Abstract
This chapter outlines a broad theory of sign use in natural and artificial systems that was developed over several decades within the context of theoretical biology, cybernetics, systems theory, biosemiotics, and neuroscience. Different conceptions of semiosis and information in nature are considered. General functional properties of and operations on signs, including measurement, computation, and sign-directed actions are described. A taxonomy of semiotic systems is built up from combinations of these operations. The respective functional organizations and informational capabilities of formal systems and computempiral-predictive scientific models, percept-action systems, purposive goal-seeking systems, and self-constructing systems are discussed. Semiotic relations are considered in terms of Morrisean semiotic triad of syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. Analysis of statetransition structure is used to demarcate functional boundaries, such as epistemic and control cuts. Capabilities for open-ended behavior, combinatoric and emergent creativity, and umwelt expansion are taken up. Finally, basic problems of neurosemiotics, neural coding, and neurophenomenology are outlined.
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Notes
- 1.
We use the term “representation” advisedly, despite considerable unwanted implicit realist-referentialist philosophical baggage it carries from some sectors of cognitive science and philosophy (Bickhard and Terveen 1995). It is used here as in the neurosciences as a systematic set of distinctions, without any assumptions about what is being represented or signified, or the veridicality of the representation.
- 2.
Inscription seen on an antinuclear poster produced by Hard Rain, Cambridge, MA, c. 1978.
- 3.
The general concept, from theoretical biology, is related to self-reproducing automata (von Neumann 1948), metabolism-repair systems (Rosen 1991), autocatalytic sets, hypercycles, and hypersets. Regenerative networks also characterize brains (Cariani 2000b, 2001b) and social systems (Luhmann 2013), pp. 70–83.
- 4.
This epistemic sense, which is agnostic regarding the world distal to measuring devices, is very different from the realist-referentialist sense of information as true knowledge about the world as it really is, e.g., Dretske 1981, i.e. knowledge that exists independently of observers and observations.
- 5.
There are some substantial differences between Morrisean and Piercian semiotics in their descriptions of sign relations (see Brier 2008; Brier and Joslyn 2013; Ecco 1976; Nöth 1990; Queiroz et al. 2011; Vehkavaara 2008) for discussions. Although Pierce and Morris were both pragmatists—C. S. Pierce founded the movement—Piercian theory with its triad of signifier, referent, and interpretant is more compatible with realist ontologies, whereas the Morrissean triad is more compatible with epistemologies that are ontologically agnostic. These epistemological/ontological splits parallel pragmatistrealist debates in philosophy of science (van Fraassen 1980; Murdoch 1987).
- 6.
For example, a switch that actuates a motor opens a drawbridge, the latter physical motions being nonsemiotic consequences of the switch sign state.
- 7.
Analogous attempts have been made from within artificial intelligence and cognitive science frameworks to ground language meaning in the semiotics of percept-action cycles (Roy 2005).
- 8.
Nowhere has this operational structure, which encompasses the roles of symbols, measurements, and mathematical computations, been more self-consciously and rigorously contemplated than in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century physics. Operationalist and realist accounts of scientific method contended, culminating in debates over the meaning of quantum mechanics (Murdoch 1987; van Fraassen 1980; Bridgman 1936). Parallel debates raged in the foundations of mathematics (Cariani 2012b).
- 9.
While most attention has been paid to the formal parts of the modeling relation, the operational description of a scientific experiment also includes tacit physical actions that are only incompletely described (e.g., materials, skills, and work needed), that are needed to build measuring devices and set up experimental conditions (“preparing the system”).
- 10.
Specification of the mode by a proposition that is to be evaluated returns us to a clear Kantian analytic-synthetic-practical distinction ( contra Quine).
- 11.
We also reject the postmodernist construction of “technoscience,” which conflates science (successful understanding, empirical truths) with technology (successful action, pragmatic truths).
- 12.
As von Neumann showed in 1932, one cannot completely eliminate measurements by successively subsuming them into the formal predictive model, for to do so leads to infinite regresses (von Neumann 1955). Therefore, the two kinds of operations are primitive: they complement each other.
- 13.
Clear demarcations between semiotic functionalities are, therefore, only possible within the context of a particular, fixed observational frame. As with other foundational problems, ambiguity and indeterminacy can be replaced with clarity and consistency once operationalist definitions that specify methods of observation, calculation, and evaluation are adopted.
- 14.
The semiotic operation of sign-initiated action (Fig. 2, left panel) describes some sign-directed process that activates effectors to act on the world outside the sign system. The ensuing world change is not semiotic, as it lies outside the functional boundaries of the sign system. If it were describable in semiotic terms, depending on whether it involved determinate or contingent STs, the process would respectively resemble either computation or measurement.
- 15.
One does not create color vision by simply recombining feature primitives of monochromatic vision—new types of photoreceptors with differing wavelength sensitivities are needed. When new types of photoreceptors are introduced, then, in effect, another observable feature dimension is added to the internal sign states of the system.
- 16.
As with the other functional distinctions, it is possible to develop clear, operational criteria for recognizing these two kinds of emergence. In the epistemological, observer-relative conception of emergence, called emergence relative to a model (Cariani 1989, 2012a; Rosen 1985), an emergent event occurs when the behavior of a system violates the observer's expectations; whether the observer can account for the change in terms of existing distinctions and processes, or whether new ones must be invoked distinguishes between combinatorial and creative processes.
- 17.
We have worked on both NCCC and NCC problems, the neural coding of pitch (Cariani 1999) and neurocomputational requisites for awareness (Cariani 2000a, 2001b, 2012a), which we believe, entail autopoiesis-like mutual regeneration of sets of neuronal temporally coded spike pattern signals in global reentrant circuits.
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Cariani, P. (2015). Sign Functions in Natural and Artificial Systems. In: Trifonas, P. (eds) International Handbook of Semiotics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9404-6_42
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