Volume 13, Issue 4

The unification of the theory of semiotics has been an ambition of the IASS-AIS since the First World Congress in 1974. In his Preface to the Proceedings, Umberto Eco set the participants with certain fundamental tasks, including “providing the discipline with a unified methodology and a unified objective.” At the Second Congress, however, the multitude of topics and approaches led to the prevailing question of the Closing Session: “Can Semiotics Be Unified?” By the Fifth Congress the organizers would claim that theoretical differences “served to strengthen rather than to divide.” This paper traces the origin of this disunity to the writings of Aristotle and their interpretation by late classical and medieval theologians. Received wisdom tells us that linguistic semiology forms a part of general semiotics – the part dealing with either linguistic or conventional signs. This paper overturns that view, demonstrating that (linguistic) relations of equivalence and (semiotic) relations of implication operate in perpendicular planes of semiosis, intersecting at the point of the thing itself. These two planes of semiosis exist as unconnected theories in Aristotle, but become conflated in Augustine. This paper resolves the relationship between semiotics and semiology and in doing so, provides a unified methodology and objective.

In this essay, eight fallacies of elementary semiotics are presented, analyzed from an empirical viewpoint, and corrected to the best of my present knowledge. These eight fallacies are called: The Sign Fallacy The Fallacy of Interpretation at a Distance The Fallacy of Instantaneous Interpretation The One-Way Interpretability Fallacy The Inference Fallacy The Fallacy of Things The Fallacy of Isolation The Realism Fallacy By properly sensing and correcting these eight fallacies, we may see more deeply into semiotic structure, allowing us to develop theories more representative of that structure and thus reach a better understanding of the underlying semiotic reality. This advance in depth of understanding is comparable to the difference in depth of understanding of physical reality allowed by Aristotelian physics and that allowed by Newtonian physics. We can be optimistic, however, since we have the Einsteinian revolution in semiotics to look forward to.

Wittgenstein gave no real definition of the strategy of language, so that clear definitions of the language-game and the underlying forms of life are explained in tentative hypotheses. The study of the language-game is an empirical idea of inquiry: Its possible definition can be extrapolated from the source of Wittgenstein’s own writings, tracing out the meaning from the examples. Here viewed from a semiotic standpoint, Wittgenstein is boosted as a semiotic philosopher of language, moving in the conceptual development from Saussure’s interpreted-signs to Peirce’s interpretant-signs. The history of Wittgenstein’s language-game and forms of life generate linguistic-and-cultural (linguïcultural) forms of play-acts . Wittgenstein liked “engineering” examples of practical language-games, such as the carpenter’s toolbox and the building blocks. The “bricks” of the reconstruction of Wittgenstein’s language-games are shown by the interjective keywords to announce the building blocks. This cognitive and creative game of language can be applied to solve and understand the “building” messages of Wittgenstein’s language-games.

We can say Ben is reading , but not Ben’s body is reading . The relational account says that this is because our bodies are objects that do not read. On the false-implication account, by contrast, to say Ben’s body is reading is to say that Ben is reading, while implying, falsely, that reading is some sort of brute-physical property. Besides being metaphysically neutral, this sort of view explains far better why we cannot say such things as Ben’s mind is six feet tall . But neither account explains why we cannot say Ben’s body is six feet tall . The article argues that a variant of the false-implication account can solve this puzzle.

This paper is divided into five parts. The introduction presents some implications of the relational nature of human beings as well as other living beings, and establishes a connection between biosemiotics and existentialist thinking. The second part indicates key points of a “semiotics of being” as a genuine outlook within semiotics. In “Universals of biosemiosis”, the third part, a number of common features of everything and anyone alive are identified. The fourth part, “On Earth – the natural setting of the human condition”, sets the stage for a few ecologically and astronomically minded reflections in philosophical anthropology. In the fifth and concluding part, “On the alienation of the semiotic animal”, observations are made on some existential implications of the characteristically human form of being. Part of the motivation for the paper is to demonstrate, firstly, that existential semiosis plays a key role in human semiosis, and secondly, that other living beings too live through existential dramas.

Among the different orientations in biosemiotics, those moved by Peircean ideas tend to agree that the organization of non-living parts into organisms cannot be made intelligible without supplementing the traditional resources of the physical sciences with novel kinds of causation. This is particularly true with regard to semiosis – the influence by which signs mediate the determination of interpretants by their objects. Consideration of special forms of causation and explanation is important for assessing the place of biosemiotics within biology. In my view the promise of biosemiotics far exceeds its role as a biological sub-discipline governing the semiotic aspects of living processes (cellular signaling, organic codes, etc.). Beyond this, biosemiotic research should include two other important endeavors: first, if semiosis is essential to the constitution of the objects of biological science, biosemiotic ideas must have foundational and integrative roles comparable to those of evolutionary conceptions; and second, these roles should promote a wholesale redefinition of the place of biology within the sciences. This examination seeks to clarify the relations between semiosis and ordinary physical causation. It also proposes a new perspective on the evolutionary nature of emergence by taking into account the increasing importance of evolutionary explanations in some branches of contemporary physics.