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This article has a double scope. First, we consider the dynamics inherent in the emergence of genres. Our view is that genres emerge relative to two sets of constraints , which we aim to capture in our double feedback loop model for the dynamics of genres. On the one hand, (text) genres, or text types, as we will interchangeably call them, emerge as a variation of already existing text types. On the other hand, genres develop as a response to the negative constraints or positive affordances of given situations: that is, either the “exigencies” of the situation or the new resources available in a situation. Accordingly, Section 1 is mainly devoted to a characterization of situations and of the dynamic relation between situational constraints/affordances and genres. Our main claim is that situations and genres stand in a relation of mutual scaffolding to each other so that the existence of a text type is not simply caused by the exigencies present in a given situation, but, once emerged, also feeds back into the situation, further stabilizing or consolidating it: hence, the use of the term “feedback loop.” Section 2 is a more detailed discussion of the dynamics of genres with a particular focus on the first feedback loop: the way genres develop as deviations from existing text types and then stabilize as text types proper with a normative import. The second scope of this article consists in developing a typological apparatus consistent with the dynamic approach to the emergence of genres. This is our parameter theory of genres presented in Section 3. Here we consider genres as governed by parameters external to them and intrinsic to the situations they are dynamically related to. Genres should thus be understood not simply in terms of inherent textual or formal traits, but also relative to a certain set of situational parameters and relative to the degree to which they are governed by them.

Semiosis, and particularly visual semiosis, is not something unique to humans. All animal species, all living beings (including other forms of life outside the animal kingdom) have semiotic activity. But we can go even beyond that. It is possible to maintain that also in the world that is usually called “inanimate” or “inert” some kind of semiotic activity takes place. This paper proposes a view in which the elements and organisms in the natural environment, instead of being classified into separate categories are thought of as forming a continuous gradation from one to another, from lower to upper levels of complexity and semiotic behavior. From this, and from further arguments, it is possible to maintain that semiosis permeates the entire universe. A special point is made concerning the interaction of light stimuli with matter and living organisms, which in some cases has produced the systems of vision that many animals posses, and in some other cases produce reactions and changes that can be considered as a kind of protosemiotic activity.

Peirce’s best idea, and the one least implemented by himself and his followers, is that of an ethics of terminology. Using this ethics as a tool, we suggest that many Peircean terms are in fact misleading, or, as he said himself at the end of his life, “injurious.” From the point of view of cognitive semiotics, there is no reason to abide by Peirce’s definition of semiosis, but, taking up the two quotes offered by Caivano, we demonstrate that they lead to different results, one being phenomenological and the other formalist. We go on to suggest that Peirce himself cannot have believed in the first definition, because then there could be no point in fallibilism and the community of scholars. In fact, we claim that what the different definitions of the “kingdoms” of nature show is precisely that human beings can liberate themselves from their Umwelt and adopt the scientific world-view, and this is also what we have to do when analysing semiosis itself.

This paper is a response to three reviews of the author’s 2014 book Natural Propositions: The Actuality of Peirce’s Doctrine of Dicisigns , by Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, Helmut Pape, and Göran Sonesson, respectively. Addressed here are issues like the Swampman argument and the character of Peirce’s concept of “Immediate Object”. A conclusion makes a general observation that semiotics is threatened by reductions of signs to sociological conventions on the one hand and mental phenomena on the other – arguing that communities as well as minds presuppose sign structure and use.