Abstract
As the accompanying articles in the Special Issue on Semiotic Scaffolding will attest, my colleagues in biosemiotics have done an exemplary job in showing us how to think about the critically generative role that semiotic scaffolding plays “vertically” – i.e., in evolutionary and developmental terms – by “allowing access to the upper floors” (Hoffmeyer Semiotica 198: 11–31, 2014a) of biological complexity, cognition and evolution.
In addition to such diachronic considerations of semiotic scaffolding, I wish to offer here a consideration of semiotic scaffolding’s synchronic power, as well – and in particular the ability that it can afford its users to access new and other sign relations “horizontally” as a function of the way that multiple semiotically scaffolded relations intertwine to result in a “definite semantic topology that determines the ways that symbols modify each other’s referential functions in different combinations” (Deacon 1997:99).
Taking up, in turn, Terrence Deacon’s later challenge that what the sciences of cognition – and biology more generally – needs to “come to grips with [is] the process of semiosis; the dynamic of interpretive activity by which semiotic relationships emerge from other semiotic relationships [as] intrinsically dynamic phases in a generative process” (Deacon 2011:10), I attempt here to show how Deacon’s own Peirce-inspired matrix of referential sign relations as presented in The Symbolic Species, when viewed as a semiotic scaffold of interactional constraints and possibility biases, provides the key to understanding the essentially thirdness-manifesting nature of symbol reference, formation and growth.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This quote, of course, is Peirce’s Pragmatic Maxim, wherein it is asserted that precisely such ineliminably situated, possibility-encompassing consideration of a sign constitutes its very “meaning” (CP 5.402). Please note that throughout this paper, I have employed the ‘CP: x.xx’ citation format that is the standard practice adopted by Peirce scholars for referring to Peirce’s writings, as they have been collected in the eight volume Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce (1866–1913 [1931–1935] and [1958]). CP refers to this collection, and the numbers refer to volume and paragraph, respectively, while EP: x, xx citations refer to the volume and page number of The Essential Peirce (1867–1913 [1992–1998]), again, as is standard practice in Peirce scholarship.
Indeed, the present article was inspired by advances to do so more biosemiotically, as reported on by Belgian roboticist and linguist Luc Steels in a pair of recently edited volumes (Steels 2012; Steels and Hild 2012). Necessitating a long discussion on Peircean firstness, immediate interpretance and ‘ground’, however – in addition to the semiotic scaffolding discussion presented here – such discussion far exceeded the available word limit for the journal, and so will appear forthcoming.
Such relations of indirect action upon “what is not” via “what is” constitute the origin of what Terrence Deacon (2011) calls ententionality in such systems, thus justifying the non-anthropomorphic use of the term “quasi-mind” here.
Although Francois Jacob’s quote from The Possible and The Actual (1982) to the effect that: “If the image that a bird gets of the insects it needs to feed its progeny does not reflect at least some aspects of reality, there are no more progeny. If the representation that a monkey builds of the branch it wants to leap to has nothing to do with reality, then there is no more monkey” defuses the charge of naïve representationalism to the “semiotic realism” viewpoint well, I join Howard Pattee in preferring this quote by physicist and Peirce contemporary Heinrich Hertz (1857–1894) in this regard, anticipating the Pragmatic Maxim (and even expressing its central idea more clearly perhaps): “We form for ourselves images or symbols of external objects; and the form that we give them is such that the logically necessary consequents of the images in thought are always the images of the necessary natural consequents of the thing pictured. …For our purpose it is not necessary that the images should be in conformity with the things in any other respect whatever. As a matter of fact, we do not know, nor have we any means of knowing, whether our conception of things are in conformity with them in any other than this one fundamental respect.” (Hertz 1894:323–324 [1956:1–2]). What Peirce importantly adds to this characterization is the corollary idea that through the communal investigation and testing of “this one fundamental respect” and over time, our conceptions can, in fact, come to conform closer and closer to the object of our investigations – and this is a critically important observation for the purposes of the present discussion, as we will soon see.
The most thorough treatment extant of such thermo-, morpho- and teleo-dynamics and their generative interactions with one another, being, of course, Terrence Deacon’s masterful and original (2011) Incomplete Nature which puts incalculably more “flesh on the bones” of the Peircean and Deaconian matrices depicted here than the present much more narrowly focused article is attempting to do.
It is a triadic nature, of course, once one factors in – as one must – the emergent sign relation itself that is in no way reducible to the sum of its constituent two relata. But I wish to also draw attention here to that aspect of the sign that “stands for something other than itself” precisely because it “partakes of a twofold existence: one in singular things, another in the [observing being], and both [contribute their respective] accidents to it” to paraphrase Aquinas’ observations about esse (1252 [1965]). Such self-reflexivity about the objects of one’s own experience (much less the triadically scaffolded products that result) is only made possible by the mode of being proper to symbols, as we shall see.
Deely, of course, would not approve of this cavalier equation of ‘object’ with ‘thing’, given that he has devoted several important volumes (most notably, Deely 2009) to drawing out precisely this distinction– a distinction, moreover, with which I wholeheartedly agree. But as Sebeok reminds us: “While, as I continue to insist, all human beings – indeed, all living entities on our planet – modulate their environment by means of signs, only a handful grow up to be professional semioticians --- and a good thing too” (Sebeok 2001:ix). So we will let the parallel construction of ‘signs as things’ and ‘things as signs’ stand, hoping that the gods of semiotic study – including Deely – may be momentarily looking away.
Phobias and fetishes, of course, are two more obvious examples of otherwise benign sign vehicles which have become, for their users, maladaptively “over-enriched” by usually helpful contributions of the amygdala and the endocrine systems as the sign cascades through the chain of biological interpretants that it generates throughout the nervous system. But such phobias and fetishes are just the exaggerated (and thus noticeable) versions of the phenomenon of sign enrichment that builds the semiotic scaffolding by which we experience anything at all. Too, it would be a misreading of history not to acknowledge the generative, creative and productive power of ‘accidents’ in birthing new and often radically re-configured and developed sign relations – which, of course, then add to the ever-growing semiotic scaffold the hugely consequential sets of generative constraints, biases and possibilities that they themselves entail. “Symbols grow” wrote Peirce (CP 2.302), and by observing how the mutually organizing effect of their interactions and constraints give rise to semiotic scaffolding, we come to better understand how it is that the entirety of our lived experience, at any rate, is indeed, utterly “perfused with signs” (CP 6.222).
El-Hani et al. (2009) do an exemplary job of demonstrating how this stepwise transition of sign to interpretant to more developed sign takes place in the biological world in their volume entitled Genes, Information and Semiosis.
A detailed discussion about the Peircean notion of ‘ground’ – and all the debate that it has generated in the literature – would take us far beyond the available word count remaining for this article (though, again, I hope to be able to address this issue soon, especially as it relates to the so-called “symbol grounding problem” as it has been formulated in cognitive science and robotics). Suffice it to say that “ground” for Peirce – far from being the “rock bottom fundament of reality” where semiosis might be thought to begin (or stop), as it is for the roboticists – is instead that part of our semiotic reasoning that has been thus far accumulated and proven viable – “the funded result of all interpretation prior to the interpretation of the given sign” in the words of Peirce scholar Joseph Ransdell (1977: 172) – and that justifies our moving from interpretant or conclusion A to interpretant or conclusion B (instead of C or D or E) and that will, in time, provide the further grounds for us getting ever and ever closer to the objects of our inquiry. As such, it is clearly also a kind of a Hoffmeyerian scaffold, as it is built by signs and makes available, in turn, semiotically coherent pathways made of signs to yet other signs – such as understandings, inferences, conclusions, and beliefs. (See also Chumbley (2000) for an unique and illuminating discussion of the Peircean concept of “ground”.)
References
Aquinas, T. (1252 [1965]). De Ente et Essentia (On Being and Essence). In J. Bobik (Ed.), (Trans.) Aquinas on Being and Essence: A Translation and Interpretaion. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press.
Chumbley, R. (2000). The synonymous nature and communal function of Peirce’s ground, immediate object and meaning. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 36(3), 407–418.
Deacon, T. (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton.
Deacon, T. (2011). Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter. New York: W.W. Norton.
Deely, J. (1990). Basics of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Deely, J. (2001a). A sign is what? A dialogue between a semiotist and a would-be realist. Sign System Studies, 29(2), 705–743.
Deely, J. (2001b). Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Deely, J. (2007). Intentionality and Semiotics: A Story of Mutual Fecundation. Scranton: University of Scranton Press.
Deely, J. (2009). Purely Objective Reality. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Eigen, M. (1971). Self-organization of matter and the evolution of biological macromolecules. Naturwissenschaften, 58, 465–523.
Eigen, M., & Schuster, P. (1977). The hypercycle. A principle of natural self-organization. Naturwissenschaften, 64, 541–565.
El-Hani, C. N., Queiroz, J., & Emmeche, C. (2009). Genes, Information, and Semiosis. Tartu: Tartu University Press.
Emmeche, C. (2015). Semiotic scaffolding of the social self in reflexivity and friendship. Biosemiotics (this issue).
Favareau, D. (2008). Collapsing the wave function of meaning: The epistemological matrix of talk in interaction. In J. Hoffmeyer (Ed.), A Legacy of Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as a Precursor to Biosemiotics (pp. 169–212). Dordrecht: Springer.
Harnad, S. (1990). The symbol grounding problem. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomomena, 42(1), 335–346.
Harnad, S. (1993). Grounding symbols in the analog world with neural nets. Think, 2(1), 12–78.
Hertz, H. (1894 [1956]). The Principles of Mechanics. New York: Dover.
Hoffmeyer, J. (1996). Signs Of Meaning In The Universe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hoffmeyer, J. (2007a). Semiogenic scaffolding in nature. International Journal of Applied Semiotics, 5, 81–94.
Hoffmeyer, J. (2007b). Semiotic Scaffolding of Living Systems. In M. Barbieri (Ed.), Introduction to Biosemiotics. The New Biological Synthesis (pp. 149–166). Dordrecht: Springer.
Hoffmeyer, J. (2009). Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs. Scranton: Scranton University Press.
Hoffmeyer, J. (2011). Biology is immature biosemiotics. In C. Emmeche & K. Kull (Eds.), Towards a Semiotic Biology: Life is the Action of Signs (pp. 43–65). London: Imperial College Press.
Hoffmeyer, J. (2014a). The semiome: from genetic to semiotic scaffolding. Semiotica, 198, 11–31.
Hoffmeyer, J. (2014b). Semiotic Scaffolding: A Biosemiotic Link Between Sema and Soma. In K. R. Cabell & J. Valsiner (Eds.), The Catalyzing Mind: Beyond Models of Causality (pp. 95–110). Dordrecht: Springer.
Hulswit, M. (2001). Peirce on Causality and Causation. In M. Bergman & J. Queiroz (Eds.), The Commens Encyclopedia: The Digital Encyclopedia of Peirce Studies. New Edition. Pub 120809-1715a. Retrieved from: http://www.commens.org/encyclopedia/article/hulswit-menno-peirce-causality-and-causation.
Jacob, F. (1982). The Possible and the Actual. London: Pantheon Books.
Kull, K. (2012). Scaffolding”. In D. Favareau, P. Cobley, & K. Kull (Eds.), A More Developed Sign: Interpreting the Work of Jesper Hoffmeyer (pp. 228–229). Tartu: Tartu University Press.
Lotman, J. (1990). Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture.. Tauris: Shukman, A. trans London.
Parmentier, R. (1994). Signs In Society: Studies In Semiotic Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Peirce, C. S. (1866–1913 [1931–1935]). Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Vol. 1–6). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Peirce, C. S. (1866–1913 [1958]). Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Vol. 7–8). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Peirce, C. S. (1867–1913 [1992–1998]). The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. 2 volumes. Vol. 1: In: N. Houser & C. Kloesel (Eds.), Vol. 2: The Peirce Edition Project (Eds). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Raczaszek-Leonardi, J. (2012). Language as a System of Replicable Constraints. In H.H. Pattee & J. Raczaszek-Leonardi (Eds.), Laws, Language and Life: Howard Pattee’s Classic Papers on the Physics of Symbols (pp. 295–332). Berlin: Springer.
Ransdell, J. (1977). Some leading ideas in Peirce’s semiotic. Semiotica, 19, 157–178.
Sebeok, T. A. (2001). Global Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Steels, L. (Ed.). (2012). Experiments in Cultural Language Evolution. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Steels, L., & Hild, M. (Eds.). (2012). Language Grounding in Robots. Dordrecht: Springer.
Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2005). Solving the symbol grounding problem: a critical review of fifteen years of research. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Life, 17(5), 419–445.
Uexküll, J. (1934 [1992]). A stroll through the worlds of animals and men: A picture book of invisible worlds. Semiotica 89(4), 319–391.
Conflict of Interest Statement
The author declares that no conflict of interest is involved in the publication of this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Favareau, D. Symbols are Grounded not in Things, but in Scaffolded Relations and their Semiotic Constraints (Or How the Referential Generality of Symbol Scaffolding Grows Minds). Biosemiotics 8, 235–255 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-015-9234-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-015-9234-3