Abstract
This article considers categorical perception (CP) as a crucial process involved in all sort of communication throughout the biological hierarchy, i.e. in all of biosemiosis. Until now, there has been consideration of CP exclusively within the functional cycle of perception–cognition–action and it has not been considered the possibility to extend this kind of phenomena to the mere physiological level. To generalise the notion of CP in this sense, I have proposed to distinguish between categorical perception (CP) and categorical sensing (CS) in order to extend the CP framework to all communication processes in living systems, including intracellular, intercellular, metabolic, physiological, cognitive and ecological levels. The main idea is to provide an account that considers the heterarchical embeddedness of many instances of CP and CS. This will take me to relate the hierarchical nature of categorical sensing and perception with the equally hierarchical issues of the “binding problem”, “triadic causality”, the “emergent interpretant” and the increasing semiotic freedom observed in biological and cognitive systems.
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Notes
Different from (and complementary to) a “formal hierarchy”, in a heterarchy there can be relations of complementarity and subordination between categories of different logical levels, giving place to a more network-like nature of emerging processes than a strict relation of vertical subordination, i.e. the horizontal relations are as important. Harries-Jones (1995) makes explicit the heterarchical nature of Bateson’s conception of “hierarchical context”, which is fundamental for the present approach. He claims that in advocating for a heterarchical kind of order “Bateson would maintain that he never meant to indicate that there was any sequential relationship between levels in his version of steps of logical typing. A meta-level of learning is simply a different aspect of the description of the same process, he said. The levels in his (Bateson’s) hierarchy were reciprocal—higher levels are also explanatory of lower levels, and vice versa. Any new learning is articulated with all that has gone before and will contain some overtones of all the levels.” (Harries-Jones 1995: 247–248). More directly related to the topic of this article (i.e. hierarchical categorical perception), Harries-Jones adds that: “Bateson recognized that the absence of any analytic logic underpinning the semantics of communication gave an extraordinary flexibility to meaning in communicative sequences. Framing, or labelling of messages becomes exceedingly complex, so that the framing message may become the message itself, or it may be falsified. The ability to discriminate the different classes of messages is a learned skill, and levels of learning and the typing of signals are inseparable phenomenon ... Bateson’s epistemological experimentation would not have gained prominence were it not for the evident practical importance of ‘typing’ or ‘classification’ in an interactive communicative setting.” (Harries-Jones 1995: 248). In this article I will be using the term “hierarchy” with the understanding that it includes the possibility for heterarchical relations.
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Bruni, L.E. Hierarchical Categorical Perception in Sensing and Cognitive Processes. Biosemiotics 1, 113–130 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-008-9001-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-008-9001-9