Abstract
A life form and its environment constitute an essential unit, a microcosm. This microcosm is sustained by a privileged dialectic relationship in which the embedded agent- an entity endowed with a particular physical architecture- and its specific environment, coupled, mutually influence each other. Identical principles rule both the basic forms of semiotic organisation and the upper forms. When we distinguish these two levels of semiotic structuring we are distinguishing the semiotic relations that involve a stimulus-response relationship, which is dyadic in nature, from those that involve a more complex relationship where the capacity of symbolically encoding allows organisms to go beyond the immediacy of sensory awareness. However in all instances of semiotic structuring, there is the presence of a living system that evolves in an environment individuating and assigning a value to typical environmental features. Acknowledging this fact is crucial: the inquiry into how elemental life forms interact with their environments leads to the identification of the fundamental role played by the physical architecture of the agent and sheds light on the semiotic process that is common to all life forms, ultimately highlighting the very nature of meaning and reality.
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Notes
Cf. Maturana (1978) on the concept of observer and on the constraints to objective descriptions.
In Maturana’s words it is the structure of the living system and not the structure of the medium that determine what structural configuration of the medium may constitute its sensory perturbations.
The Gibsonian tradition, cf. Gibson (1979), calls these environmental features “affordances”. These are the potentialities present in the surrounding environment to satisfy an organism’s specific needs. For instance the presence of a certain flower affords a small insect the possibility to rest and drink some of its nectar while the same flower affords a bird the chance to satisfy its hunger by eating insects. The perception of these affordances is maximised by the organism’s drives to satisfy its needs.
Edelman who received the Nobel Prize in 1972 for his model of the recognition processes of the immune system extended his theory to a more general “science of recognition”. By “recognition” Edelmann means the continual adaptative matching or fitting of elements in one physical domain to novelty occurring in elements of another, more or less independent physical domain, a matching that occurs without prior instruction.
In our opinion the term knowledge should designate exclusively information that is conceptually and propositionally structured. In this case we prefer to use the term “know how”.
Cf. Uexkhull’s concept of Umwelt.
By plastic structures we mean, as Maturana (1978), a structure that can be affected by outside events, that can be “perturbed.”
Cf. Maturana (1978).
According to Maturana (1978), in an autopoietic unity, the history of structural change without loss of identity is its ontogeny. Still according to Maturana, the coupling of the changing structure of a structurally plastic autopoietic unity to the changing structure of its medium is called ontogenic adaptation. The coupling of the changing structures of the sequential generated unities to a changing medium is called evolutionary adaptation.
Cf. Peirce’s (1992) distinction between dyadic and triadic relations.
As Searle (1995) points out an animal without language can have perceptions and even some sorts of memories but once an animal has a language it has an immensely richer system of representation.
We know that it could be argued that this communicative urge is also present in forms of interaction involving some mammals. However we will only use the term “communication” to refer to intentionally driven verbal interaction. On this topic Cassirer (1985) wrote: “Diverse as the animal cries and calls may be- cries of fear or pleasure, mating calls, and calls of warning- they do not go beyond the sphere of mere sounds expressing sensation. They are not “significant” in the sense of being correlated as signs with definite things and happenings in the outside world”.
The case of physical particles or that of celestial bodies whose existence came only to be certified in the course of technological development.
By environmental conditions we mean the physical, social, cultural and linguistic components that characterise the environment in which a human organism evolves.
According to Moreno et al. (1992) ontogenetic adaptation corresponds to the most elemental version of perception as it is achieved through the selective activation of the pertinent genes given the detection of certain environmental conditions and consequently enhancing specific patterns of behaviour.
As Krasnegor and Lecanuet (1995) pointed out, human newborn babies are sentient beings ready to interact with physical and social environments.
According to some authors e.g. Mandler (1996) the sensitivity that newborns seem to exhibit relatively to the perception of biological versus nonbiological motion could be relevant for the pre-verbal distinction between animate and nonanimate entities.
This distinction is probably vital for the subsequent and more fine-grained differentiation that allows for the identification of differentiated animated forms. This subsequent differentiation will be encoded by particular linguistic forms.
Though we acknowledge their absolute interdependence we consider two possible forms of consciousness: a primary or basic form and a higher form. We ascribe to the primary or basic form of consciousness two different orders: a first order corresponding to perceptive activeness: sensory modalities able and ready to interact; and a second order corresponding to awareness: the organism, aware of its physical integrity, as well as of the existence of an external reality, processes information retrieved by sensory modalities.
The higher form of consciousness corresponds to the capacity of translating his interactions in symbolic form, reifying meaning and building a reality of self-subsistent entities it corresponds simultaneously to the capacity to set himself apart from his own experience and to analyse it as an objective entity.
Edelmann refers to this higher form of consciousness as “consciousness of being conscious” and stresses that it involves representing a “true self” or a “social self” acting on an environment.
Evans (1982) asserted that an egocentric self-concept develops as a result of the subject’s constant and long-term interaction with the surroundings. According to him this gives rise to an objective conception of both oneself and the world.
By subjective principles we mean those characteristic of experiential subjects and that determine the particular mode of interacting with environment and consequently of constructing reality that characterises human cognition. In this same sense Merleau-Ponty (1962) talks of “a perceptual consciousness which embraces and constitutes the world”. In his opinion this perceptual consciousness embraces the world by taking in determinate features of it, and it constitutes the world by building the perceptual experience out of these features. However, we think one should avoid referring to essentially nonconscious processes as a certain form of consciousness even when this is called a perceptual one.
I’m referring to physical properties such as electromagnetic radiation, force, gravitational attraction...
By subjective we mean the mental construction accomplished by an experiential subject, i.e. by a self-conscious cognitive agent.
As Merleau-Ponty points out, we have to understand that space hasn’t three dimensions in the same way an animal has two or four legs but that dimensions are established based on one dimension, a polymorph being, that justifies them all. Orientation, polarity are all derived phenomena causally linked to my presence.
In fact, as Evans (1982), we can say that our perceptual field has an orientational structure whose coordinates- a foreground and a background, an up and down- are defined by an embodied agent and by the way he acts in the field.
These coordinates are always applied in every new field of real or virtual action. This can be observed for instance in console and computer games. Players tend to use spatial terms-deictics- as “up” and “down” or “here” / “there” to refer to areas in virtual space as if they were really physically there, piloting an aeroplane, driving a car or fighting. Though they are conscious of being just playing a game the fact that the course of the game depends on their decisions and actions makes them assume the virtual scenario as the physical/perceptual field they are embedded in.
According to Clancey (1991) a sense of time involves self-reference because without being able to relate my experiences (either past or present) back to me, my awareness of the past, of history, of memory, and the present situations will be impaired.
Strawson (1959) calls non-solipsistic consciousness, the consciousness of a being who is able to distinguish between himself and his states on one hand and something that he experiences and is not himself, or a state of himself.
It is interesting to view how the problem of the relation self-consciousness/consciousness of alterity towards the world and its role in the construction of a particular world view is reflected in literature. We can observe this in Italo Calvino’s “Mr. Palomar” (1985).
“But how can you look at something and set your own ego aside? Whose eyes are doing the looking? As a rule, you think of the ego as one who is peering out of your own eyes as if leaning on a window sill, looking at the world stretching out before him in all its immensity. So, then: a window looks out on the world. The world is out there; and in here, what do we have? The world still-what else could there be? With a little effort of concentration, Mr. Palomar manages to shift the world from in front of him and set it on the sill, looking out. Now, beyond the windows, what do we have? The world is also there, and for the occasion has been split into a looking world and a world looked at. And what about him, also known as “I,” namely Mr. Palomar? Is he not a piece of the world that is looking at another piece of the world? Or else, given that there is world that side of the window and world this side, perhaps the “I,” the ego, is simply the window through which the world looks at the world. To look at itself the world needs the eyes (and the eyeglasses) of Mr. Palomar”.
Sense experience constitutes a primary form of consciousness.
The belief that an experiencer-detached regard is possible gave rise to the notion of “Cartesian Theatre” (the existence of a stage upon which our conscious thoughts, desires and experiences are played out for a watcher- the mind’s “I”) and all its subsequent more or less diluted versions. However, as Maturana (1978) points out, even in scientific inquiry we have to be aware of the fact that we live in a domain of subject dependent knowledge and subject-dependent reality where the notion of an absolute observer is intrinsically impossible.
In what concerns language, symbolic forms comprehend not only the individual lexical forms but also speech or text complexes. In this work we are referring to meaning as encoded in lexical units and usually also designated as “word meaning”. We are consequently methodologically forced to ignore other important phenomena that play a fundamental part in communicative intercourses: the beliefs and expectations of the sender, his intentions i.e. the purposes he aims to achieve, which determine his strategies for speech or text production; the beliefs and expectations of the recipient which determine the way he interprets a particular communicative occurrence i.e. the way he reconstructs the initial text, assigning it a global meaning.
G. Simondon (1964) calls this “le fond pré- individuel”.
Cassirer (1996).
Culturally-dependent or universally recognised attitudes are an essential part of communicative intercourses mainly of those that develop face- to- face. They provide the speaker with essential information concerning the way his peers are reacting to his message.
For a definition of place- loci, cf. Ferreira (2007): On Meaning the phenomenon of individuation and the definition of a world view. Ph. D. thesis. Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa. University of Lisbon.
We can observe this when contrasting the way traditionally Japanese architecture defines and organises domestic space with the way this same space is defined and organised in western culture.
One of the roles of architecture is to answer to the needs that arise in the interaction with and within certain spaces, proposing adequate solutions. Another of its roles is to enhance new forms of interaction through the definition of new spaces and new functionalities.
For instance dwellings are supposed to be protective and churches solemn.
This status corresponds to the role a particular entity plays and the place it occupies among the constellations of individual entities defined by a community in the process of constructing reality.
As Lakoff (1988) mentions Tuesday can be defined only relative to an idealised model that includes the natural cycle defined by the movement of the sun, the standard means of characterising the end of one day and the beginning of the next, and a larger seven-day calendric cycle- the week. In this calendric system the week is a whole with seven parts organised in a linear sequence in which each part is called a day and the third is Tuesday.
Discussing the ontological status of imaginary or abstract entities Linsky (1974), quoting Moore, refers:
“To say that a centaur isn’t real seems equivalent to saying that there isn’t such a thing as a centaur. Even a philosopher should insist that there isn’t such a thing, that it’s pure fiction. However, there’s another fact that seems equally clear. I can imagine a centaur, we all can. And to imagine a centaur isn’t certainly the same as to imagine nothing. On the contrary, since to imagine a centaur isn’t the same as to imagine a griffin. If both of them were nothing, if they were pure non-entities, there wouldn’t be certainly any difference between imagining one and imagining the other. However, apparently, a centaur is nothing, it’s just something I imagine. But if it is something doesn’t it mean that there’s something that it’s a centaur-that this is a being? It is a fact that I imagine something when I’m imagining one and it seems that what is “something” should mean there is such a thing as I imagine it. It could also seem that “centaur” it’s just a name for what I imagine and consequently that a thing as a centaur should be or I wouldn’t be able to imagine it. How can we then sustain our first proposition, that seemed right, that there isn’t such a thing as a centaur? (free translation).
As Eco (1999) points out, characters from fiction and myth are formally individuals. In fact, one can always refer to them in everyday speech as far as the semantic frame initially defined for them and that shapes their identity backs up this reference. For instance, we cannot refer to Robinson Crusoe as an Aborigine or to Snowhite as the young lady who was nearly devoured by a wolf.
At least in western culture.
On the particular nature of this interaction Percy (1975) writes: “the organisms are no longer oriented pragmatically toward their environment but ontologically as its co-knowers and co-celebrants”.
Using Bruce Mau’s terms, cf. Mau (2004).
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Ferreira, M.I.A. On Meaning: A Biosemiotic Approach. Biosemiotics 3, 107–130 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-009-9068-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-009-9068-y