Biosemiotics and Peirce

3.1 Semiosis

It is notable that Sebeok, the founding thinker of biosemiotics, seems not to have adhered to such a view: “semiosis involves an irreducibly triadic relation among a sign, its object, and its interpretant” (2001: 27): for Sebeok, it is semiosis that forms the triadic relation between the three correlates, not the sign on its own as others have claimed, and in this he is simply following Peirce’s original definition of 1907:

It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All dynamical action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects [whether they react equally upon each other, or one is agent and the other patient, entirely or partially] or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between pairs. But by ‘semiosis’ I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a coöperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs. (EP2: 411, 1907)

For the dictionaries, the concept of semiosis was defined by Peirce in 1907, and Sebeok indeed quotes Peirce’s definition given above, but throughout his study offers other definitions which derive more from his research in biosemiotics. To wit, semiosis is conceived above all as an animate organism’s capacity to engage with signs: “[Semiosis] can be defined simply as the instinctive capacity of all living organisms to produce and understand signs” (2001: 3), and “Semiosis is the biological capacity itself that underlies the production and comprehension of signs, from simple physiological signals to those that reveal a highly complex symbolism” (2001: 8). Semiosis, for the biosemioticians, thus constitutes the organism’s capacity to “model” or, in other words, through the process of signification, organize its Umwelt, this being defined by Sebeok, following von Uexküll, as the “domain that a species is capable of modelling (the external world of experience to which a species has access)” (2001: 157). Cobley (2018) explains this theoretical position simply and clearly:

The human Umwelt, according to Sebeok, drawing upon von Uexküll, is a model; or, put another way, various acts of modelling on the side of the Innenwelt (the inner, subjective world of the animal) contribute to the constitution of the “objective” or “public” world of an animal species as Umwelt. Models are made up of signs: thus, semiotic systems are modelling systems. (2018: 34)

The problem with the adoption of “Peircean semiosis” by semioticians is that the “coöperation” mentioned in Peirce’s definition given above cannot in actual situations of semiosis be limited to three correlates: nor can the determination of the sign by the dynamic object as stated in the following later definition be immediate: ‘I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former’ (SS: 80–81, 1908). The definition states that the interpretant is mediately determined by the object, which might imply that the sign is immediately determined by the object. This is empirically and logically impossible. Inconveniently for triadicity, Peirce offers the following very clear definition of the term “immediate”: “to say that A is immediate to B means that it is present in B” (339: 243Av, 1905). Consequently, any agency or object, human or otherwise, triggering the process of semiosis cannot possibly have the sign “present in” it; were the case the interpreter would not perceive it and the sign would not produce any effect or reaction. As Peirce must have realized when he introduced his first hexadic typology in 1904 (SS: 32–34, 1904), it is the sign that must have something of the triggering object or agency “present in” it. The process of signification, therefore, requires more than three correlates, a process later explicitly described by Peirce in the letter to Lady Welby of 23 December 1908 as a series of five determination “stages” (Figure 1), and in which the sign from 1906 on functions as a medium:^[3]

It is evident that a possible can determine nothing but a Possible, it is equally so that a Necessitant can be determined by nothing but a Necessitant. Hence it follows from the Definition of a Sign that since the Dynamoid Object determines the Immediate Object,

which determines the Sign itself,

which determines the Destinate Interpretant,

which determines the Effective Interpretant,

which determines the Explicit Interpretant,

the six trichotomies, instead of determining 729 classes of signs, as they would if they were independent, only yield twenty-eight classes. (EP2: 481, 1908)

Figure 1:

The five-stage determination process in signification.

In this way, the process of semiosis as displayed by the determination sequence above and on Figure 1 is linear, where Od, Oi, S, Ii, Id and If are, respectively, the dynamic object the immediate object, the sign, followed by the sequence of immediate, dynamic and final interpretants;^[4] any semiotician adopting it has to be able to account for each of the stages. This is clearly a more complex conception of semiosis than any proposed by biosemioticians, who, by and large, are more comfortable with what they know of the Peircean semiotics of the Lowell Lecture of 1903: two objects and three interpretants are possibly seen as an extravagant irrelevance.

Thus, Sebeok, while not adopting the sign-as-triadic-relation principle like Sharov and Deely, for example, nevertheless offers more general definitions of semiosis than Peirce’s. Other differences between his and Peirce’s conception of the sign are evident in the monograph. One such case is the reduction to six the classes of signs that he defines. These are: symptom, signal, icon, index, symbol and name (2001: 8–11), none of which is identified by reference to defining and discriminating criteria as Peirce does from phenomenology, although, judging by the order of the three that he takes from Peirce’s three modes of representation – icon, index and symbol – they are organized in order of increasing complexity. Furthermore, although Sebeok refers to the structure of the dicent sinsign in a discussion of types of models (2001: 147), there seems not to be any explicit form of informational sign like Peirce’s dicent symbol. As the semiotics and an organism’s Umwelt, are in theory based upon a precise definition of the sign, they are thus necessarily representational, but not, like Peirce’s logic, explicitly propositional. In Sebeok’s case, information is communicated by means of messages: “Messages can be constructed on the basis of single signs or, more often than not, as combinations of them. The latter are known as texts. A text constitutes, in effect, a ‘weaving together’ of signs in order to communicate something. The signs that go into the make-up of texts belong to specific codes” (2001: 7).

The two conceptions of the sign also differ with respect to the scope of semiotics itself, as can be seen from Sebeok’s assimilation of Jakobsonian linguistics and information theory: “These six key factors – messages and code, source and destination, channel and context – separately and together make up the rich domain of semiotic” (2001: 32). What is commonly referred to as Peirce’s semiotics is, by contrast, an extended conception of the scope of logic, a logic of which applied, “idioscopic” versions have now been incorporated into linguistics, varieties of descriptive semiotics and biosemiotics.

As his research into semiotics and biology began over half a century later than Peirce, Sebeok was able to draw on many more recent and more varied scientific sources and authorities – Morris, Jakobson and von Uexküll, of course – it is natural that there should be differences between his comprehensive and self-contained conception of the semiotics as presented in Sebeok (2001) and the protean, unfinished theory left by Peirce almost a century earlier. This raises the issue of the continuing relevance of a century-old theory of the sign. What follows is a comparison of certain key aspects of the two approaches to signs, in order to highlight further significant differences between them. One pertains to aspects of the context of sign activity, and concerns the problem of “looking”. It thus introduces the issue of the “scopic”: namely, the relation holding between observer and object, and more broadly between organism and environment, topics inseparable from semiosis, representationalism and language. A second aspect concerns language and communication.

3.2 Observation

In Peirce’s classification of the sciences, it was axiomatic that “All knowledge whatever comes from observation; but different sciences are observational in such radically different ways that the kind of information derived from the observation of one department of science (say natural history) could not possibly afford the information required of observation by another branch (say mathematics)” (CP: 1.238, 1902). Moreover, claimed Peirce, ‘Observation is, in Agassiz’s phrase, the “ways and means” of attaining the purpose of science’ (CP: 1.238). For Peirce, too, in scientific endeavours, observation is key,^[5] hence his affection for the terminological division between the sciences of discovery into cenoscopic and idioscopic, the “scopic” suffix deriving, via Bentham, from the Greek infinitive, σκοπεῖν, ‘to examine’, ‘to observe’. Now consider these remarks from Sebeok (2001):

One obvious implication of this postulated duality is that semiosis requires at least two actants: the observer and the observed. Our intuition of reality is a consequence of a mutual interaction between the two: Jakob von Uexküll ’ s private world of elementary sensations (Merkzeichen, ‘perceptual signs’) coupled to their meaningful transforms into action impulses (Wirkzeichen, ‘operation signs’) ; and the phenomenal world (Umwelt) , that is, the subjective world each animal models out of its ‘true’ environment (Natur, ‘reality’) , which reveals itself solely through signs. The rules and laws to which those sign processes – namely, semiosis – are subject are the only actual laws of nature. ‘As the activity of our mind is the only piece of nature known to us,’ he argued in his great work, Theoretical Biology, ‘its laws are the only ones that have the right to be called laws of Nature’ (Uexküll 1973 [1928]: 40). (2001: 33)

[W]hat a semiotic model depicts is not ’reality’ as such, but nature as unveiled by our method of questioning. It is the interplay between ’the book of nature’ and its human decipherer that is at issue. (2001: 26, emphasis added)

A polymath like Sebeok would no doubt have been aware of the research into embodiment undertaken by contemporaries in the cognitive science field such as Varela et al. (1993), for example, but it is common knowledge now that his conception of what Clark (2011: 222) has called a “coupled system”, involving in Sebeok’s case what he refers to neutrally as two “actants”, derived not from cognitive science but from his acquaintance with the biological researches of von Uexküll. For Sebeok, the relation holding between observer and observed is clearly characterized by mutual interaction, by a variety of reciprocal influence enacted between the two actants involved in the moment of observation. Moreover, the nature of this interaction is doubly dynamic: it involves this interplay, certainly, but in doing so each actant affects the other – in observing the object the observer “perturbs the latter’s condition”, as Sebeok has it. In other words, observation – looking – is reactive in such cases:

Any observer’s version of his/her Umwelt will be one unique model of the world, which is a system of signs made up of genetic factors plus a cocktail of experiences, including future expectations. A complicating fact of life is that the bare act of observation entails a residual juncture that disturbs the system being observed [emphasis added]. The essential ingredient, or nutriment, of mind may well be information, but to acquire information about anything requires, via a long and complex chain of steps, the transmission of signs from the object of interest to the observer’s central nervous system. Its attainment, moreover, takes place in such a manner that this influential action reacts back upon the object being observed so as to perturb its condition [emphasis added]. (2001, 34)

This statement states unambiguously that not only is the relation between observer and object one of mutual interaction, but that through the very act of observing the object the analyst is held to disturb or perturb that object in some way.

3.3 Language

Semiotic modelling within Sebeok’s conception of signs and their actions governs organisms’ means of communication seen as the transmission of messages. Innovatively, Sebeok sees human language as multimodal, composed initially of nonverbal communication followed later by verbal language. He posits nonverbal communication as basic and common to all animate organisms: “One of the main targets of a biological study of semiosis is nonverbal communication. Indeed, it is the ‘default mode’ of communication. Only the members of the species Homo sapiens are capable of communicating, simultaneously or in turn, by both nonverbal and verbal means” (2001: 11), such a capacity being uniquely available to animals by means of a variety of media or channels: “Animals communicate through different channels or combinations of media. Any form of energy propagation can, in fact, be exploited for purposes of message transmission” (2001: 12). Any such exchange of information between humans, the species that uses the modelling system of speech, is explained in terms of the encoding and decoding of messages (2001: 31), these being various types of text as mentioned above.

This ability to communicate verbally, he has suggested, was the development of a modelling system proper to communication between humans, and evolving over time through the process of exaption (Sebeok 2001: 147). Moreover, according to Sebeok, who was possibly influenced in this by Noam Chomsky’s so-called language acquisition device,^[6] the later verbal expressive system (“modelling device”) is innate: “With a brain capacity of 600–800 cc, this ancestral creature [homo habilis] must have had a mute verbal modelling device lodged in its brain, but it could not encode it in articulate, linear speech (Sebeok 2001: 146 [emphasis added]). See, too, this comment by Cannizzaro and Cobley: “Semiotics is the study of comparative Umwelten and, as such, must be concerned with animal and plant communication whilst principally attending to the human Umwelt which is characterised by what Sebeok called “language” – not linguistic communication but the innate and phylogenetically developed “modelling” device [emphasis added] mentioned above.” (2015: 210)^[7]

It would be unrealistic to review Sebeok’s comprehensive and innovative conception of biosemiotics in its entirety, but it can conveniently be summarized as interactive and representational. Although representational, it is not explicitly propositional in the Peircean sense: messages communicated within and between organisms are defined as texts, not dicent, informational signs. Observation involves interplay between two actants, be they observer and observed, or organism and environment, while two-stage human linguistic ability is construed as the realization of some form of innate modelling device.

4.1 Perception

Such a position can be explained by Peirce’s having adopted Kant’s contention that the purpose of conceptions was to reduce the multitude of external stimuli to the unity of a proposition, for he held the proposition, more generally the dicent symbol, to be the minimal complete unit of knowledge: propositional “knowledge that”.^[8] Just how such symbolic content is derived via perception from sense data is a complex affair which involves at least two forms of reasoning, hence of logic. One of these Peirce considered acritical, that is, as being beyond our conscious control; the other he held to be conscious and therefore open to control and correction. In the first case, the intellect directly receives the disparate mass of external stimuli in the form of sense data, over which, quite naturally, it has no control, since these are never known directly. The form of reasoning that is known, however, is the percept, namely what Peirce calls the “evidence of the senses”, which the intellect records as a positive, fallible but incorrigible and irreversible perceptual fact (CP: 2.140–143, 1902): “The perceptual facts are a very imperfect record of the percepts; but I cannot go behind that record. As for going back to the first impressions of sense, as some logicians recommend me to do, that would be the most chimerical of undertakings” (CP: 2.142, 1902).

Peirce dismisses as pointless any attempt to observe the original sense data, for he holds that in some unexplained way we experience the percept and that we experience it in the form of a positive proposition which we cannot help thinking to be true. The best that we can do is unconsciously test the evidence of our senses by means of inferences. Such ratiocination forms the basis of our future actions and constitutes a class of judicative inferences which Peirce terms “perceptual judgments”, since the process involves an abductive judgment concerning the nature of the percept. It is, in other words, the non-conscious framing of a hypothesis. Since perceptual judgments are such as they are: positive, incorrigible and irreversible, they are not open to the questions of truth and falsehood that are a feature of conventional epistemological querying:

It follows, then, that our perceptual judgments are the first premisses of all our reasonings and that they cannot be called in question. All our other judgments are so many theories whose only justification is that they have been and will be borne out by perceptual judgments. But the perceptual judgments declare one thing to be blue, another yellow -- one sound to be that of A, another that of U, another that of I. These are the Qualities of Feeling which the physicists say are mere illusions because there is no room for them in their theories. If the facts won’t agree with the Theory, so much the worse for them. They are bad facts. (CP: 5.116, 1903; cf., too, CP: 2.27, 1902).

The only way, then, to obstruct the gate of perception would be to shut down the entire sensorium. In the period when he was developing his categories, Peirce showed much interest in perception in the Harvard lectures on pragmatism of 1903, on which the material above is based. In spite of the more logical approach to pragmaticism in the various attempts to describe his pragmaticism in manuscript R318 of 1907, his conception of the “passive”, receptive nature of perception itself hadn’t changed in any way, as we see from this extract from MS R299 of 1906, in which Peirce is explaining what he means by “experience” and the inevitable shock that characterizes it:

Low grades of this shock doubtless accompany all unexpected perceptions; and every perception is more or less unexpected. Its lower grades are, as I opine, not without experimental tests of the hypothesis, that sense of externality, of the presence of a non-ego, which accompanies perception generally and helps to distinguish it from dreaming … But the important point [is], that the sense of externality in perception consists in a sense of powerlessness before the overwhelming force of perception. Now the only way in which any force can be learned is by something like trying to oppose it. That we do something like this is shown by the shock we receive from any unexpected experience. (LI 346–347, 1906).

Perception is thus initiated by the sense data emanating from the object observed, a principle that accords completely with his definition of reality as being independent of what anyone thinks it to be. Since the origin of any perception is the real, we cannot engage with it before and until it has made us aware of it. Thus activated by the sense data, perception brings with it the elements of logical thought, the categories included (EP2: 207, 1903). The paragraphs to follow examine how such a principle relates to the issues raised by the biosemioticians, the latter referencing, remember, Peirce as an early theoretical influence.

4.2 Observation

We begin with the problem of looking, observation. Many if not most contemporary biosemioticians consider with Thomas Sebeok that the relation holding between an observer and an observed object, like the one holding between an organism and its environment, is in some way dyadic: two “actants”. This is fully consonant with Peirce’s conception of the sign and semiosis, which are both dialogic in the sense that for either to function, at least two quasi-minds are required, as mentioned in the following definition:

For the purposes of this inquiry a Sign may be defined as a Medium for the communication of a Form. It is not logically necessary that anything possessing consciousness, that is, feeling of the peculiar common quality of all our feeling should be concerned. But it is necessary that there should be two, if not three, quasi-minds, meaning things capable of varied determination as to forms of the kind communicated. (R793: 1–2, 1906)

These are the logical equivalents of Sebeok’s two biological actants. However, as seen above, the biosemioticians’ conception of the observer-organism relation involves a form of interplay or mutual interaction, as Sebeok has it, in which in the observation the object is in some way disturbed (2001: 34). This aspect of the relation is clearly at odds with Peirce’s conception of perception – and hence of semiosis. In the latter case, it is the (dynamic) object which unilaterally and unidirectionally perturbs the observer. The object is the origin of the sense data entering the observing intellect via the gate of perception, to repeat Peirce’s striking metaphor. Consider, within the Peircean perspective, the trope of the lab technician as an example. When he or she peers into a microscope to examine some object, a moon rock, say, it is the object which perturbs the technician, not the technician the object. This is an elementary example of semiosis: the rock, as dynamic object, projects via the light medium a complexus of frequencies that form a sign as a complex sense datum; this then produces a series of effects upon the technician, possibly terminating in a cry of “Eureka!”. The final interpretant in such a case, the perturbing action produced by the object via the sign is verbal. Peircean semiosis is clearly linear, unlike more recent models. Just how this relates to observation can be explained by returning to Peirce’s notion of cenoscopy and its Greek origins: skopeo, ‘I see’, ‘I look’, and what is common, koinos. The differences between the position of the biosemioticians and the earlier Peircean one can clearly be seen in these two definitions of the entry for the verb “look” in the Oxford English Dictionary:

look, v. I.I To direct one’s sight. 1.I.1 intr. To give a certain direction to one’s sight; to apply one’s power of vision; to direct one’s eyes upon some object or towards some portion of space.

behold, v. […] 7.I.7 trans. a To hold or keep in view, to watch…arch. This has passed imperceptibly into the resulting passive sensation: b To receive the impression of (anything) through the eyes, to see: the ordinary current sense.

In the first definition the verb signifies an active process: “to direct one’s eyes upon some object”; in the second, a passive process: “To receive the impression of (anything) through the eyes”. The two types of observation discussed above respect this division. A well-known enactivist like Alva Noë, for example, clearly espouses the active sense of the verb: “Perception is not something that happens to us or in us, it is something we do” (quoted by Clark 2011: 170). Moreover, Sebeok and biosemioticians that he has influenced would all see looking, observing, as active in this sense, too, since it is generally accepted that in the process of observing the object analyzed is disturbed. Consider, however, with respect to active and passive looking, this remark by Heidegger:

In the statement “Science is the theory of the real,” what does the word “theory” mean? The word “theory” stems from the Greek verb theorein. The noun belonging to it is theoria. Peculiar to these words is a lofty and mysterious meaning. The verb theorein grew out of the coalescing of two root words, thea and horao. Thea (cf. theater) is the outward look, the aspect, in which something shows itself, the outward appearance in which it offers itself. (Heidegger 1982: 163)

Combined with Peirce’s theory of perception, Peircean semiosis offers a different perspective on how we look: the object determines, through the sign, a reaction in the interpreter-analyst. The “directionality” involved in the looking begins with the object, not the analyst. This differs completely both from the first, OED sight-directing, definition and from the sort of interactive relation between analyst and object as described by Sebeok. In observation in its Peircean perspective, skopeo, ‘I look’ is, rather, à la Heidegger, ‘I am determined/modified in my look’. It is the object which initiates the observing process, and in this process of looking, it is the object in what Heidegger refers to as “the outward appearance in which it offers itself” which determines the observer. In the laboratory example, the technician’s eye is struck by a certain distinctive pattern of light emitted by the object and he or she reacts to it. Peircean observation assimilates beholding, not the active looking, the active direction of sight towards an object. To take a theatre example, we conventionally consider the audience at a play or in the cinema to be “spectators”, active lookers, but in fact semiosis works here exactly as in the laboratory case: aural and visual stimuli emitted by the players in a variety of forms are not actively sought but, rather, passively “absorbed”, taken in, by the audience, and then produce a reaction, i.e. interpretants, in its members – actions such as laughter, clapping, or internal qualities of feeling. This might be dismissed as a radical form of objectivism; nevertheless, it is the way observation presents itself from a Peircean perspective, if the conception of semiosis adopted here is correct. In observation from a Peircean perspective, to look is “to receive the impression of (anything) through the eyes”.

4.3 Language

How would this Peircean combination of perception and semiosis apply to language? Sebeok, like Cannizzaro and Cobley, sees language, both the nonverbal and the later verbal, as processed by means of an innate device serving this purpose: an ‘innate and phylogenetically developed “modelling” device’ as Cannizzaro and Cobley have it (2015: 210). Now, since the elements of every concept are deemed by Peirce to enter into logical thought at the gate of perception in the guise of perceptual judgements – abductive inferences – it follows that any further activity of the intellect can involve nothing but further inferences, and any phylogenetically developed capacity for language in any form will have been constructed from inferences stimulated by communication, by the exchange of experience, with the “Other”. In short, animate organisms, at their different levels and according to their experience, are “inference machines”, and it is through myriad sequences of such inferences that humans, for example, have acquired the capacity to communicate verbally, perception ultimately producing, pace Noam Chomsky, habits – more or less idiosyncratic habits of syntax, of pronunciation, of articulation.^[9] From a Peircean perspective, there is no need for a device of any sort – from the day we are born we perform inferences from the stimuli imposed upon us by the world we live in. We learn to communicate successfully with our fellow humans, verbally or by means of many types of semioses, in addition to acquiring inferentially a multitude of other skills and habits.

Moreover, according to Peirce, “No communication of one person to another can be entirely definite, i.e., non-vague…. But wherever degree or any other possibility of continuous variation subsists, absolute precision is impossible. Much else must be vague, because no man’s interpretation of words is based on exactly the same experience as any other man’s” (CP: 5.506, 1905). In conjunction with every individual’s distinct inferential acquisition of language and communicating skills, such a state of affairs is likely to be the source of much language dysfunction, breakdown in communication, misunderstandings, etc., and, at the same time, must surely be one of the sources of language change and the possibility of grammatical reanalysis, grammaticalization. It is difficult to see how an innate device might malfunction phylogenetically in such cases. Finally, it would be more in line with Peircean logic and with theoretical consistency to replace the better-known terms “encoding” and “decoding” employed by Sebeok by “mediatization”^[10] and “interpretation”, concepts that avoid the dyadic implications of the code.

Thus – reasoning from the Peircean conception of perception and semiosis as presented above – since all our knowledge is acquired by inference, there is no reason for our knowledge of language to be acquired any differently. One of the frequently touted arguments in favour of generative grammar was the notion that although capable of understanding infinitely many sentences, no human being has more than a finite period of time in which to learn them, hence the necessity of an innate acquisition device. On the contrary, speakers bring to the speech act their unique experience of the world and try as best they can to make sense of what the other is saying: for Peirce, the evolution of thought – and with it, language – is dialogic (LI: 326, 1906). This suggests that language is an aggregate – more, an “un-preformatted” aggregate – not an inviolable, perfect system, even less an innate, pre-existent, universally shared whole that speakers carry around in their heads.

From a Peircean perspective, then, the argument for an innate device is irrelevant, and a purely quantitative conception of exposure to experience underestimates the nature of the inferential capacities of the human being: until we find convincing proof to the contrary, there is no reason to suppose that knowledge of language is ever complete or that the “structure” of one’s native tongue is not inferred like the other information derived from perception. If this is the case, then language – verbal and nonverbal – is, from a Peircean point of view, an open-ended system, not a closed, pre-established one whose putatively determinate structure diligent linguists seek to uncover.

4.4 Mind

What of the brain and mind? Alva Noë’s claim is that we are not our brains (2009). His enactivist thesis is that our awareness of our environment, our consciousness, does not reside in the brain, but is constructed, enacted by the sort of dynamic interplay or interaction with the environment in a manner consonant with the coupled system attributed in this paper to Sebeok and other biosemioticians, although for Sebeok the relation between organism and environment is less a question of enaction than of signification: ‘In brief, the brain, or mind, which is itself a system of signs, is linked to the putative world of objects, not simply by perceptual selection, but by such a far-off remove from physical inputs – sensible stimuli – that we can safely assert that the only cognizance any animal can possess, “through a glass, darkly,” as it were, is that of signs’ (2001: 34). What form would a Peircean view of this problem take? Consider, in this respect, these two extracts, the first from the Prolegomena paper of 1906, the second from MS R318 of 1907:

Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there. (LI: 326, 1906)

The action of a sign generally takes place between two parties, the utterer and the interpreter. They need not be persons; for a chamelion and many kinds of insects and even plants make their livings by uttering signs, and lying signs, at that. Who is the utterer of signs of the weather, which are not remarkably veracious, always? (R318: 419, 1907)^[11]

No doubt Peirce, whose time spent with Agassiz, a Harvard professor of zoology (CP: 1.229, 1902) was surely not entirely taken up with the rules of classification, would agree with Noë that mind and consciousness, awareness of the environment, were not the prerogative of the brain, for he holds even more radically that thought, habit and semiosis are to be found not only in animate organisms such as humans and bees, but also in what John Deely refers to as physiosemiosis,^[12] namely sign activity in the inorganic realm, here crystals and “throughout the purely physical world”. As seen in the quotation above from manuscript R318, Peirce is even more emphatic on the capacity for semiosis of non-human animate organisms: many kinds of insects and plants, he says, survive by producing signs – “lying signs, at that” – by camouflaging themselves, that is, formed by habit to pretend to be what they are not, either for protection or to attract prey. But in Peirce’s case this is not zoology or ethology, but logic: “In its broader sense, [logic] is the science of the necessary laws of thought […] which […] coincides with the study of the necessary conditions of the transmission of meaning by signs from mind to mind, and from one state of mind to another” (CP 1.444, 1896?). With respect to which, we have the following robust statement from Thomas Sebeok:

No one, at present, knows how afferent neuronal activity acquires meaning, beyond the strong suspicion that what is commonly called the ’ external world,’ including the objects and events postulated as being contained in it, is the brain’s formal structure (logos). For all practical purposes, we are ignorant about how the central nervous system preserves any structure and assigns a meaning to it, how this process relates to perception in general, and how it induces a response. Implicit in this set of queries is a plainly linear model: for example, that fear or joy ’causes’ increased heart rate. Not only does such a model seem to me far too simplistic, but there is not even a shred of evidence that it exists at all. (2001: 80)

The broader sense of logic in Peirce’s texts quoted above (e.g. CP 1.444, 1896?), is, of course, his logic as semeiotic, not the traditional Critic as described in the Syllabus (EP2: 256, 1903). What he was saying, over a hundred years ago, is that the transmission of meaning is not from brain to brain as might be thought in some folk theory of psychology, the sort that Sebeok is rejecting, but from mind to mind, which, in his broader conception of logic, is described in the following remarkable manner and is, in effect, assimilating semiosis, a linear model: “… signs specially function between two minds, the one being the sign’s utterer, (not necessarily a vocal utterer, but putting forth the sign in any way) the other the sign’s interpreter. Indeed, a mind may, with advantage, be roughly defined as a sign-creatory in connection with a reaction-machine” (R318: 425, 1907). Peirce is careful here to avoid any psychological implications in this definition as the reaction-machine, which could, alternatively, be designated an interpretant-machine or interpreting machine, is connected not to a creator, but to a creatory. This definition of mind, purposely abstract and stripped of any possible association with any particular animate organism, is pure logic, and is typical of the difference between the “perception-semiosis” conception of observation, language and the brain presented as Peircean in this paper and that of what is posited above as mainstream biosemiotics.