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Learning Plants: Semiosis Between the Parts and the Whole

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Abstract

In this article, I explore plant semiosis with a focus on plant learning. I distinguish between the scales and levels of learning conceivable in phytosemiosis, and identify organism-scale learning as the distinguishing question for plant semiosis. Since organism-scale learning depends on organism-scale semiosis, I critically review the arguments regarding whole-plant functional cycles. I conclude that they have largely relied on Uexküllian biases that have prevented an adequate interpretation of modern plant neurobiology. Through an examination of trophic growth in plant roots, I expose some conceptual difficulties in attributing functional cycles to whole-plants. I conclude that the mapping of resource areas in the root system is a learning activity requiring higher-scale sign activity than is possible at the cellular scale, strongly suggesting the presence of organism-scale functional cycles. I do, however, question whether all perception-action cycles in organisms are accompanied with organism-scale semiosis.

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Notes

  1. We shall ignore intracellular semiotics and signal transduction in this paper as this is a component of all life and therefore not essential to understanding phytosemiosis (or zoosemiosis). Mycosemiosis may be a different case, however, owing to the different role that cells play in fungi (see Hoffmeyer 2008, p. 224–225).

  2. It may be that, in some cases, there are actually two scales here: the single cell scale and the organ scale. However, they shall be treated as a single ontological type for the purpose of this paper.

  3. The capacity for a particular instance of some plant hormone or neurotransmitter to act as a iconic sinsign e-moting the plant into an activity occurs on a different scale than the capacity of the plant to form a class of situations for which the iconic sinsign is but a replica. The class is a legisign, and it may be an evolutionarily inherited sign type that is not itself available to change during the course of somatic development.

  4. To coordinate the movement of sugars, plants use action potentials along long tubules interspaced with chemically mediated signalling across plasmodesmata, in a system that formally converges with animal neurotransmission (Baluška et al. 2005)

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  1. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, 252 Bloor St. West, Toronto, ON, M5S 1V6, Canada

    Ramsey Affifi

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Affifi, R. Learning Plants: Semiosis Between the Parts and the Whole. Biosemiotics 6, 547–559 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-013-9164-x

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