Human sense and plant blindness

1 Premise

Words do not have static meanings as they appear in dictionaries, nor can they be reduced to a given data or content. In live language they cannot be frozen in a literal sense, they don’t have “literal” ambitions. So, communication through verbal signs can be conceived as “continuous approximation” in the given context in which these signs are produced and consumed. Language is not reducible to a “grammar” of relations among nouns but is a living thing which grows and changes gaining new values from the utterers, new associations, and new possibilities each time it is produced. The “plant blindness” hypothesis has to be historicized and contextualized: perhaps when forests and pastures were no longer “commonplaces” in which to produce, consume and exchange signs and values, the language stopped being interested in those values?

The connection between collectivity and utterer must be sought in a continuous dialectical relationship between linguistic production and material production. As Ferruccio Rossi-Landi observes:

The first linguistic mechanisms probably developed together with the emergence, if not of writing itself, at least of consolidated techniques for the oral handing down of knowledge. One can assume that their development was parallel to the production of the first material machines. If men had not learned to make a group of utensils function by itself, impersonally, it is unlikely that they could have learned to report anything in an equally impersonal way, regardless of the immediate performance of individual linguistic workers i.e. speakers. (Rossi-Landi 1992, p. 213)

Social habits do have a “coercive” character and it is difficult to ignore them: in this sense we could say that this “coercion” becomes “objective” in “purpose of production” of verbal language. “The property of being a sign is the direct result of a given piece of the social practice that I call ‘linguistic production’ and ‘linguistic work’.” adds Rossi-Landi (Ibid, p. 71).

The discourse of Rossi-Landi is similar to the one that Bakhtin develops in “From Notes Made in 1970–1”:

Everything that concerns me pertains to me enters my consciousness, beginning with my name, from the external world through the mouths of others (my mother, and so forth), with their intonation in their emotional and value-assigning tonality. I realize myself initially through others: from them I receive words, forms and tonalities for the formation of my initial idea of myself. (Bakhtin 1986, p. 138)

A constitutive quality of sign is its precariousness: since signs (and verbal signs) are “plunged” in a continuous game of interpreting (Peirce), they require a continuous translation process to be validated: “…a ‘meaning’… is, in its primary acceptation, the translation of a sign into another system of signs” (CP 4.127).^[1]

Peirce discussed many issues with Victoria Welby, and they mutually influenced each other’s thinking, since she also considers that:

Every single phrase and word have had historically one hundred different shades of meaning and now has psychologically perhaps one thousand. You think you are using it in the one plain literal sense and that someone else is using it in an unreal sense. You are under a delusion, hallucination. A fixed common meaning only exists in a code of signals of fixed value; and in words no value can ever be fixed. E pur si muove. The idea itself, the phrase in which you express it is but an attitude or a phase in the race or unit’s experience. (Welby, 190, p. 479)

Welby reflected on the various entities of experience: “common” and “scientific”. She maintained that these experiences are all interconnected: ethic, aesthetic, philosophical, scientific: these experiences mutually influence each other and develop together in a never-ending sign process. She supposes that language is a living thing which grows and changes gaining new values from the utterers, new associations, and new possibilities each time it is produced. The same word may change as the context, different experiences, intention, economic positions change. This because “similarly to the word object of interpretation, the interpretive process itself is never neutral. The word that a speaker utters is taken from the mouth of another.” (Petrilli 2009, p. 360).

According to Welby nonverbal and verbal semiosis are not possible without translation: semiosis itself is a translative-interpretive process. The role of translation is another constitutive quality of sign, in the creation of meaning, a “meaning” that doesn’t exist at all outside this translating process.

This semiotic process is always linked to the actors involved, to their social, economic, and cultural position. Verbal signs always call for a “response”, for a “motivation” by those who use it. Welby is very clear about this:

The question then arises, Has Society any conscious intention? If so, ‘it’ becomes a dangerous pronoun. We need a personal one. For if we want to be clear and consistent we must never ask What does it mean, but what do I, you, we, he, she, and they mean by it?

Mere things don’t ‘intend’: they don’t ‘mean’ anything, they are meaningless. They signify; they indicate; they imply; they are significant: it may be profoundly and urgently so. If we say that they have ‘sense’ we must ‘mean’ – intend our hearer to understand – that they arouse in us a sense of their existence, presence, and character: the sense of a word is our sense of its special use, of what it signifies. (Welby 1908, in Petrilli 2009, p. 260)

What I see, what I feel, what I perceive, can only be proper to my unique and irreplaceable position in the world: this is pictorial, plastic knowledge. “Nomination” is a learning process, just as adaptations of other living forms are also learning processes. The form of adaptation that developed as a consequence of the nomination process laid the conditions under which words and men conditioned each other from that moment onwards.

2 Few indicators and many appreciations towards plants

In his work on signs and behaviour Morris (1977) invests of particular importance three types of signs: identifiers, appreciators, and prescribers. These signs guide us in behavioural responses to the external environment. This is probably also how the study conducted by botanists Wandersee and Schussler (1999) can be read: this study would show a presumed “common” characteristic of humans: being blind to plants.

Such “blindness” manifests itself in the inability of identifying plants clearly and accurately. The plant world is an indistinct “background”. In a forest, humans easily notice the face of a deer (to hunt?), a wolf (to escape from?), another human (to follow?), but they struggle to distinguish a bush and a shrub (I use the generic names bush and shrub perhaps for this reason). One hypothesis for the reasons of this “blindness” may be that animals move to solve their problems, while plants solve problems by standing still (Mancuso 2019, p. 54). It is necessary to distinguish all those who move.

What moves must be immediately recognizable (facial features function as an index to what the face “carries” i.e. the body). To make this index work, the iconic trait of physiognomic homology is needed, between individuals of the same species, but also between different species (dogs, men, birds, reptiles basically share homological and iconic signs: eyes, mouth, nose, and other various symmetries).

To reinforce the evidence of this need for homological identifications is the hallucination (pareidolia), which makes us “recognize” faces and profiles within modular textures of nature such as bushes, clouds, bark, sand, etc., (Cf. Capuano 2011). Recognition is a matter of survival.

Peirce ascertains that: “Men and words reciprocally educate each other; each increase of a man’s information involves and is involved by, a corresponding increase of a word’s information” (CP 5.313, 1893–6). This quote comes from Charles Sanders Peirce’s general reasoning about what is knowable and what is unknowable, a problem he believes to be unfounded “since the meaning of a word is the conception it conveys, the absolutely incognizable has no meaning because no conception attaches to it” (CP 5.310, 1893–6). This observation derives from Peirce’s criticism of Cartesianism as formulated in the “New List of Categories” (CP 1.545–9, 1893–6) which reinterprets the a priori and the transcendental in linguistic and semiotic terms. Peirce’s semiotics is explicitly anti-Cartesian and rejects the rationalism–empiricism dichotomy as sterile and abstract (CP 5.215–63, 1893–6 and CP 5.264–317, 1893–6).

It seems proper to emphasise that an analogous line of thinking about knowledge is used by Victoria Welby in her correspondence with Peirce. As she sustains: “we must at best be contented to work patiently and thoroughly for the future; securing that our own labours shall be strictly preparative and aim more at influencing the future parents and teachers than at suddenly revolutionising the methods of the present ones” (Welby 1908, in Petrilli 2009, p. 504).

Every phrase and word has had historically 100 different shades of meaning and now has psychologically perhaps 1,000. You think you are using it in the one plain literal sense and that someone else is using it in an unreal sense. You are under a delusion, hallucination. A fixed common meaning only exists in a code of signals of fixed value; and in words no value can ever be fixed. E pur si muove. The idea itself, the phrase in which you express it is but an attitude or a phase in the race or unit’s experience. (Ibid., p. 479)

Peirce affirms that the information that is transmitted by ideas (and ideas are inside words) can be obtained and confirmed only through group errors. Without these group errors there would not be the evolution of knowledge: words can be used, in this reciprocal learning process, as “spies” or “guardians” or “guides” of these errors. The community learns by group errors – in the best of cases – excluding them from their own field of knowledge and then validating and retaining everything that is not an error:

Man makes the word, and the word means nothing which the man has not made it mean, and that only to some man. But since man can think only by means of words or other external symbols, these might turn round and say: “You mean nothing which we have not taught you, and then only so far as you address some word as the interpretant of your thought.” (CP 5.313, 1893–6)

And Welby adds that a “systematic training in critical and creative reflection on meaning was necessary from early school days. […] Moreover, education and the correct use of language are also considered as a moral responsibility. Indeed, the capacity to interrogate sense, meaning and significance is considered by Welby as an ethical commitment, an act of responsibility for the general improvement of the human condition” (Petrilli 2009, p. 375). But it appears helpful to consider all words in the continuous learning process that is life (an infinite semiosis) and not only the words exchanged during an “educational representation” of some sort (a representation to encourage emulation or to repress behaviours; a representation to give an example or to abstract ideas; a representation to advise people or to organize them, etc.).

Words play a central role in human learning – learning in a broad sense, even as “learning ourselves”. We ought to consider words as constitutive of identities: and the semiotics of human learning will have to take words into account with their economic, political and cultural history.

Given that not only culture but perception itself, “even the most basic like hunger, is expressed through the verbal sign, this too is socially oriented, ideologically intonated […] The speaker is the word’s owner only in physiological terms. As Bakhtin shows in all his writings, the word as a sign, even in its stylistic characteristics, is a social product, like the individual speaker” (Petrilli 2016a, p. 325).

Thanks to the ability for language conceived as primary modelling, the “world” of human beings, the Umwelt is flexible. The human Umwelt is a historical “world”, a socio-cultural historical world.

3 Towards nature: human indifference, exploitation and their ecological consequences

Ferruccio Rossi-Landi’s states that human nature, conceived as detached from history, does not exist. He argues that by modifying the history the human nature itself is modified and the harmful parts of human nature can be eliminated within the domain of social reproduction (cf. Rossi-Landi 1978). It is possible to change human nature by varying the “metabolism” of social reproduction systems, reconstructing a new way of understanding what “human being” essentially signifies in the context of the semiobiosphere.

We could say the same about our linguistic “landscape”. Speaking of “plant blindness” without questioning the form of social reproduction in which we find ourselves, and in which we “find” words we use, is reductive if not misleading.

The expression “global-communication-production” does not only refer to the fact that communication network and the market have expanded at a world-wide level, but that all aspects of human life are incorporated into the communication-production system. This is true weather reference is to development, well-being and consumerism, or to underdevelopment, poverty and unsustainable life conditions; to health or sickness; to normality or deviation; to social integration or marginalization… Nor is incorporation into the communication-production system limited only to human life, but on the contrary involves all life forms over the planet, whose health in the global-communication-production system is now compromised and put at risk (Petrilli 2010, p. 32)

According to Thomas A. Sebeok, life in its biological sense and sign-life converges. To overcome alienation, we ought to recognize the ideological level of the assertions and procedures that maintain and generate alienated situations. We will be able to reinvent our social reality only by revealing the ideological character of these claims. Still, we have to keep in mind that in the reproducing process we are yet again influenced by prior reproducing systems that formed us and thus, in the practice of reintroducing human being to the “nature”, the former ideologies will re-appear.

Language is the primary mean for executing power relations. This means that is with language that we define the human species-specific reality or Umwelt. But this means also that the language defines us. ^[2] The way we speak about the “nature” influences our worldview and influences our attitudes and the responsibility to environment or to otherness. We cannot talk or think about something without expressing our thoughts in language; we are constantly having a dialogue with ourselves and with all that surrounds us, even if we don’t acknowledge it.

Human alienated condition needs a more thorough clarification. Human society has created and inhabited a “mental utopia” – a reality where human being has denied itself a “room” in the nature. The idea of society as separated entity represents an unreachable ideal: this is impossible, it is a trickery – an inadequacy for the character of this social reproduction. As long as we choose to continue living in this illusion, the alienation grows always more real and powerful and as its result human’s separation from the environment appears more normal than its interrelation with all the other living beings (and non-living beings, as viruses, for example).

When we see nature, we don’t see anything human – nature is considered as a place which is ‘untouched by humans’, a background, a texture (in which sometimes we recognize faces, our faces). We are not related to the nature: this illusion provides us with an alibi for indifference. Even in the naming of the elements present therein. We don’t have to be concerned for something so far from us. Illusion leads to the utopia that we don’t take part in the semiobiosphere.

To recognize that humans are a “piece” of the ecosystem has become harder even though the elementary activities of daily life like eating, defecating, reproducing, could remind it to us constantly. The totalizing ideology realizes several methods to reinforce its propaganda and makes us regard these everyday activities as somehow isolated from the general context of living (and dying) organisms. The illusion of being “separated bodies” becomes a “real abstraction”.^[3] This type of alienation gets sustenance from every reason that confirms the division between nature and culture: the anthropocentrism.^[4] There is no distinctions between one’s “self” and the exterior world, because “all of us eucaryotes are fashioned of bacteria”; we are both their habitats and vehicles for further dispersal. In particular, our central nervous system may be characterized as a colony of interactive bacteria (Sebeok 2001, p. 43).

We are used to represent ourselves separate, “beyond” of the nature. We got to the point that there is a “needing” of scientific researches to “validate” and “prove” our connection with the world and environment. Some of these researches seem to prove truths that are part of general understanding.

Man has bordered himself in the texts that reassure his alienated condition in the environment. The discourse of nature is full of “misunderstanding”.

Rossi-Landi observes:

In the complex exchange between nature and man and between man and man, during which man has slowly become something other than nature and is conscious of such differentiation, some real fundamental operations must have become lost or confused and some fictitious fundamental operations must have been introduced: as a result of which the course of civilization, including the theories that man himself started to form in the so-called historical period, in the strict sense of the word, has not been what it could have been without those losses, those confusions and those intrusions. That is, as they say, the course of civilization has falsified itself. [ …] Alienation is a falsification, a general malfunction in the formation and the unfolding of history (1967–72, p. 3).

The problem of naming (or of not naming, as in the cases of “plant blindness”) for a semiotic critique is nothing other than the re-proposition, in a linguistic key, of the same abstraction of the “man” detached from the social reproduction and environment. Plants are different from animals in that they don’t move. But there is also another important difference between plants and animals: if animals are “divided”, they can die, if plants are “divided”, they can propagate.

Plants show something perhaps difficult to accept according to the prevailing logic: that one can be anything other than “individuals”, that all species live in symbiosis until they seem like an indistinct “background”.

If semiotics fails to achieve a critical function, “its work will prove useless or, even worse, the mere synergetic result of some special semiotics – a transversal language of the encyclopaedia of unified sciences, or a philosophical prevarication suffering from omniscience with respect to the different disciplines and specialized fields of knowledge” (Petrilli and Ponzio 2008, p. 36).

Semioethics underlines the “unifying function of semiosis” (as global semiosis), and “identifies three aspects of this function: the ‘descriptive-explanatory’, the ‘methodological’ and the ‘ethical’” (Petrilli 2010, p. 27). As a result of totalizing communication-production ideology otherness is expunged. Biodiversity and language diversity are put at a risk.

4 Denominational deficiencies, but mainly ideological limits

Every discipline is ideological: all sciences are trained by social organization. According to Schaff (1978) ideology is a system of opinions that is based on a system of values and is related to the scopes of social development. Augusto Ponzio defines ideology, in accordance with Schaff, as all the opinions which are formed under the influence of the interests of a specific class or which are useful in defending the interests of a specific class (Ponzio 1993, p. 70).

Winfried Nöth calls ideology in its widest sense “a system of ideas” (2004, p. 11). Eero Tarasti observes: “From this point of view, an ideological utterance is one that tries to mask its own axiological points of departure, to justify and universalize them by a myth that deceives the receiver, or by postulating one’s own values as if they were ‘natural’ … For semiotics, however, nothing is just ‘natural’” (2004, p. 23–24). Jeff Bernard illustrates Rossi-Landi’s semiotics as based on anthropological principles, that “the transformation of the whole of nature into culture, i.e., of self-evolutive sociality, is based on work which needs materials, instruments, workers, operations, aims and products. The transformation of materials via operations into products proceeds in an endless concatenation of work cycles” (Ivi, p. 47).

Rossi-Landi affirms that “Terminological remarks have a healthy tendency to become remarks about our way of using words and phrases, and the latter have an even healthier tendency to become remarks about our way of using concepts and conceptions” (Rossi-Landi 1992, p. 277).

And further he adds:

The sign systems reproduced within social reproduction are both verbal and nonverbal. No consideration of verbal languages by themselves would be sufficient from the point of view of social reproduction. The difference between linguistics as the science of verbal sign systems and semiotics as the general science of any sign systems whatsoever becomes here particularly evident. A proper approach to the sign factors of social reproduction cannot be but a fully semiotic approach. No merely linguistic approach would ever do. (Ivi, p. 279)

For Guattari “A capitalist subjectivity is endangered through operators of all types and sizes, and is manufactured to protect existence from any intrusion of events that might disturb or disrupt public opinion. It demands that all singularity must be either evaded or crushed in specialist apparatuses and frames of reference” (2000, p. 51).

The phenomenon of “plant blindness” seems to be considered only in the semantic dimension and not also in the syntactic and pragmatic ones.

Language, in a semioethic reading-key, can be conceived as species-specific modelling system that allows to invent a multitude of possible worlds; reflect upon signs; be responsible for one’s action; gain consciousness of our unavoidable involvement in the sign network of life over the entire planet; be responsible in the destiny of planetary semiosis.

Each language represents its environment and acts on this environment. The annihilation of languages impoverishes “human Umwelt”, but we must ask whether this linguistic poverty is the cause of “plant blindness” or if it is the effect on the language of this social reproduction system.

Words has great influence over our values and perspectives: talking about living being as “natural resources” lightens humans from the responsibility and reduces our environment to mere commodities.

von Uexküll (1992 [1934]) defines Umwelt in his Umwelt theory as the living organism’s modality to appropriate and precept its environment. We can imagine Umwelt as a kind of soap bubble. In Umwelt just like in a soap bubble the external signs and images are deformed when projected inside the bubble according to their qualities. We can add that this “soap bubble” is interweaved also by the words, as states Charles Sanders Peirce when he says that there is no element of human consciousness that hasn’t its equivalence in the words and that is because the words or signs that humans use are themself (CP 5.314).

Kalevi Kull observes that “The notion of nature is itself the result of certain opposition, and there are many ways to build up further binary oppositions in human-nature relationships, used in different circumstances, which delimit or split nature in various ways” (1998, p. 346). Further on Kull adds that: “Making distinctions (polar oppositions) has a tendency to replace the importance of the whole by the importance of particular parts. A trivial example in our context would be the distinction between nature and culture, which leads us to think that the processes in culture and nature are separated, and that the processes of culture or respectively of nature are more important to consider than those of the whole” (1998, p. 354–355).

5 Third value and plastic language according to Victoria Welby

Victoria Welby defines the subjectivity as a “community” of selves that are different but not isolated from each other. Such idea excludes the possibility of confusion between the elements (signs) of subjectivity and of their homologation. As she affirms, “to confound is to Sacrifice Distinction” (Welby 1906, in Petrilli 2009, p. 645–6). Hence, the subjectivity is not the “individual,” but the “Unique”: this uniqueness derives from a continuous dialogue between verbal and non-verbal signs that constitutes the identities. Identity is built on the otherness:

… for we may represent the Unique. That is the word which might well supersede the intolerably untrue “individual.” It is in fact just our dividuality (our italic) which constitutes the richness of our gifts. We can, but must not be, divided; we must include the divisible in the greatest of Wholes, the organic Whole, which as risen to the level of the human, may crown each one of us as unique. (Welby 1907, in Ivi., p. 648)

Plants could metaphorically and homologically give humans a visible model of this. Naturally we must consider this similarity in the broadest way, bearing in mind the morphological difference between plants and animals and drawing inspiration from the possibilities we have of learning from vegetable kingdom. The term “dividuality” that Welby proposes is fundamental in botanic: this “divisibility” must take into account the interconnectedness of every living being in the semiosphere. Divisibility is an entirely human ideological claim. There are at present day numerous scientific studies that prove this idea: the shared communication networks of plants, their being actively cooperative for all life on the planet. Their “dividuality” is the most powerful means of their resilience. Maybe it is this very model we don’t want to “learn”, maybe it is this very model we don’t want to “see”. Immersed as we are in the ideology of separation, in the ideology of roles, in the ideology of separated identities, this becomes a truth not easy to understand, perhaps all this makes us “blind”.

Another milestone of semiotics as Charles Morris investigates the signs utilized in methods to influence awareness, whether of the single individual or of the groups. He criticizes the control of mass communication as a method broadly used to condition consciousness and isolate the selves. Morris thematizes the link between linguistic practices and choices in human habits. Furthermore, he stresses the importance of accurate linguistic usage: like Welby before him, he thematizes the importance to control signs rather than being controlled by them. When speaking of the accurate linguistic usage Morris refers to universal words such as “freedom”, “democracy”, etc. These are words that affect the social life of all of us. Can we extend the correct use of language to the naming of plant species as well? What type of society should we imagine then?

When in communication the self understands what is said, this occurs through interpretants that are not solely verbal signs. It occurs in a system of signs in which historical-natural language simply interprets a narrow space. When the subject names objects and elements of reality this is possible thanks to conditions that were founded earlier. As Petrilli observes: “when the speaker speaks to communicate, communication has already occurred. This is true of both oral and written texts. Whether written or oral, speaking does not install communication relations, but, if at all, ratifies, maintains, notifies, declares, or exhibits them” (Petrilli 2010, p. 227).

Welby explored the problem of meaning from various perspectives – its circumstances, changes, and simultaneous differences, she considers meaning in language and behaviour, in verbal and nonverbal sign systems, linguistic and nonlinguistic processes. She developed a dynamical and generative “philosophy” of meaning, and firmly criticized methods that theorise meaning in terms of invariableness and homogeneity as though words and phrases were ‘numerals or labels of unanimous consent’. Welby theorised a “third area” or “third value” of meaning which typifies linguistic usage at large, from the common discourse to the more specific, a ‘third value, neither wholly literal, nor wholly figurative’. In this third area ‘literal’ and ‘figurative’ aspects manifest themselves in different shades.

We should therefore ask ourselves whether a positive approach to the world of plants can take place only thanks to a lexical accuracy or even by exploring that “third value”.

It is reductive to analyse “plant blindness” as a purely cognitive or semantic problem. The Divina Commedia ^[5] is considered a fundamental text for the Italian culture and language: the author, Alighieri (1265–1321 ca, poet, writer and politician), who is also considered the “father” of the Italian language, in this text seems to be affected by plant blindness, as he uses a limited number of botanical terms. Out of a total number of 101698 words, in this masterpiece of literature only 12 names of plants appear, with this frequency: rose (8 times); lily (6 times); blackthorn (4 times); daisy (3 times); fig (2 times); cornflower (2 times); olive tree (2 times); fir (1 time); absinthe (1 time); apple tree (1 time) and myrtle (1 time). Of course, someone may argue that this is the reason why the poet got lost in a “selva oscura”^[6] at the beginning of the poem…

Language is not a fixed system in which meanings are given once and for all. Welby stressed the dynamic nature of language, depicting it as an open system incessantly enhanced with new meanings through continuing translation and interpretation practices. Welby conceived translation as a process that exceeds the obvious relation among different languages, interlingual relations. Translation, in Welby’s conception, is the ability to create and recognize relations of “comparison, association, likeness, analogy, and parallels among different sign systems, whether internally to a single historical-natural language or externally among different languages. The translative method favours the mutual clarification of concepts and terminology, paving the way towards the formulation of new hypotheses and results, to progress in knowledge.” (Petrilli 2009: 353). Welby observes that:

In the case of knowledge acquired by the scientific method, we know that beyond the simple directness of sense-perception we have various forms of indirect knowledge. Perhaps the most obvious of these is found in the case of vision already touched upon. First we ‘see’ with the naked eye; then we acquire the telescope, and ‘through’ it indirectly or mediately see more; lastly, we use a sensitive plate in connection with telescope and eye, and our vision becomes doubly indirect. But we are through dealing with the same ‘realities.’ (Ivi., p. 354)

In ‘Meaning and Metaphor,’ her essay of 1893 (cf. Petrilli 2009), she criticized what she named ‘Plain Meaning,’ which she defines as a ‘linguistic trap’ and as a cause of general misunderstanding. She criticized even the shortage of an adequate linguistic awareness, the incorrect usage of verbal communication and the abundance of wrong metaphors and other forms of verbal inaccuracy. The “plain meaning” fallacy stands on the untrue belief that meaning is “literal” or “univocal”, specified once and for all, as well as the associated conception of hard dry facts. Because “When language and meaning are in use, when expression is alive, there is no such thing as fixed and plain meaning. On the contrary, meaning is continuously influenced and transformed by different factors – from the subjective and psychological to the broader socio-cultural, interpreted and reinterpreted, translated into different signifying contexts.” (Ivi., p. 368)

If we consider again the plants of the Divina Commedia we understand that the semantic frequency of the botanic names does not correspond to the identification of any natural element. The “rose” for example occurs 8 times, but in no case it is a flower in the fully literal sense. The name “rose” means everything but “flower” in literal sense: it is an idea, it is an example, it is God, it is a metaphor and, in the “third area” of meaning, it is even a flower. (Divina Commedia, Paradiso: XII-135; XXII-56; XXIII.73; XXX-117; XXX-124; XXXI-1; XXXII-15; XXXII-120).

Welby quotes the English philosopher Benjamin Jowett (1817–1893) to illustrate what she means when she speaks about words as “plastic” and “pictorial” elements of the language:

In his ‘Dialogues of Plato’ (Vol. 1: 285–286, 293) Professor Jowett warned us twenty years ago of our linguistic dangers, repeating his warning with greater emphasis and in fresh forms in the admirable essays added in the edition just published. He urges that the ‘greatest lesson which the philosophical analysis of language teaches us is, that we should be above language, making words our servants and not allowing them to be our masters.’ ‘Words,’ he tells us, ‘appear to be isolated but they are really the parts of an organism which is always being reproduced. They are refined by civilisation, harmonised by poetry, emphasised by literature, technically applied in philosophy and art; they are used as symbols on the border-ground of human knowledge; they receive a fresh impress from individual genius, and come with a new force and association to every lively-minded person. They are fixed by the simultaneous utterance of millions and yet are always imperceptibly changing: – not the inventors of language, but writing and speaking, of nations, Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, the German or English Bible, Kant and Hegel, are the makers of them in later ages. They carry with them the faded recollection of their own past history; the use of a word in a striking and familiar passage, gives a complexion to its use everywhere else, and the new use of an old and familiar phrase has also a peculiar power over us.’ Then he reminds us of what we too often forget; that ‘language is an aspect of man, of nature, and of nations, the transfiguration of the world in thought, the meeting-point of the physical and mental sciences, and also the mirror in which they are reflected, an effect and partly a cause of our common humanity, present at every moment to the individual and yet having a sort of eternal or universal nature.’ (Welby 1893, in Petrilli 2009, p. 521–522)

Welby defined language as a living being which constantly grows, gaining new value from the different utterer, meaningful associations and new meaningful force each time it is utilized. Similar words may gain several meaning shades when change the context, former experience, education, purposes. The interpretative process itself is never impartial. Words we utter are always taken from others. Consequently, “before being uttered by the speaker, this word has already been pronounced by another, oriented by another, accentuated or intonated by the word of another, permeated with values. […] The problem of language is largely the problem of the relation between the logic of identity and the logic of alterity, the same and the other, the stranger, the alien.” (Ivi., p. 357–8) Where should we find the words to define plants in such an anthropocentric society?

Welby clearly hypothesized the fundamental “vagueness” of meaning, whether literal and direct or figurative and indirect, changing on the expressive condition. Vagueness is conceived in a positive sense distinct from ambiguity conceived negatively as generating misunderstanding and confusion. The ability for vagueness conceived in a constructive sense is crucial for adaptation to new communicative situations.

Indeed, ‘plasticity’ is a word derived from the biological disciplines: she gave an essential role to biology in the formulation of her theory of meaning. Welby defined ‘plasticity’ as an indispensable quality of thought and language, a sign of meaningful vigour. Words and utterances are living things, in a similar sense to living beings. Plasticity implies the capacity for adaptiveness to the expressive context, to new communicative desires, the capacity for generating relationships: an essential condition for effective communication in the historical-cultural world as much as in the organic.

What we do want is a really plastic language. The biologist tells us that rigidity in organic activities can never secure accuracy – is indeed fatal to it. The organism can only survive by dealing appropriately with each fresh emergency in more and more complex conditions. Only the utmost degree of plasticity compatible with persistence of type can give the needed adaptiveness to varying circumstance (Welby 1983, in Ivi., p. 361).

6 Conclusions

As Thomas Sebeok has shown many times through his works, especially in Global Semiotics, there is no separation in semiosis, or life – “life is semiosis” – on the planet. Phytosemiotics (the semiosis of plants) are essential in zoosemiotics, including of course anthroposemiotics.

Unfortunately, the trend towards self-sufficiency, even self-exaltation by humans often leads to a disregard for the importance of plants. It is not only about not knowing the names of the plants in public and private gardens and the flowers we decorate our rooms with. It is in fact not only ignorance or “blindness” but also a sense of self-sufficiency and arrogance: the function of oxygenating the environment by plants is scientifically known yet it is generally and usually completely ignored. Of course, this varies depending on culture, countries and nations, and therefore of course, also depending on personal sensitivity. Very often in metropolitan cities public gardens are supplanted by the construction of dwellings. What to do?

Semiotics, in particular the aforementioned Global Semiotics of Thomas Sebeok, should be part of education and training from the early years of each person. We indicated, together with Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio, as “Semioethics” the orientation of semiotics towards the awareness of responsibility of human beings as capable, unlike other beings, to not only make use of signs, but to reflect on signs and therefore to have a decision-making capacity. In this sense, man is not only a semiotic animal but meta-semiotic. As a result, man is not the lord, the despot, the master of nature but the only one who can realize how completely dependent his life is on other living species. Will we make it?