Preface

A century ago, in the 1920s, Jakob von Uexküll discovered a new and very unusual aspect of nature, which later took shape in a new scientific discipline—biosemiotics. He demonstrated that signs and meanings exist not only in human minds and texts, but also in various living organisms that arose and have existed long before the first humans appeared. In the 1960s, Howard Pattee, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon independently rediscovered the existence of meaning in the activity of living organisms as well as in artificial intelligence agents. At the same time, the value of Uexküll’s ideas had been acknowledged by the English-speaking scientific community, including by Thomas Sebeok and Gregory Bateson. Furthermore, over the last half of the century, biosemiotics has been developing intensively, and achieving interesting and significant results. However, it still has a long way to go, and this book was conceived as the next important step on this path.

The chapter authors of this book consider the origin and evolution of signs and meanings in various natural and artificial systems from different angles. Meaning is often defined as a signified associated in language with a signifier in the sense of Ferdinand de Saussure, or semantics in the sense of Charles Morris. In communication theory, meaning is the content and value of messages or information. In biosemiotics, signs and meanings are considered in a much wider sense than in linguistics, and include non-mental signification. A biosemiotic sign is a tool that thanks to its form rather than matter or energy prompts an agent (e.g., organism, cell, or protein) to perform some meaningful activity or change, which tends to be beneficial to the agent itself and/or associated agents (progeny, superagents). Such activity or change in response to a sign is equivalent to what biologists call adaptation. For example, cold temperature makes the skin of mammals grow a thicker fur, which protects an animal from cold. Besides semantics (the type of activity or change), adaptation includes a utility component, which belongs to pragmatics in the sense of Charles Morris. Semantics and pragmatics are two necessary and interdependent components of meanings, although in some cases we focus on either semantics or pragmatics separately. Note that syntax, one of the three components of semiotics according to Morris, is not a part of meaning, although syntax of a message (or other sign) affects its meaning.

All semiotic agents can perform meaningful actions by interpreting signs but not all of them can acquire new meanings (e.g., a ribosome). Meaning is not a material component of an agent, but rather a dynamic organization or form that supports a capacity (or affordance) of an agent to act adaptively and robustly in changing environments. Meaning can be encoded, for example, in a computer algorithm or in a text and get transferred in such a frozen state to other agents.

Biosemiotics assumes that meanings exist only in living systems, but to explain the origin of life equipped with some primordial meanings it is necessary to consider precursor conditions in non-living systems that can be interpreted as potential meanings. For example, Howard Pattee envisioned that life originated from “primitive geochemical matter cycles,” where “it is the constraints of the primeval ecosystem which, in effect, generate the language in which the first specific messages can make evolutionary sense.”1 In fact, many causal relationships can be interpreted as potential meanings. For example, the birth of a star is caused by the ignition of a thermonuclear reaction, and thus, the appearance of a star means that a thermonuclear reaction began there. The cause of the event of a new star’s appearance is simultaneously its meaning in relation to a hypothetical observer (e.g., a human astrophysicist). Such meanings exist in potential (i.e., unmanifested) form until competent agents appear who recognize their utility.

John Deely2 discussed a similar example, where a fossilized bone underground is a sign of a dinosaur even if it is not observed. This sign, however, does not signify, and thus, to avoid confusion, we call it a “potential sign.” Living organisms can get additional affordances by converting potential signs into actual form and integrating new meanings into their Umwelten (subjective worlds). Analysis of potential signs allows us to explore adjacent possible meanings that have not been actualized yet. It does not imply pansemiosis or panpsychism because potential signs do not signify unless they are sensed and interpreted by semiotic agents.

The emergence of living organisms and their spread in the Universe led to the transformation of some potential meanings into a manifested form, in other words, to their actualization. However, the actualization of potential meanings occurs only in certain kinds of organisms that can utilize these meanings. For example, the actual position of the sun in the sky does not matter to many plants and animals,3 but it makes sense for a sunflower that turns its inflorescence to follow it. In this way, the sun plays the role of a sign for a sunflower, which interprets it as a spatial direction to follow. Expected benefits from turning to the sun include attracting pollinators (bees and flies), evaporating water on seeds which prevents fungal infection, and better photosynthesis. The more complex an organism is, the more actualized meanings it has, and the more complex connections established between these meanings become. The most highly organized animals, and especially humans, have an extremely complex organization of signs and meanings. Their appearance as a result of evolution led to the emergence of more and more complex systems of reflexes and, finally, to consciousness characterized by active learning and self-awareness.

Currently, there is no consensus on the relation between sign properties and meanings. Many molecular biologists believe that heritable features of organisms are meanings encoded in the sequence of nucleic acids in living cells. Similarly, the structuralist school in linguistics assumes that meanings are embedded in the relational structure of human language. The opposite view of the interpretational school of semiotics assumes that meanings emerge via interpretation processes, and in this respect, they do not necessarily depend on the properties of sign vehicles (i.e., material carriers of signs). The extreme version of this view is unlimited relativism, where anything can be a sign of anything else for some agent. These two approaches are often combined, as in the theory of Peirce, who considered the meaning of symbols as conventional in contrast to the meaning of icons and indexes that depend on the features or correlations of sign vehicles.

We approach the dualism of structural vs. interpretational meaning from the position of the theory of semiotic agency. Semiotic agents are organisms, cells, autonomous cell components, families, colonies, species, ecological consortia, human organizations, nations, and autonomous human artifacts. Agents perform their functions via semiotic processes, such as sensing and interpretation of signs, as actions or representations, production and manipulation of signs, and/or communication (exchange of signs between interacting agents and subagents). The structural approach to meanings is most relevant for production and manipulation of signs by agents because it results in a construction of sign vehicles that somehow represent pre-existing meanings for certain agents, whereas the interpretational approach is most relevant for categorization and learning, where meanings are inferred from sign vehicles by agents in the context of their memory and the environment. Obviously, communication requires both approaches: structural and interpretational.

An important aspect of semiosis is semiogenesis, which is the emergence of new meanings. It can be either spontaneous or triggered by external or internal disturbance (e.g., mutations). New meanings are established as a result of the repeated interpretational activities (including misinterpretation) of agents in their adaptive evolution, development, and behavior. Mutations are not primary causes of evolutionary novelties, but some mutations are interpreted creatively by cells and/or their subagents based on their innate competence acquired in preceding evolution. Some adaptations emerge due to physiological and behavioral plasticity and are then stabilized by genetic accommodation. In cognitive animals and humans, new meanings emerge mostly by learning of new behaviors, concepts, and models of the world.

This book will be of interest not only to biosemiotcians, but also to specialists in the evolution of signs and matter, philosophers studying the dialectics of potential and actual, as well as to anyone interested in the role of the observer and agency in biology and other natural sciences (including physics) and the origin and evolution of the Universe as a whole.

Notes

1. 1 Pattee, H.H. (1969), How does a molecule become a message? Developmental Biology Supplement 3, 1-16.
2. 2 Deely, J. (1992), Semiotics and biosemiotics: Are sign-science and life-science coextensive? In: Biosemiotics. The semiotic web 1991. T.A. Sebeok and J. Umiker-Sebeok, (eds.) Mouton de Gruyter, New York: 45-75.
3. 3 However, the presence of sun is essential for all photosynthetic plants and most animals with diurnal activity, and the length of the day (photoperiod) is an important...