Abstract
Following Peirce’s semeiotic and theory of causation, we will argue that the distinctive character of life is its being a semeiotic process, that is, a genuine triadic relation expressed as the flow of causation by which an object causes an effect, called interpretant, due to the mediation of a sign. Living organisms are characteristic examples of processes causally directed toward general end states, that is, states that represent habitual dispositions to behave in the future according to successful past experiences. Familiarity through habit-taking provides the necessary information to denote correctly the objects of attention of daily experience, without which no living being would survive. To be able to have such dispositions to act coherently, the teleology of living beings must involve a combined action of final causation, efficient causation, and chance. All of this is an expression of semeiosis, which provides the formal aspect of causation by which transmission of forms from causes into effects becomes possible. Thus, symbols (the only signs that can be conditional propositions about the real) are living signs capable of gathering information during experience and of conveying it to its interpretants so as to produce general habits of conduct attuned with the causal patterns, or laws that govern reality. The flow of causation that we perceive in reality provides the form of a genuine and continuous triadic relation, which is the predicate of every true proposition. Any living species is analogous to a true proposition as much as it is attuned to the flow of causation that grounds the real and allows its permanence.
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Notes
- 1.
“According to the dominant mechanical philosophy, nothing is real in the physical universe except particles of matter with their masses, their relative positions in space at different instants of time, and the immutable laws of the relations of those three elements of space, time, and matter. Accordingly, at any one instant all that is real is the masses and their positions, together with the laws of their motion. But according to Newton’s second law of motion the positions of the masses at any one instant is not determined by their positions at any other single instant even with the aid of the laws. On the contrary, that which is determined is an acceleration [the effect is the acceleration]. Now an acceleration is the relation of the position at one instant not to the position at another instant, but to the positions at a second and a third instant” (RLT 199, 1898). For further explanation, see RLT 199–201.
- 2.
See Peirce’s “The Ethics of Terminology” (EP II, item 19).
- 3.
According to Peirce, association is “a habit or disposition of mind in consequence of which an idea of on description is likely to bring into comparative vividness of consciousness an idea of another description” (RLT 232, 1898).
- 4.
Peircean processes are creative in a triple sense: (1) each event involved in the process contains an element of irreducible novelty; (2) the end state of a process can be reached in different ways; whenever one way or line of causation be blocked, it may originate new lines; and (3) the end state toward which a process tends, may evolve spontaneously.
- 5.
In the explanation of his final scheme of classification (1904), Peirce had changed the word ‘largely’ to ‘exclusively.’ “This classification […] is to be regarded as simply Comte’s classification, corrected. That is to say, the endeavor has been so to arrange the scheme that each science ought to make appeal, for its general principles, exclusively to the sciences placed above it, while for instances and special facts, it will find the sciences below it more serviceable” (MS L 107, 1904).
- 6.
Peirce’s Classification of the Sciences according to his 1898 Cambridge Lectures is as follows;
A. THEORETICAL SCIENCE
Mathematics
Philosophy
a. Logic
b. Metaphysics
3. The Special Sciences
a. Psychical
b. Physical
B. PRACTICAL SCIENCE
For Peirce’s final scheme, see his “A Brief Intellectual Autobiography” (MS L 107, 1904).
- 7.
Peirce borrowed the terms ‘genuine’ and ‘degenerate’ from the geometry of plane curves, where they refer to the irreducibility or reducibility of a figure to simpler figures. (MS 304: 35, 1903). For a thorough analysis of “Genuineness and Degeneracy in Peirce’s Categories,” see Kruse 1991.
- 8.
See page 92 for a full quotation on Peirce’s view of the being of a form.
- 9.
Consider, for example, the following passage: “If a sign has no interpreter, its interpretant is a ‘would be,’ i.e., is what it would determine in the interpreter if there were one.” (EP II; 409, 1907)
- 10.
This is our interpretation of the meaning of Peirce’s “broader conception” of sign. (LW 81, 1908).
- 11.
About this, see “Teleology: A Peircean Critique of Ernst Mayr’s theory of Teleology” in Hulswitt 2002, pp. 88–95.
- 12.
Peirce himself was not always consistent in the application of this distinction, however.
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Hulswit, M., Romanini, V. (2014). Semeiotic Causation and the Breath of Life. In: Romanini, V., Fernández, E. (eds) Peirce and Biosemiotics. Biosemiotics, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7732-3_6
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