Abstract
My aim in this commentary article is to observe and comment on some of the main conceptual and methodological continuities and discontinuities between recent biosemiotics-informed learning theory and the model of Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) that Jablonka and Ginsburg (2022) present in this Target Article. UAL as a model, presents important synthesis and clarity around the ecological context and evolutionary dynamics underlying learning, with a wide range of implications. Still, there are conceptual “grey areas” that the authors themselves note and that biosemiotics in particular has problematized in various ways. I highlight the general challenge of defining minimal consciousness in relation to a concept of minimal Umwelt, as well as the issue of animal cultures, and the transition from UAL to symbolic-cognition and human language, making connections to the evolution of hominin musicking capacities.
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Notes
My specific work in music and arts education made me, early on, interested in the connections of different phases and modes of consciousness and experience with different art-making and social learning practices. Interestingly, some of my main contributions as a pedagogical theorist have centred around how much of what we call learning is precisely pre-conscious and pre-intentional, yet still, modifiable through reflective practice (see my phenomenological-pedagogical concepts of “indexical rub” and “firstness moments” in Campbell, 2016, 2018a, 2019).
Kull (2009: 82): “The sign vehicle, or representamen (or sign, sensu strictum), stands for an object. This is the relation that is created by semiosis. The object, thus, has an interesting duality – it is both there and is not there – because it is both connected and anticipated. The relation of standing for is possible owing to the absence of what is referred to (the object) and, concurrently, there cannot be semiosis without the existence of a reference (an object) […] Semiosis is what makes anything plural.” See also Olteanu (in Stables et al., 2018: 117): “That plurality is the basic and necessary condition for learning […] implies the need for cultivating and enhancing plurality. Biological evolution provides clear examples of this enhancement, arguably driven by the rationale of learning. As explained, biological phenomena are driven semiosically, semiosis being the principle of pluralistic development itself.”
Again, Roli et al. (2022: 2) have utilised the biosemiotic Umwelt-affordance coupling, with great success, for their research into AGI: “An organism not only passively reacts to environmental inputs. It can initiate actions according to internal goals, which it seeks to attain by leveraging opportunities and avoiding obstacles it encounters in its Umwelt, that is, the world as perceived by this particular organism. These opportunities and obstacles are affordances, relations between the living agential system and its Umwelt that are relevant to the attainment of its goals (Gibson, 1966). Organismic agency enables a constructive dialectic between an organism’s goals, its repertoire of actions, and its affordances, which all presuppose and generate each other in a process of constant emergent co-evolution.”
“Ritual without modern language may seem a puzzling concept, but to see this likelihood we need only picture social complexities among hominins as far back as half a million years ago, which involved pedagogies of tool making, divisions of labor in organized hunting or scavenging, communal sharing of the resulting spoils, and other similar behavioral patterns. The absence of modern language in such societies need not have blocked the coalescing of ritual, because they possessed well-developed vocal and bodily communicative resources referred to today as “protolanguage” or “protodiscourse” (Wagner & Tomlinson, 2022: 13).
My co-authors and I would like to accommodate both top-down as well as bottom-up approaches to development, cognition and learning: “In any semiosis, the as-yet-unknown (dynamical) object, “that real thing or circumstance upon which that idea is founded, as on bedrock” (EP II: 1992: 407; “Pragmatism,” 1907), is decomposed into (immediate) objects, as meaningful ways of relating to the object, that are possible within the spectrum of the organism’s phenomenal world (Umwelt), as relative to its embodied morphology (brain-body structure). Through discovering possible action-patterns (affordances) in the environment, the organism is able to better predict and respond to possible future uncertainty […] From these basic recognitions, we derive an understanding of the process of learning as a reciprocal interplay between (top-down) decomposition of complexity into simpler signs, and the recombination of these simpler signs into further complexity (bottom-up)” (Campbell et al., 2021: 176–177).
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Campbell, C. Embracing the Learning Turn: The ecological context of learning. Biosemiotics 15, 469–481 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-022-09507-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-022-09507-6