Meaningfulness and applicability of semiotic concepts in biosemiotics
The 1st Gatherings in biosemiotics was held 22 years ago in Copenhagen and the first sentence of its CFP proclaimed the intention “to establish a regular framework for discussions of biosemiotics in the context of biology”. I must have been taken that seriously, because without being biologist at all, my talk was titled “How and why to naturalize semiotic concepts for biosemiotics?”, i.e. how semiotic concepts of human, mental, logical, and linguistic sciences might be applicable in the natural science of biology (Vehkavaara 2002). Eight years later, the sixth of the so-called Saka-theses (Kull et al. 2009) proclaimed “(b)iosemiotics does not take for granted the wide variety of concepts of the sign, sign action, and so on […] but undogmatically sees these as a resource for the construction of an up-to-date, refined, and better-grounded […] version of a general semiotics” (p. 170). The question is the same as my talk in 1st Gatherings. One of the many difficulties in this is the integration of conceptual and empirical studies. Often in empirical studies, the phenomena are dealt with standard biological manners, and the semiotic concepts either play a rather thin and decorative role, or are referred only in some vague intuitive senses. Theoretical studies, in turn, easily stuck into debates between competing abstract definitions without criteria specific enough to control their applicability. Some of the theoreticians start from a kind of foundational and universalistic semiotic metaphysics or transcendental philosophy (seemingly e.g. Søren Brier, John Deely, Kalevi Kull, and Thure von Uexküll) that is supposed to replace more standard non-semiotic naturalism. Others take the opposite strategy and start from standard physical theory but aim to end up showing how semiotic concepts emerge or become possible as the complexity of physico-chemical systems increases (e.g. Deacon 2013, Short 2007, Bickhard 1998, and to some extent Hoffmeyer 1993). This last strategy may nevertheless be too consuming for more concrete studies, and therefore perhaps some antifoundationalist and pluralist naturalism would be more preferable. In these biosemiotic approaches, it would be accurate to consider on which grounds and how the theoretical starting points are chosen?
In empirical studies, the choice appears often as rather random, but it is implicitly present even in the naturalistic strategy of Deacon and others, because some preliminary idea about signhood or meaningfulness is after all required. Be the starting points some already developed semiotic conceptions or merely intuitive ideas, we should pay attention to the semiotic phenomena that we use as exemplary prototypes for the used or constructed concepts of sign, meaning, etc. Of the already established semiotic theories and conceptions applied in biosemiotic studies, several motivating problems and starting point intuitions can be listed: (1) subjectively meaningful perception (e.g. Uexküll, Husserl, and Sonesson), (2) socially shared mental ideas (e.g. Saussure and structuralists, Lotman, and later Wittgenstein), (3) representational cognition of rational inquiry (Peirce and Dewey), (4) mechanical action or correspondence (e.g. Barbieri’s cry “meaning is a molecule!”, protosign of Sharov 2015, and possibly Morris’ behaviorism), (5) intentional or teleological action (e.g. Alexander 2013, constructive representation of Vehkavaara 2003, and minimal ontological representation of Bickhard 1998). These differing starting points produce the differently structured and functioning concepts of sign or meaning. I would take it unlikely that any single concept of sign or semiosis could be sufficient to describe all biosemiotic processes and be somehow self-evidently universally applicable. It is also possible that in many cases more than one differently structured signs functions together.
References
Kull, K. et al. (2009). Theses on Biosemiotics: Prolegomena to a Theoretical Biology. Biological Theory 4(2), 167–173.
Stjernfelt, F. (2022). Sheets, Diagrams, and Realism in Peirce. de Gruyter GmbH. Berlin/Boston.