Abstract
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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
There is a third possibility of course, a possibility that has been adopted by philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, who recommended our taking of “the intentional stance” (Dennett, 1987). Briefly stated, this view holds that we cannot understand the life of other humans (or of animals) without describing those lives as guided by, or woven into, intentionality. This does not mean that these creatures possess intentionality as a real property – rather, the thesis states only that we cannot understand these creatures unless we pretend that they do. I must confess that this position reminds me of the evermore complex (and increasingly less likely) sets of epicycles that Ptolemaic astronomers had to introduce into their explanations of the planetary orbits in order to uphold the belief in the geocentric system. Rather than seeking shelter in such powerless conceptions about what, for all of us without exception, is the deepest and most real content of our lives – i.e., the fact that such life is being experienced – we shall suggest that it is instead the ingrained belief in animals as machine-like robots that ought to be given up.
- 2.
Semiotics unfortunately is still best known as a branch of linguistics due to the influential work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1916). In the Saussurean tradition, which should better be termed semiology (Saussure’s own original term) to avoid confusing it with Peircean semiotics, human language is taken as the primary model for semiosic activity and if semiosis is admitted to take place in the animal world at all, it is seen as a degenerate version of human semiosis. Modern semiotics, however, following the semiotic understanding of Peirce, considers human language as just one peculiar instantiation of a much broader semiotics pertaining to evolution at large.
- 3.
History is written by winners.
- 4.
Augustine defined the sign as “something, that besides the impressions it conveys to the sense, make something else come into cognition” (Bains, 2006, p. 40).
- 5.
Peirce had no illusions that his contemporaries would accept his own broader conception whereby nature teemed with beings, for example, bees, that could stand in the place of persons as sites for the establishment of interpretants.
- 6.
In Peirce’s icon, index, symbol trichotomy the icon is a sign that refers to an object because of a supposed “likeness”; an index refers to an object because of a causal or correlative relation; the symbol refers to the object via a convention (often historically based as when the word “cheval” refers to an animal that in the English-speaking world may be referred to by the word “horse”).
- 7.
According to Peirce “All thinking is by signs, and the brutes use signs. But they perhaps rarely think of them as signs. To do so is manifestly a second step in the use of language. Brutes use language, and seem to exercise some little control over it. But they certainly do not carry this control to anything like the same grade that we do. They do not criticize their thought logically.” (“Consequences of Critical Common-Sensism”, c. 1905, (Peirce, 1931–1958, p. 5.534)).
- 8.
It may seem contradictory that “sign” is put in as one element in the sign-relation. As explained in the text the sign always presupposes the whole triadic relation and technically speaking the term “representamen” or at least “sign vehicle” should have been used instead of sign. However, since everyday language uses the term “sign” as equivalent to the representamen as such, I have chosen to stick with it.
- 9.
Plant movements may not seem of much, but if you increase the time scale it may actually look quite impressive when played at video. Plants move by growth (beneath and above the earth), by off-shoots and runners, and by spreading their seeds.
- 10.
- 11.
Even at this level one cannot rule out individual semiotic freedom right away though. A bacterium is a hugely complex and well tuned system of proteins and other components and although learning processes do probably not directly play a role at this level the bacterium is capable of changing its behavior by the active uptake of foreign DNA from bacteriohages.
- 12.
Often unwittingly disguised as materialistic monism which, however, in a deeper analysis can be shown to presuppose dualism (Searle,1992).
- 13.
References
Bains, P. (2006). The primacy of semiosis. An ontology of relations. Toronto, ON: Toronto University Press.
Bateson, G. & Bateson, M. C. (1987). Angels fear. Towards an epistemology of the sacred. New York: Macmillan.
Bekoff, M., & Pierce, J. (2009). Wild justice. The moral lives of animals. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Brentano, F. (1874/1973). Psychology from an empirical standpoint. New York: Humanities Press.
Darwin, C. (1971 [1859]). On the origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life. London: J.M. Dent & Sons.
Deacon, T. (1997). The symbolic species. New York: Norton.
Deacon, T. (2006). Reciprocal linkage between self-organizing processes is sufficient for self-reproduction and evolvability. Theoretical Biology, 1, 136–149.
Deacon, T. (2007). Shannon-Boltzmann-Darwin: Redefining information. Part 1. Cognitive Semiotics, 1, 123–148.
Deacon, T. (2008). Shannon-Boltzmann-Darwin: Redefining information. Part 2. Cognitive semiotics, 2, 167–194.
Deely, J. (1994). How does semiosis effect Renvoi? The American Journal of Semiotics, 11, 11–61.
Deely, J. (2001). Four ages of understanding. The first postmodern survey of philosophy from ancient times to the turn of the twenty-first century. Toronto, ON: Toronto University Press.
Deely, J. (2007). Intentionality and semiotics. Scranton, PA: Scranton University Press.
Dennett, D. C. (1987). The intentional stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Favareau, D. (2007). The evolutionary history of biosemiotics. In M. Barbieri (Ed.), Introduction to biosemiotics (pp. 1–67). Dordrecht: Springer.
Gilbert, S. F., & Epel, D. (2009). Ecological developmental biology. Integrating epigenetics, medicine, and evolution. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer.
Hoffmeyer, J. (1993). En Snegl på Vejen. Om Betydningens Naturhistorie. København: Rosinante/Munksgaard.
Hoffmeyer, J. (1996a). Signs of meaning in the universe. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Hoffmeyer, J. (1996b). Evolutionary intentionality. In E. Pessa, A. Montesanto, & E. P. Penna (Eds.), Third European conference on systems science (pp. 699–703). Edzioni Kappa.
Hoffmeyer, J. (1997). Biosemiotics: Towards a new synthesis in biology. European Journal for Semiotic Studies, 9, 355–376.
Hoffmeyer, J. (2008). Biosemiotics. An examination into the signs of life and the life of signs. Scranton and London: University of Scranton Press.
Hoffmeyer, J. (2009a). Semiotics of nature. In P. Cobley (Ed.), The routledge companion to semiotics (pp. 29–42). London and New York: Routledge.
Hoffmeyer, J. (2009b). Tro på tvivl. Kritik af religiøs og videnskabelig ufornuft. København: Ries Forlag.
Hoffmeyer, J. (2010). A biosemiotic approach to health. In S. Cowley, et al. (Eds.), Signifying bodies. Biosemiosis, interaction and health. Braga: The Faculty of Philosophy of Braga, Portuguese Catholic University.
Kauffman, S. (2008). Reinventing the sacred. A new view of science, reason, and religion. New York: Basic Books.
Kauffman, S., & Clayton, P. (2005). On emergence, agency, and organization. Biology and Philosophy, 21, 501–521.
Kull, K., Deacon, T., Emmeche, C., Hoffmeyer, J., & Stjernfelt, F. (2009). Theses on biosemiotics: The Saka convention. Biological Theory, 4, 167–173.
Laughlin, R. (2005). A different universe. Reinventing physics from the bottom down. New York: Basic Books.
Peirce, C. S. (1908). A letter to Lady Welby dated Dec. 23. In C. S. Hardwick & J. Cook (Eds.), Semiotics and significs: The correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby 1977. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Peirce, C. S. (1931–1958). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols. 1–4, C. Hartstone & P. Weiss (Eds.), Vols. 7–8 A. W. Burks (Ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pert, C. B., Ruff, M. R., Weber, R. J., & Herkenham, M. (1985). Neuropeptides and their receptors: A psychosomatic network. The Journal of Immunology, 135, 820s–826s.
Popper, K. (1990). A world of propensities. Bristol: Thoemmes Antiquarian Books.
Roepstorff, A. (2004). Cellular neurosemiotics: Outline of an interpretive framework. Theorie der Biologie, 6, 133–154.
Saussure, F. de (1916). Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot.
Searle, J. R. (1992). The rediscovery of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sebeok, T. A. (1979). The sign & its masters. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Sebeok, T. A., & Umiker-Sebeok, J. (1992). Biosemiotics: The semiotic web 1991. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2009). The corporeal turn. An interdisciplinary reader. Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic.
Short, T. L. (2007). Peirce’s theory of signs. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press
Swenson, R. (1989). Emergent attractors and the law of maximum entropy production. Systems Research, 6, 187–197.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hoffmeyer, J. (2012). The Natural History of Intentionality. A Biosemiotic Approach. In: Schilhab, T., Stjernfelt, F., Deacon, T. (eds) The Symbolic Species Evolved. Biosemiotics, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2336-8_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2336-8_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-2335-1
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-2336-8
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life SciencesBiomedical and Life Sciences (R0)