)
James (1956) pg. 216–254
Santayana, G. (1980/1905) pg. 284
Santayana (1920), pgs. 7, 53–4, 64–96, Santayana held that James was ‘irresponsible’ towards the past (which he ‘raided’ philosophically), and that he belied progress by begetting forgetfulness. And yet, Santayana also offered James the highest praise available within his weltenshauung, that he had “the temperament of an artist.” Theirs was a complicated relationship.
James (1904a), pg. 533
To be more exact, we must differentiate between genuine and degenerate experience: here, I speak of the first, which involves sentiency, Peircean Firstness, and the opening of possibility, and not the second, wherein consequence is determined by object and interaction, and which involves probabilities but not possibilities. See Ostdiek (2014)
James (1907) Chapter 2
Dewey (1896)
This being a central tenant of Pragmatism, e.g., James (1956), pg. 131 “Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities”
This claim is a) the central proposition of this essay, b) a corollary of the immediately previous proposition, and c) valid—based on evidence offered above.
Savage (2010)
O’Dwyer (2015)
James (1890) Vol. 1 pg. 291 and Ostdiek (2016)
Whitman (1892/1855): e.g., section 51, lines 1324–6
Bruni and Giorgi (2015)
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Ostdiek, G. Me, Myself, and Semiotic Function: Finding the “I” in Biology. Biosemiotics 9, 435–450 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-016-9268-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-016-9268-1