Living the duty of care: languaging in semiotic fields

1.1 Overview

In privileging semiotic fields, in Section 2, I reject folk conceptions and linguistic or sign views of “language.” Rather than divide linguistic “objects” from people, human feeling, acting, and speaking all contribute to living in semiotic fields. Languaging unites circumstances, living landscapes, and, thus, epistemic concerns. In Section 2.1, I trace the inertia of global politics, in part, to how sign views of “language” reduce ethics to issues of discourse. In calling for action, an anti-humanist ethics begins with being seized. In semiotic fields, events set off languaging and, thus, ethical responding. Since this can engender the new, for all our limitations, we can change the possible. In Section 2.2, taking an agnostic stance to the ontology, I address what Cobley calls the “mind independent.” In Section 2.3, I show how experience distills the new in “pro-optative” acts (and use of wordings). Hence, desiderata draw widely on things that are not mind dependent. In Section 3, I disentangle semiotics from causal powers by showing how non-semiotic things inform the activity of languaging. In Section 3.1, I illustrate how prosody brings an ethical edge to the fore. For this reason, there are gains in placing languaging in semiotic fields. In Section 3.2, I link this to causal powers, science and its limits. Although I remain agnostic about a semiotic realism, I adopt the core insight that living beings draw on things we can describe as signs (as part of living nature). In conclusion, in Section 4, I favor semiotics over semiosis. By focusing on semiotic fields, I suggest, one can pursue what binds the known, the knowable, the unknown, and the unknowable. One thus brings observership to the fore and gains some hope of averting catastrophe.

2.1 Seized by events

Ethics are often treated as knowing how one ought to act. Commentators identify what enables an individual, community, and/or institution to gain (or possess) knowledge of what is “incorrect” (or correct). To act ethically is thus to meet discursive standards. As in law, a dichotomy between what is and is not correct assumes a sign view of “language.” Just as an act may be “legal” (or not), what a person believes, says, or does may be “right” (or not). The distinction is ascribed to “language” and, in various senses, to “context.” Even if the logic is naïve, the view is common. For example, as part of a pro-environmental agenda, an article in The Guardian (2022) reports the European Commission’s vice-president, Frans Timmermans, as saying: “We are killing species at an unprecedented rate. And killing those species will make our survival less likely. If we can get that concept into people’s minds more broadly, I am sure politicians will have to react to people’s outcry: ‘Well, fix this before you kill us.’” The words actually spoken imply (among other things):

1. We know that killing species may threaten humans.

2. People need to get the concept into their minds.

3. If people make an outcry, politicians may act to fix the problem.

Alongside the pronouncement that “we” kill whole species, the vice-president’s words are revealing. In the first place, for Timmermans, political action uses, not what is right, but, rather, public outcry. Second, he implies that an unprecedented rate of killing is wrong, not in itself, but because “our survival” becomes less likely. He links political action to anthropocentric, utilitarian discourse and a need for public outcry. The logic is voluntaristic: we choose to kill species and, once we get a concept “into our minds,” we can choose outcry. Then, if so inclined, power can choose to act. Politicians act ethically if, and only if, the results align to public discourse about what is right (or not). For Cobley, the world could be different. With Engels (1946/1886, cited in Cobley 2007: 73), he regards voluntarism as a myth. As Cobley notes, it is contradictory to reduce ethics to a moral system and, at once, to evoke individual or social will. The view assumes an “ahistorical” and “complacent” theory of knowledge (Cobley 2007: 74).

In order to do better, Cobley extends the other-oriented humanism of Ponzio et al. (see 2006). In all their work, “semiosis and life converge” (Petrilli and Ponzio 2009: 150). Human self-consciousness imposes a duty of care on a humanism of the other. However, rather than begin on a “plane of discourse” (Cobley 2007: 74), one can turn back to semiotic fields. From here, it is intrinsically wrong to kill species at an unprecedented rate – we feel this as we think. In the thick of things, responsibility demands care for the living. In Peircean terms, while immanent in the sign it remains external – human agency must “compromise with circumstances” (Cobley 2007: 79). For Althusser and Balibar (1970), such an anti-humanist ethics grants “man” no essence. As Marx would say, moral systems and “reality” stem from control of the means of production. Even if one rejects the analysis, practices unite people, things, and institutions: discourse has, at best, a part in “social reality.” Hence, living in a semiotic field can set off a “truth” as one feels, observes, or draws on wordings (and discourse). In Badiou’s (2001) terms, one is seized by events. Acknowledging that the view requires refinement, Cobley uses it to reject an ethics of voluntarism. A sense of what is right uses, not the cogito, but observership and experience or how, as part of nature, we experience responsibility. The view also challenges individualism or, as suggested elsewhere, is bioecological (Steffensen and Cowley 2021).^[2] It demands an ecosophy (see Stibbe 2021) or a moral approach that, in ecolinguistics, brings enjoyment and understanding to striving for life-sustaining relations. In China, it connects ecological civilization with an ancient philosophy of human and natural harmony (see Huang and Zhao 2021). Elsewhere, it appears as Stibbe’s (2021) ecosophical motto: “Live!”’ Natural inclusion brings judgement to events and thus challenges authority. Here, Cobley identifies a third danger – universalism. Circumstances vary from moment to moment, and so one must avoid checklists of universal (or national) values. In rejecting voluntarism, individualism, and universalism, an anti-humanist ethics puts “language” in its place. Doing the right thing is, above all, a matter of responding, acting, and linking a critical grasp of the unknown with events and the facts of the matter. It is only once one is seized that, given circumstances, one can formulate what may be right.

Ethical “language” is often overplayed: public outcry can be manipulated by media use of experts and data sets. Using transparent evidence and argument (i.e. appeals to “language”), opinions reflect the concerns of technoscience, finance, and economics. Yet, as shown by COVID-19, war, or famine in North Africa, macro-models overlook change, contingencies, and the unknown (or “risk”). Hence, their “language” often serves only to legitimize certain interests. While undoubtedly a lie that education can lead to a prosperous life, the market demands prosumers. The young are trained to value products and pass on stories that earn the rewards of choice, sport, tourism, fashion, fine dining, etc. Especially in democracies, as De Beaugrande (1999) stresses, inclusive theory sustains exclusive practice. While acknowledging problems – wars, famine, ecological degradation, etc. – solutions are to be found by a global community of experts who:

1. collect data

2. make models

3. understand the facts/assess risks

4. report options

5. choose between scenarios

6. define problems

7. propose solutions

8. implement outcomes

9. etc.

Ethics are conspicuous by their absence. Given inclusive theory, “language” tends to sustain global institutions even if they degrade human and nonhuman living. Indeed, destruction of ecosystems and human communities is cloaked by discursive values that include, for example, free trade, democracy, or rule of law. By ignoring semiotic fields, social reality highlights the macro concerns of growth-led economics and technoscience. Given their dominance, expertise, data, and policy are increasingly directed as such issues. The status quo seeks evidence to justify decisions by mesmerizing displays of social “reality” that set off outcry (and distracting debate). Conversely, an anti-humanist ethics begins with events in semiotic fields. It builds on how humans and nonhumans respond in thought and feeling. Once one treats “language” as an abstraction, one leaves behind voluntarism, individualism, and universalism. One senses how much we do not know about humans, nonhumans and thingishness. Our limitations challenge “science” to work for ecosocial equity and life-enhancing relations. By drawing on observership, we can change ourselves, our attitudes, and how we actualize practices. An anti-humanist ethics can therefore nurture positive action, create new stories, and, thus, alter both languaging and practices. With this in place, I return to implications for semiotic theory and, thus, what lies beyond that which we (believe we) know.

2.2 Beyond the mind-dependent

Hope arises in striving to change ourselves, others, and our languaging by using natural innovation. Rejecting anthropocentrism, we can use what is not mind dependent (or known) to direct change. For Cobley, this “to-and-fro” enables physics, biology, law, or semiotics to present versions of the world (c.f. Maturana’s [1988] objectivities “in parenthesis”). Thus, while semiotics pursues life, it also seeks the world’s essence – what eludes the mind dependent, data, and models. For Cobley, the key lies in how observers, things, events, and situations are perceived as signs. In some sense, they are mind independent. The intuition seems to build on a folk view of “mind” that, like the “language myth,” grounds millennia of practice. For a Rylean like myself, however, “mind” captures not inner gymnastics, but a network of practices that stabilize individual, social, and institutional knowing. Indeed, for Cobley too, “mind dependent” knowledge is socially sanctioned. Yet, like Poinsot and Deely, he also thinks that, given semiosis, human self-consciousness uses symbols that index the mind independent. While all animals use a primary modeling system (or how the averbal brings forth a world), humans know that there are signs. Causal effects use signs that are real. In its symbolic aspect, language gives humans a dual heritage (Cobley 2016) that reveals nature’s order or Poinsot’s ens reale. For Cobley, within a vast environment of semiosis, what language discloses or, the mind independent, grants humans semiotic consciousness.

Yet, if “mind” is a concept, the “mind independent” is a metaphorically “higher” concept. Viewed thus, it seems unlikely that lower-level events draw on a “reality” that is independent of mind. The known is no more “below” the unknown than the contrary: rather, one can deny that “all there is” reduces to “an arrangement of qualities.” As for Wheeler (1994), the anti-Humean point is that observership does not reduce to sense-impressions (see Deely 2015). Hence, expanding the known demands participation and innovative powers. Rather than turn to “consciousness,” one can offer an alternative. Many mammals exhibit wide cognition (Wilson 2005) as, for example, they seek signs of water or prey (i.e. semiotic fields enable intelligent and even directed activity). In hominins, collective life (Donald 1991) transformed human powers as we developed artifacts, institutions, and practices: in perceiving thigs as signs, we learn in groups, co-act, and, at times, extend the known. We use distributed agency or, alternatively, how material engagement (Malafouris 2019) informs events in distributed cognitive systems (Hutchins 2014). The peculiarities of human agency come to the fore in Ronald Giere’s (2004) discussion of how the Hubble served science. Persons, or “human cognitive agents,” use technology (and practices) to bring the distant universe within reach. Computer-generated images shape outputs that are selected and re-used (viz. as signs). A human cognitive agent, the astronomer, uses natural innovation, expertise, and contingency. In terms of this paper, she acts as an observer-participant who brings intuition (and feeling) to events triggered by a wide system’s cognitive outputs. Hence, agency is distributed socially, across artifacts, and over time. In using the Hubble, the human’s role is secondary in that the equipment exerts tight constraints on what can be seen. While images are what we see as signs, they arise as systems compute, measure energetics, and code (meaningless) information. Thus, reversing Giere’s emphasis, Cowley and Gahrn-Andersen (2022) stress how an astronomer sees an indicator of red shift in a fleck that appears in an image from space. Seeing a dynamic sign reduces to neither direct perception, sense-making, a priori content, nor mental gymnastics. Rather, it arises in being seized, or noticing, something in the world of astronomy. Using distributed cognition, and contingencies, a trained astronomer picks up what could be red shift. Although, they do not know how they do this, in Cowley and Gahrn-Andersen’s (2022) terms, they simplexify. They use what appears as a sign. But what is the pixelated fleck? In that it is computer-generated, it is neither mind dependent nor a pure relation. And yet, it is not mind independent either (viz. it depends on noticing and, drawing on various pasts, recognizing that can be described by signs).

2.3 Semiotics proper

Semiotics allows for real causation, as, in Deely’s (2015) terms, signs pervenate from the suprasubjective. Humean “causation” is replaced by how observership draws on mind independent signs. In Peircean realism^[3] (see Ritz 2022) as Deely suggests (2015), signs reveal a real unknown. As Cobley would argue, noticings can lead to correct perceiving. Paraphrasing Bruner (1973), a person uses signs to go beyond the information given. Metaphysics aside, as red shift shows, noticing transcends mere sense-impressions. So let us turn to a famous case of innovation. Reporting (or recalling) watching an ant on the beach, Herbert Simon writes: “Viewed as a geometric figure, the ant’s path is irregular, complex, hard to describe. But its complexity is really a complexity in the surface of the beach, not a complexity in the ant” (Simon 1981: 51). In Cobley’s terms, the ant sets off a fro: a mind independent ant shapes a mind dependent hypothesis. Ants, Simon infers (or abduces), use mechanisms that, in his view, are mind independent or objective (Wystrach [2013] offers another story). Hence, Simon’s ant can be used in various ways. In reaching beyond the mind dependent, Roy Pea treats the ant as showing distributed (or “wide”) intelligence. It arises from how we use what we perceive “to shape and direct possible activity emerging from desire” (Pea 1993: 49). Perhaps, like an ant, “desire” qualifies as mind independent. In one sense, indeed, I desire a reader who imagines Simon’s ant and, thus, re-evokes a to-and-fro that is not “mind dependent.” At very least, the zigzag of the ant on the beach uses unknowns. Not only does it set off more than sense-impressions (or affordances), but it permits observership. In standard terms, as a sign, the ant prompts context-free “language”:

1. The observer (or imaginer) of the ant exhibits detachment.

2. Given observation/imagining, description transcends the mind dependent (as written discourse or, strictly aggregated alphanumeric patterning).

3. In reaching beyond initial observership, one can treat the signs as emblematic wordings and as “pro-optative” or thus, loosely, “symbolic.”

The ant brings the unknown to future thinking (e.g. via a link [or colligation]) that can be based on appeal to cognitive simplicity, distributed intelligence, or the mind independent. In this sense, the use of wordings is pro-optative in that, over time, applications are channeled in a certain way. While allowing abductive inference, they bring stability to semiotic fields. A way with wordings (or a pattern in the data) can be a sign for those who use training, models, and a field of use to adjust their knowing. There is nothing odd with such a view: economics, astronomy, and semiotics all use pro-optatives, acts, data, and models to test hypotheses. They vary on how to conceptualize the “real.” As Maturana (1988) suggests, fields construct an “objectivity in parenthesis” (e.g. biology or economics).^[4] In semiotics, by contrast, appeal is made to a future-oriented “community of observer-participants” (Sebeok 1991: 48, cited in Cobley 2018: 29). Observership is taken to prefigure future knowing. Combining observership with semiosis suggests, for Peirce (1868), that, “from our own existence (which is proved by the occurrence of ignorance and error) that everything that is present to us is a phenomenal manifestation of ourselves” (Peirce 1868: 148, cited in Cobley 2018: 41). Confronted with such a view of the real, I prefer to be agnostic.

Noticing the ant on the beach while making pro-optative use of wordings need not attest to future knowing. The event may arise, rather, from what Simon, Pea, the reader, and others have already lived. We adopt ways or, for Peirce, take habits that bring multiscalarity to wordings, brain activity, and organism–environment relations. In semiotic fields, unthought collocations or “ideas” change incrementally (as likenesses). Simon’s noticing and/or imagining of an ant’s zigzags shapes these ways with wordings. In Sellars’s (1960) terms, languagings bring isomorphisms (see Seiberth 2021) and what, echoing Wittgenstein, he calls picturings.^[5] Like the fleck that indicates red shift, the ant is emblematic; in naming its significance, we simplexify. Although everything can be described in terms of signs, wordings help us to reach beyond sense-impressions. Like nonhumans, we draw on percacting to achieve causal effects by using things that appear as signs.

3.1 Enlarging anti-humanist ethics

While taking a distance from Paul Cobley’s realism, the paper celebrates what he taught me one evening in Prague. As we walked the streets, I spoke of my hopes for biosemiotics. He told me that I had things wrong: I should ask how things appear to us as signs. Even in pursuit of how living language, I should start with semiotics. While bewildered, even then, I “knew” he was right. In languaging, prosody is felt to mean (sic) or, as Williams (1989/1958) says, culture invites “responding to thought and feeling.” Since emplacement is a “to-and-fro,” prosody is not signaling (Cowley 1994). Oddly, even a bystander feels how others understand. By responding in prosodic thought and feeling, in Wheeler’s (1994) sense, we use observership. Given detachment, repeated listening, and acoustics, an ethnographer can track extraordinary detail in events. Prosody has antecedents and consequences that weave the reportable into doing and saying. Technically, mundane actions (in enchronic scales) set off micro- and pico-scale co-modulation. With gesture, gaze, and much besides, prosody thus co-enacts thought and feeling. In one example, Cowley (2014) reports a daughter who feels that mother is about to “go off on a rant” and, sensing it, utters “oh good.” Given emplacement, she uses her mother’s subtle voice dynamics to urge silence. Hearing the unsaid, her mother redoubles her complaint (Cowley 2014). Expressive activity also enacts a community’s social meaning (see Eckert and Labov 2017). For example, in a case from 1990s South Africa, I trace a dominance/subordinance routine (Cowley 2001, 2015) that indexes a post-apartheid setting. Specifically, two White administrators treat a senior Black teacher like a child who, inadvertently, reciprocates. All respond thought and feeling as they concert their voices. Reporting on use of the episode in a university course on crossing ethnic divides, one (presumably Black) student ties it to “problems we all face in our daily lives” (Cowley 2015). Prosodic and other expressive displays bring a social and moral dimension to events.

Focusing on how languaging is emplaced clarifies natural innovation. Thought and feeling use the sensed and the unknown as events linking understanding with a changing self that shows sensibility to the ethical and the aesthetic. As prosody begets prosody, simplex tricks trigger habits, use a detour principle, set off inhibiting, and, given wordings, permit vicariance. As bodies concert brains, eyes, and voices, people adjust to likenesses as they use things and dynamics, as signs. Positive and negative ways with wordings arise as people make/display judgements about happenings, situations, events, and, thus, each other. They use practices, certainties, and networks of beliefs as signs align with causal effects. Just as with identifying red shift, to respond in thought and feeling, is to simplexify. In complex worlds, to respond is often to put things to rights. Thus, as we orient to things as signs, how we understand draws on appearances and hidden aspects. Noticings and responding bring a moral dimension to events as we draw on pasts and the absent: seeking what may be right brings the ethical to action.

Orienting to one’s mother or rubbing the wounds of apartheid show the intrinsically ethical nature of human judging and percaction: these change how people act and inhibit as well as subsequent reports. When struck by sticky heat or Timmermans’s view of democracy, one brings bioecological awareness to living in a semiotic field. Its ethical aspect is public and, thus, affects actors and bystanders. Just as a person can feel how trees suffer from drought, one can sense a need for activism. With bioecological awareness, one sees why a limited grasp of public politics gains from, say, an ecosophy (qua post-hoc rationalization) or seeing that ecosocial inequity is inseparable from ecological destruction. Anti-humanist ethics changes attitudes, spreads stories, and invites new ways of languaging. By starting in semiotic fields, one challenges universalism, voluntarism, and individualism. Ethics and understanding use natural innovation to shape ways with wordings that can take on collective and individual power.

3.2 Causal powers and science

As we perceive and construe signs, events, the unknown, and the unknowable collide. As I learned in Prague, we use things that appear as signs. Semiotics draws on this sensitivity and, thus, how ethics permeates understanding (and being seized). Philosophically, the view unites anti-Humean realism with how signs trigger what Vukov and Lassiter (2020) call causal powers: it links semiotics to radical embodiment by giving weight to emplaced events. As we act, causal powers link what appear as signs to dispositions and, for Vukov and Lassiter (2020), manifestation partners that are often non-semiotic. As with Simon’s ant or Dennett’s centers of gravity, what appear as signs bring living systems together with informational constraints. Yet few in cognitive science acknowledge either natural innovation or ask how we draw on things that appear as signs. Perhaps the views will come to merge. Indeed, the semiotic seems to need the non-semiotic if it is to contribute to life-sustaining relations between humans and nonhumans. In order to build ecological civilizations, we must link how things appear, ethical bias, and engineering. In seeking new harmonies, humans can seize responsibility for the future of evolution.

Distributed agency transformed human powers. Human doing, knowing, and practices use a history that led to the Hubble (and, thus, social organization). Hence, Giere’s (2004) human cognitive agents build (and identify) dispositions around events in semiotic fields. For example, in seeing an image as a sign, one sees better and, in so doing, simplexifies. The ethical slant appears as daughter tries to stop her mother’s rant or how White administrators act transparently with repetitive simple “language.” Both the administrative procedures and the Hubble act as distributed or “flat” structures that prompt individual dispositions and participation in practices. We use what, in the epigraph, are called “movements to and fro between the mind dependent and the mind independent” (Cobley 2018: 22). Having tracked the latter to the variety of thingishness, I can both endorse and deflate the remark. While agnostic about the reality of “semiosis,” I stress how things appear to us as signs. On this view, the prosodic and expressive aspects of languaging bring the ethical to the known, knowable, and, perhaps, even the unknowable. Emblematically, the mind independent thus includes actual ants (whatever they are), feels, literal plasticity, and lost-sock centers. Indeed, its basis may lie in not semiosis, but how we bring causal powers to signs and their parts.