A Short Introduction to Edusemiotics

1 Historical antecedents

One does not have to look far to find a common history between semiotics (the study of signs, and signification) and education. In fact, Augustine (354–430AD) begins his famous De Doctrina Christiania (on Christian doctrine, or, On Christian Teaching) with the important remark “learning concerns either things or signs, but it is through signs that we learn what things are” ([397AD], book 1, line 2).^[1] In these opening lines a sophisticated philosophical perspective is put forward, a point of view that will eventually come to be recognized within the purview of semiotics. Here is the recognition that humans and animals alike only know the mind-independent things of their environment through attributing meaning and value to them: by bringing them within their species-specific phenomenal world (or Umwelt, the term later adopted in biosemiotics from von Uexküll 1973 [1928], see Sebeok, 2001 [1994]: 27, and, further, also in edusemiotics, see Nöth in Semetsky, 2010:5 and Stables 2012:1, 40, Stables et al. 2014).^[2]

Let us be clear, edusemiotics does not mean semiotics applied to education, as a pedagogical aid or teaching/research tool. Edusemiotics is a growing global research project that, like Augustine, thinks semiotics as the foundation for educational theory and practice at large.^[3] “A sign is something by knowing which we know something more” (CP 8.332) Charles Peirce said. That is, a sign’s meaning is always virtual and waiting to be realized in some (possible) future interpretation (see CP 5.427, CP 5.97). Conceptualizing learning-as-semiosis means that learning is not reducible to internal mental states, neurological activity, or behavioral responses. Undoubtedly this deferred event we call learning involves a little of all the above, for signs are mediations. Mediating what? Well, anything entering-into-relation: subject–object; mind–body; animate life–inanimate matter; culture–nature; and most directly for our purposes, teacher–learner. Recognizing the primacy of relations in these various encounters involves recognizing a distinctive form of being (ontology) that doesn’t reduce neatly into axioms, formal systems, or reductionist accounts.

2 Transcending dualism

As Andrew Stables (Semetsky and Stables 2015: 31–45) details clearly, when mind and matter are thought of as fundamentally distinct, learning is reified and mystified, no matter where we sit on the mentalist–materialist tightrope:

Thus the mind-matter dualism partly attributable to, and certainly exemplified by, Descartes encourages materialist responses that both valorize mathematically-based conceptions of nature and society as predictable and controllable and devalue any conception of mentalistic activity. As a result, conceptual confusion can occur between positions that are “anti-Cartesian” in a thoroughgoing way (those that reject the mind-matter divide) and those that are materialistic and anti-subjectivist (that prioritise objectifiable matter over mind). (32)

Such a research heritage has resulted in inadequate explanatory frameworks that adhere to a strongly dyadic conception of the sign defined through binary opposition, “in which a term is understood in the context of its opposite” (Stables and Semetsky, 2015: 32). Thus, these frameworks privilege substance dualism, materialist and behaviorist responses that favor predictability and the rejection, or at least nullifying, of mental processes, and paradoxically, the opposite, that is, radial constructivism and solipsism, where any interpretation can be recognized as valid. Without going too deeply into analysis, we can witness this substance mind–body dualism at work in popular pedagogical assumptions that “take for granted the existence of an ‘educable’ inner intelligence distinct from a ‘trainable’ bodily organism, despite calls in the philosophy of education for more attention to the embodied nature of both knowledge and teaching” (33). Indeed, the very orienting premise of much formal education (that the child is an incomplete or underdeveloped adult) is reflective of this basic substance dualism.

The anthropocentrist idea of humans being distinguished by their potentiality to undergo education and, as such, of participating in a sociocultural life which is unknown to other animals originates in the early modern educational philosophy of contractualism (see Rousseau’s Emile, 1911 [1762]; Hobbes’ Leviathan, 1909 [1651]), inherent in turn of mind–body dualism. This assumption oriented much of the modern educational research to come, which, as particularly noticed in Piaget (1959 [1926]), has attributed particular cognitive capacities for learning to human infants. Thus, particularly the capacity of learning a language, as a specifically human capacity, came to be considered as the key to all learning, endorsing the linguistic turn, whereby knowledge, the object of learning, came to be understood as constructed entirely in linguistic categories. The semiotic approach to education challenges the assumptions for learning and education of the linguistic turn, claiming that learning processes occur more broadly in nature. In this view, learning is not construed as a matter of linguistic articulation but, more generally, as meaning-making (semiosis).

3 Peirce’s categories

To address these inadequacies there has been this growing body of educational scholarship that has looked to C. S. Peirce’s categorical semiotic philosophy.^[4]

The strength in Peirce’s semiotic is precisely that it is triadic and thus nondualist, that is, it purports to explain relation itself as an ontological modality.^[5] More specifically, we can say that a Peircean (edu)semiotic doesn’t “locate” learning solely within ens rationis (mind dependent reality), nor in the “processing” of an external and independent ens reale (mind-independent reality), but rather in the dynamic and triadic mediation of observer, the observing, and the observed. This is a step beyond substance dualism and the corresponding principle of non-contradiction (this is this, because it is not that), to recognize the logic of the included (rather than excluded) middle (this is always becoming that). This perpetual becoming characteristic of educational processes is conceptualized through the growth of signs (semiosis). Semetsky (in Semetsky and Campbell 2018: 124) explains further in an interview recently published in CSS:

We perceive the environment as, mainly, consisting of objects. What there “is” is aquestion addressed by ontology that accounts for the so-called “furniture of the universe.” But the universe, which is perfused with signs, cannot be reduced to “objects” that subscribe to the logic of identities – that is, being those things that they “are” and definitely not being what they are “not”: there is no in-between, any “middle” is excluded, and we can say with certainty that this is this and that is that. The semiotic reality, however, is not the world of substantial things: this or that. Signs are relational entities, which are defined as such by virtue of “mediation”, of the “included” middle without which the evolutionary process of semiosis is unconceivable. Signs – via interpretants (that is, “thirds” as a middle term in a relation) always become other signs: they evolve.

Such a conceptualization requires the expanded tripartite conception of experience offered by Peirce’s categories of firstness (the possible), secondness (the actual), and thirdness (the would be) (Merrel 1997: 27):

First is the conception of being or existing independent of anything else. Second is the conception of being relative to, the conception of reaction with, something else. Third is the conception of mediation, whereby a first and second are brought into relation… Feeling is First, sense of reaction Second… the tendency to take habits is Third. Mind is First, Matter is second, Evolution is Third. (CP 6.32 1891; emphasis added)

Recent edusemiotic research suggests that one of the central innovations of these categories for educational theory is that they offer the ability to describe and understand learning and cognition beyond what is actually (that is, materially) manifest, and incorporate:

1. the realm of virtual potential, what in some instances is also framed aspre-cognitive (firstness) experience (cf. Semetsky 2005b; Stables and Semetsky 2015 Ch. 2; Campbell 2018; Legg 2017);

2. the “forceful, dyadic consciousness of ‘resistance’” (Strand 2013: 754; Colapietro 2013; West 2015; Campbell 2016) to new learning (secondness); and

3. the growth and becoming that results through mediation: a first coming into relation with a second (thirdness).

Thirdness underlines the process of semiosis in its full estimation, and is representative of the emergence of new possibility (firstness) from out of the continuity of being in-habit (thirdness) with an environment, felt and realized through the encounter with exterior resistance (secondness). Torill Strand makes this same point, saying authoritatively that “(t)hirdness is learning” (2013: 795) and always encapsulates firstness and secondness:

‐Thirdness essentially involves the production of effects in the world of existence, —not by furnishing energy, but by the gradual development of Law’ (Peirce 1903c, p. 271). So, in addition to the immediate, incommunicable perception of the qualities of ‘pure presence’ (firstness) and the forceful, dyadic consciousness of ‘resistance’ (secondness), thirdness entails ‘learning’, or ‘the felt sense of personal transformation (of acquiring a new habit or at least of having one’s present habits strengthened, refined, or in some other way modified)’. (Colapietro, 1999, p. 23) Thirdness contains firstness and secondness, but it is by no way reducible to the two.

Because of this non-reducibility of the categories, edusemiotics attempts to replicate this tripartite fullness of experience in educational settings. This has been referred to as the palimpsest nature of the categories (cf. Campbell 2016, 2017, 2018). In line with Peirce’s scholastic realism, this means recognizing that both individuals and generals are admitted to have causal efficacy. Thirdness – or the growth of interpretants and thus the growth of perception and action-possibilities – occurs in perceptual learning to mediate between the processes of qualification (firstness) and sense-impression (secondness), or to put it more directly, to mediate the potential becoming actual in experience.^[6] It is in this sense that we can understand learning in the Deweyian sense (2005[1916]) as “the formation of habits that will engender a [future] receptiveness to novelty” (Campbell 2017:17)^[7]. Semetsky explains this Deweyian perspective very much in line with a theory of unlimited semiosis: “The more an organism learns the more it still has to learn: education means more education and becoming more developed signs” (Stables and Semetsky 2015: 81). Learning in this understanding is expressed in an anticipatory dynamic (Nadin 2010, 2014, 2017a, 2017b), where the anticipation of a future state changes and mediates the learner’s relation to the present as well as the past.^[8] Such an account of learning involves the ability to conceptualize oneself as a semiotic entity, as a sign in a process of continual unfolding (cf. Olteanu 2015: 74), undergoing continuous growth simply as being part of the life-process – by simultaneously “writing(/creating)” and “reading” the signs that make up our Umwelt.

It is important to again note how this edusemiotic (semiotics as education) perspective differs from the application of semiotic frameworks to education (semiotics in education, as has been done over the last several decades in multimodality and social semiotic research). Knowledge-content, information, data, are only significant if they are integrated with the continuity of experience and living. While recent social semiotic research has come closer to this view as well, this school (still) tends to equate knowledge with a concept of text as sociocultural constructed representation (see Kress 2010: 23–24, 26–27; Marrone 2017: 108). In what regards edusemiotics, Semetsky (in Semetsky and Campbell 2018: 124) again explains:

Take the concept of semiotics in education. More often than not, it still deals with objects – even those that play a somewhat mediating role such as teaching “aids.” But edusemiotics purports to deal with signs, taking as its starting point the rejection of non-contradiction that says: If this is this, it cannot also be that. Logic as semiotics says it can, because “this” is always becoming “that.” People are also signs: In learning, in interpreting signs, they grow and become, as Peirce would say, more developed signs. It is the process of learning and evolving that brings together ens reale (reality) and ens rationis (our knowledge of reality).

4 Edusemiotics and biosemiotics

Edusemiotics recognizes that living and learning are co-extensive, as both can be understood as processes of semiotic engagement (Stables 2006), using, responding, and interpreting (consciously and unconsciously) signs and signals alike. This recognition in itself re-orients education away from reductionist and dualist accounts:

The most important aspect of semiotics for the present argument is that it is strongly non-dualist with respect to mind and body. If living is a process of semiotic engagement, then what is real is both physical and humanly interpreted: there are not two sorts of reality, one external and one internal. (Stables and Semetsky 2015: 156)

This follows from an earlier biosemiotic realization that asserts semiosis and life itself as being co-extensive. This has been the great contribution of Thomas Sebeok’s (1991, 1994, 2001; Danesi and Sebeok 2000) semiotic project, which as has been deemed as Sebeok’s thesis by Kull, Emmeche and Hoffmeyer (2011: 2), and can be expressed as follows: “The phenomenon that distinguishes life forms from inanimate objects is semiosis. This can be defined simply as the instinctive capacity of all living organisms to produce and understand signs” (Sebeok 2001: 3).

From its beginning, Sebeok framed biosemiotics as a modeling theory (see Sebeok 2001: 144). He considered that the best English word for Uexküll’s Umwelt is model:

All organisms communicate by use of models (Umwelts, or self-worlds, each according to its species-specific sense organs), from the simplest representations of maneuvers of approach and withdrawal to the most sophisticated cosmic theories of Newton and Einstein. (Sebeok 2001: 23)

Hence, if semiosis characterizes biological life – triadic meaning-making operations consisting in the coupling of puzzle pieces that constitute an environment (Umwelt) – then learning is continuous in the biological realm, not interrupted by the emergence of humans and certainly not starting only with human sociocultural organization. Learning is a matter of adaptation, which implies that its enhancement through (institutional) education is an evolution by exaptation. For instance, Gough and Stables argue that in a semiotic perspective “human survival is taken to depend upon a continuous process of meaning-making” (2012: 369). This leads to the valuable realization that on occasions when educational institutions obstruct rather than facilitate the capacities of individuals or groups to develop more complex and insightful models of reality, these institutions contradict the rationale for which they emerged. This is true, of course, if meaning-making “is not to be conceived of as merely mental response to, and conscious interpretation of physical events, but is constitutive of all forms of adaptation and progression” (Gough and Stables 2012: 369). This argument explicates why and how edusemiotics naturally aligned its arguments with biosemiotics.

But the influence extends both ways, as biosemiotics has found inspiration from educational theories. Since biosemiotics is a theory of environmental modeling, it has to consider learning processes. Thus, Hoffmeyer (2008, 2015) found useful the concept of scaffolding, stemming from (socio-)constructivism. The term is attributed mainly to Bruner (1957, 1960, 1966), who used this term in the rather narrow purpose of instructional education, to explain that knowledge is constructed upon existing structures and that teachers need to offer to students the scaffolding support for the comprehension of loftier notions. Bruner’s idea has its roots in Vygotsky’s notion of zone of proximal development, consisting in the difference between what a learner can do on her own and what she cannot do at all: In-between there are possibilities of learning with the aid of a teacher (see Vygotsky 1978: 85). Hoffmeyer expands the use of the scaffolding concept in the broader semiotic perspective of learning as environmental modeling, and not the restrictive educational instruction perspective:

The network of semiotic interactions by which individual cells, organisms, populations, or ecological units are controlling their activities can thus be seen as scaffolding devices assuring that an organism’s activities become tuned to that organism’s needs. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 154)

A brief and insightful definition for semiotic scaffolding provided by Hoffmeyer, inviting much reflection, is that “semiotic scaffolding is what makes history matter to an organism (or a cultural system)” (2015: 154).

Thus, concurrently understanding learning-as-semiosis provides an avenue from which to explore the possibility for “liberating the concept of learning from the domain of education, and rethinking education as a system or a program that works in the service of learning” (Olteanu and Campbell 2017). This orientation suggests a more ecologically and biologically minded approach to education that resists separating humans from animals, culture from nature, recognizing that because ‘[l]earning is continuous, occurring in every life form… any Umwelt has educational potential” (Olteanu 2016: 586).

5 The primacy of iconicity in learning

The basic edusemiotic orientation is based on organism and environment interaction and complementarity. Unlike analytic philosophy, the tradition from which the dominant incarnation of philosophy of education stems, Edusemiotics assumes no dichotomy of concept from image. Hirst and Peters say this outright: “What is a concept? It obviously is not the same thing as an image” (2012[1970]: 3). The image (or icon) is primal and foundational to edusemiotics; which has been informed by “the iconic turn” in recent semiotic scholarship. Using Peirce’s famous triad of icon–index–symbol, we can say this move represents a turning away from explicit reliance on symbolic accounts of learning (a symbol being a sign that signifies its object based on an established social convention), to recognize more fully the embodied and sensory foundations of indexicality (a sign that signifies based on direct contiguity) and iconicity (signs that signify based on perceived similarity/resemblance). This iconic turn has begun to seriously inform the emerging edusemiotic project, and it has been suggested that “icons are the signs that afford learning, all signification having an iconic ground” (Olteanu 2015: 76).

The uptake of the iconic turn in edusemiotics endorses the biosemiotic concept of modeling through scaffolding, as, in this view, learning can be regarded as diagrammatic reasoning (cf. Legg 2017): “the piecing together of the semi-autonomous parts of a scaffolding has the character of meaning-bearing couplings as they support still more complicated versions of the basically significant perception-action cycle” (Cobley and Stjernfelt 2015: 292). Diagrams achieved through the piecing together of parts into more comprehensive wholes further support more complex structures. Thus, learning consists in a discovery of similarities. This challenges the long tradition of structural and text semiotics which accounted for learning as stemming from (perceived) difference, stemming from a more ubiquitous substance dualism inherited from the modernist paradigm. Stjernfelt considers that the iconic turn, inspired by recent Peirce scholarship, can rightly be termed a morphological turn, sharing the view with cognitive linguistics that “continuous models not reducible to algebra are introduced alongside feature-preserving mappings of such models between (mental) domains” (2007: 53). By considering the inherent morphology of meaning and, as such, avoiding a dualistic notion of meaning articulation of form and content, edusemiotics is aligned to the embodied phenomenology trend in current philosophy.

The iconic starting point is obvious in normal teaching and learning relationships, for the simple fact that no two people learn something in the same way: A saxophone student who knows basic piano will possess a very different relationship to harmony than one who does not; a physics student learning about the concept of force who knows how to swim will have a very different relationship to this knowledge than another student who doesn’t, etc. Olteanu (2015: 75) clarifies:

What happens when learning is that structures of signification (what needs be apprehended) have to settle on already existing structures of signification: a learner. In their interaction, these signs will find their own compatibility and the probability for this to happen in the same manner in two different cases is too small to be considered.

Of course, sign systems, as they become extended beyond the senses, and become more abstracted and symbolic, can increasingly lead to error; “semiosis explains itself through itself,” Eco (1979) reminds us. When we privilege the concept over the image, when we teach schemata as being disconnected from lived encounters, we effectively destroy the body in the sign (Danesi 1998), and rob education of its experiential basis. This is to work against the natural learning flow principle that sees the learning process as a flow “from iconicity to connotatively and symbolicity, i.e. from concrete, sensory modes of representation (and knowing) to complex, abstract modes…” (Sebeok and Danesi 2000: 171).^[9]

6 Conclusion

Edusemiotics returns awareness to the embodied foundations of learning that precedes both symbolic re-presentation, reductionist reification, and does not sharply distinguish conscious (epistemic) problem solving from unconscious and automatic response and feeling (as expressed through the Peircean concept of abduction, cf. Shank 1998, 2008). Edusemiotics also emphasizes the continuity of human learning processes with the wider biological (and possibly physical [according to a pansemiotic perspective]) world, recognizing that all life forms live and learn through semiotic engagement. Recognizing living as semiotic engagement also means that for the pragmatic purposes of educational philosophy, we cannot sharply differentiate between a “mind” that processes “signs” and a body (in the broadest sense) that responds unthinkingly to “signals” (Stables and Semetsky 2015: 147). Thus, edusemiotics both dissolves and expands the boundaries of the human, in the service of realizing the fullest possibilities of education and learning.