Abstract
The notion of “semiotic scaffolding”, introduced into the semiotic discussions by Jesper Hoffmeyer in December of 2000, is proving to be one of the single most important concepts for the development of semiotics as we seek to understand the full extent of semiosis and the dependence of evolution, particularly in the living world, thereon. I say “particularly in the living world”, because there has been from the first a stubborn resistance among semioticians to seeing how a semiosis prior to and/or independent of living beings is possible. Yet the universe began in a state not only lifeless but incapable of supporting life, and somehow “moved” from there in the direction of being able to sustain life and finally of actually doing so. Wherever dyadic interactions result indirectly in a new condition that either moves the universe closer to being able to sustain life, or moves life itself in the direction not merely of sustaining itself but opening the way to new forms of life, we encounter a “thirdness” in nature of exactly the sort that semiosic triadicity alone can explain. This is the process, both within and without the living world, that requires scaffolding. This essay argues that a fuller understanding of this concept shows why “semiosis” says clearly what “evolution” says obscurely.
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Notes
Cf. among many sources Webster’s Dictionary 1878: “To furnish with a scaffold; to sustain; to uphold.”.
This presentation remains itself so far unpublished; but cf. Hoffmeyer and Kull 2003, Favareau, Cobley, and Kull, Eds. 2012, and also Emmeche, Kull, Stjernfelt, Eds. 2002. Perhaps the most extensive treatment Hoffmeyer has given to his scaffolding idea within semiotics is his 2009 book Biosemiotics, while the most recent treatment is his article of 2014.
“Representamen” (see the Commens Dictionary entry for this term, listed under “Representamen” in the References) was the term introduced by Peirce (e.g., Peirce 1867: W 2.55; yet unpublished ms. occurrences go back to 1866) to designate what stands in the foreground position of representing something other than itself to or for a third, and thus as a term stipulated to replace the common speech use of the term “sign” to stand for something that can be seen or pointed to, a common use which conceals the fact that what makes anything that can be sensed be a sign is not the thing itself but only and rather the position it occupies within a triadic relation. He also used the expression sign “vehicle” as a synonym for “representamen”, as naming the foreground item representing another to or for a third within the triadic or sign relation: see Deely 2009a: 84–95, esp. “10a. The Peircean Texts on the Notion of Sign Vehicle”.
In a 1905 draft for Lady Welby of a letter apparently never completed, Peirce wrote (Hardwick Ed. 1977: 193): “there was no need of this horrid long word”, i.e., “representamen” (final entry cited in the “Commens Peirce Dictionary” of the Helsinki Metaphysical Club at <http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/terms/representamen.html>). It is doubtful that Peirce would have followed through on this, as there most certainly is need of a technical term which clarifies and restricts the common use of the word “sign” for the material foreground element under the triadic relation constituting the sign formally. The arguments in favor of the term “representamen”, including Peirce’s repeated usage both before and after 1905 (from 1866 through 1911 at least), are considerably stronger than what Peirce himself described in 1905 as the “dreadful twaddle, garrulous chat” surrounding his tentative backpedaling from “this horrid long word” which — everywhere else in his semiotic writings — served very well indeed. Cf., e.g., Peirce 1903a: “Sundry Logical Conceptions”, esp. 272–273; also Benedict 1985, where he takes explicit account of the draft letter of July 1905.
The most important point of all to be noticed with regard to Peirce’s 1905 letter, the point Commens fails to take into account, is the fact that Peirce continues to use the term ‘representamen’ right up to 1911: see Deely 2015.
And I would remind readers that the term “object” in fact says in an indirect and disguised way what the term “significate” says openly and unmistakably; for just as a thing need not be an object, so an object need not be a thing, but every object (whether it have as a thing a subjective dimension within its objectivity or not) necessarily exists (Deely 2014a) suprasubjectively as the terminus of a relation to finite mind. For the details of why this is so, see Deely, esp. 2009c, 2010 and 2011.
Peirce c.1906: CP 5.473: “For the proper significate outcome of a sign, I propose the name, the interpretant of the sign. … it need not be of a mental mode of being. … it seems to me convenient to make the triadic production of the interpretant essential to a ‘sign’,” although in this regard (c.1902: CP 2.92) “It is not necessary that the Interpretant should actually exist. A being in futuro will suffice.”
This distinction between an “interpreter” and an “interpretant” (not, according to the common but historically benighted thesis commonly bandied about in the Peircean literature up to the present, the discovery that sign-relations must be irreducibly triadic, which had been demonstrated centuries earlier by Poinsot), is the most original move in the semiotic of Charles Peirce. Note in particular that the “to or for whom” the sign presents another than itself may indeed be an interpreter; but Peirce’s point is that “interpreter” is a species of “interpretant”, not its full equivalent nor even necessary ‘alongside’ or ‘in addition to’ an interpretant.
Reviewer 2 of this essay proposed that “the readers of Biosemiotics in particular” may want to know why even “a physical situation that results indirectly from a direct dyadic interaction that changes the relation of the universe in the direction away from the development of life” – the emergence of a high temperature anti-carbon forming atmosphere, for example – would not change it no less genuinely, consequentially and “lawfully” (and thus likewise constitute an example of Thirdness)? If both are equally cases of Thirdness, what claim is it exactly that is being made here?
The “default biosemiotic position today … would be that (quoting Reviewer 2): ‘All semiosis is triadic, but not all triadicity is semiotic’.”
Let us try to clear up the confusion here. The universe as a whole today is the product of evolution, and while not every change in the order of Secondness directly supports life or the emergence of life, the dynamics of Secondness overall do result in conditions supportive of the emergence of life; otherwise, indeed, life would have never emerged. The “anthropic principle” admits of several formulations not always compatible; but that evolution overall tends toward biosemiosis (and anthroposemiosis within biosemiosis) is clear from the present state of the universe: “ab esse ad posse valet illatio”, as the Scholastics noted (cf. Maritain 1967; Serani-Merlo 2009; but with the caveat in note 14 below!).
Thus, just as Thirdness within the realm of human awareness particularly always produces that species of representamen we call “signs”, so Thirdness wherever it occurs in nature produces representamens that will become signs should they ever enter into the sphere of human awareness. Triadicity is not ‘semiotic’ but semiosis; while semiotic is the knowledge that develops from the study of semiosis — wherever the production of a relation irreducibly triadic is found to occur in nature. That triadicity may not of itself directly be a movement in the direction of life, but as interwoven with the universe become compatible with life overall it is an object of semiotic study, albeit ideoscopically rather than merely cenoscopically.
Kruse 1990: 222: “… within a Peircean framework, even if everything in the universe can be a sign, the universe is not composed exclusively of signs — or, more precisely, it is not composed only of things that are exclusively signs. In order for a sign relation to obtain, the representamen must first of all possess a relatively determinate, or grounded, potentiality to signify in some respect. The ground of this signifying capacity, and the dynamical object in relation to which signification is grounded, stand outside the representamen. They form the relations upon which signification is built, but insofar as they serve respectively as the ground and goal of sign interpretation, they are extrasemiotic.”
Hence the crucial distinction between “physiosemiosis” as the idea that semiosis is at work in the material world of physical nature independently of life, and “pansemiosis” as the idea that there is nothing but semiosis throughout the universe, as if the universe consisted exclusively of signs. “Pansemiosis” is a misleading term which ought to be left to history’s dust-bin, as established in my exchange with Stjernfelt on this matter (Deely 2006). “Semiosis” is simply the most generic term, under which fall the sub-genera “anthroposemiosis”, “zoösemiosis”, “phytosemiosis”, and finally (as argued here) “physiosemiosis”, the first three marking the boundaries between the humans and the alloanimals (anthroposemiosis), the alloanimals as Umwelt occupants in contrast with plant life (zoosemiosis), and vegetative species in contrast with inorganic substances (phytosemiosis) among which occurs only physiosemiosis. Nor is that the “end of the line”: the biochemist, for example (as Reviewer #1 of my paper put it), might find it “a bit odd that zoö- and phyto- should be privileged forms of semiosis”, asking “what about fungal semiosis? Protist semiosis? Prokariot semiosis?”, not to mention the “decisive distinction” between “eukaryot and prokaryot semiosis”. The questions are excellent, but carry us into the interface between cenoscopic and ideoscopic analyses of semiosis, and into the difficult laboratory analysis of what exactly the boundaries consist in, concretely and in experimental detail, within the vast varieties of individual entities that fall within these sub-genera mistakenly conceived as “privileged”. For it is not so much a matter of “privileged forms” as it is a matter of “provisional genera” established cenoscopically as points of departure for the unending further analyses of semiosis employing the laboratory methods and instruments of ideoscopy.
The contrast between final causality and extrinsic specificative causality (which latter notion Peirce only approximates when he introduces “ideal causality” into his understanding of sign) is central to semiotics, but so far remains all but unknown to semioticians outside those few (growing, but still few) familiar with Poinsot’s work. So I think it essential to the present context to clarify the contrast here (from Deely 1994a: esp. 160–163, 170–171; see also Deely 2009c: 233–275, Chapter 12, “The Full Vista of the Action of Signs”, esp. Section 4.3., pp. 261–269; also Deely 1991).
A formal cause embodied is the pattern or formal structure, the “architecture”, as it were, according to which something holds together and functions as a distinct entity. But a formal cause can also be extrinsic to an entity or grouping of entities, as would be an architectural plan. But there is a second type of extrinsic formal causality which does not model (“extrinsic formal exemplary causality”) but specifies an outcome, or what an outcome would be if certain conditions prevail; for which reason it has also been called “objective causality”. Extrinsic formal causality of this second type, i.e., specificative in contrast to exemplary, “is far removed from considerations of art or artifact, even though it pertains to such considerations insofar as they involve questions of knowledge. Objective causality occurs in nature itself wherever there are instances of relationship — that is to say, it occurs everywhere in nature. The dinosaur, long dead, is present in the fossil bone as its extrinsic specifier, enabling the scientist — paleontologist, in this case — definitely to classify a bone as belonging to a brontosaurus rather than a pterodactyl, etc.”
Such causality “occurs equally throughout culture, again wherever there is a question of relationships, which (again) is everywhere. The question of ‘style’ is a matter of extrinsic formal causality in the objective sense; deconstruction is an exercise in tracing patterns of extrinsic formal cause relative to a text; detective work is a matter of determining the extrinsic formal patterns which clues provide for the detective (and which patterns, by including this or that sensible element, constitute a clue — a sign-vehicle — in the first place).”
Thus “the type of causality which best explains the action of signs is not final causality, but extrinsic formal causality of the specificative or ‘objective’ type. The terminology here, as far as I know, does not appear as such in the Peircean lexicon, though it has an approximating counterpart in the Peircean notion of ‘ideal causality’, an expression which has a different history in Latin Age philosophy but, as Peirce uses it, pertains precisely to specificative causality.” Formal causality in the specificative sense best explains the action of signs from every point of view. This causality can be exercised through the intrinsic constitution of the sign-vehicle (in the case of a natural sign) or not (in the case of an arbitrary sign), as the situation calls for. It is more general than the final causality typical of vital powers, inasmuch as it specifies equally both vital activity and the chance interactions of brute secondness at the level of inorganic nature (in contrast with final causality, which in every sense never reduces to chance events and cannot take chance into account save indirectly — whereas chance is often directly involved in semiosis). This is the causality that enables the sign to achieve its distinctive function of making present what the sign-vehicle itself is not, regardless of whether the object signified enjoys a physical existence apart from the signification. Only extrinsic specificative formal causality is equally suited to the grounding of sign-behavior in chance occurrences (as when the implosion of a star leads to the discovery of a new law of physics, or when accidental scratches become the clue leading to the apprehension of the criminal) and planned happenings.
Once it is understood that the action proper to signs is explained by specificative causality, the central question for understanding the scope of semiosis becomes (as Peirce put it in 1904: CP 8.332): “What is the essential difference between a sign that is communicated to a mind, and one that is not so communicated?” On the one side of this line is the thirdness of experience, on the other side the thirdness of the laws of nature. How does semiosis link the two? The answer to this question is through the interpretant, which need not be anything mental, but must in every case provide the ground for objectivity virtual no less than actual (as referred to above).
Whence we see that life is more than semiosis but, conversely, that semiosis is more than life; and of the two semiosis is the more general process, and broader overall, underlying the evolutionary nature of the cosmos.
I cannot develop the point here, but the reader needs to become aware of the fact that a relation, in order to be “irreducibly triadic”, not only involves three terms (e.g., as Aquinas points out, “parenthood” is a single relation whether the parent has three children on nine or only one!), but involves the second terminus directly and on the same level as the first, while the third term is involved only indirectly and, as it were, on a level above both the first and the second termini. Hence the problem of diagramming the triadic relation of semiosis: it cannot be adequately represented in any two-dimensional diagram. This is a crucial point, perhaps the single most undeveloped central point for the understanding of semiotics at the present time. My own beginning of this new discusssion — the two-dimensional unrepresentability of any relation irreducibly triadic (the relations that constitutes the “being” upon which semiosis as an “action” follows) can be read in Deely 2009: li–xc, “Words, Thoughts, Things: Aristotle’s Triangle and the Triadic Sign”.
Here I can only, as it were, beg the question; for while I wrote in 1969 an essay which definitively proved on cenoscopic grounds the existence of life (and indeed of intellectual life) elsewhere in our universe — insofar as such a thing can be “proved” in the absence of experimental evidence! — the fact that my 1969 “proof” has still to be verified by ideoscopic science leaves it somewhat shrouded in a cloud of humor. Nonetheless I remain confident that our discovery of life elsewhere than on earth remains only “a matter of time”, provided the dimensions of our ideoscopic sciences expand sufficiently to overcome the otherwise inevitable extinction of our terrestrial species along the lines Peirce discussed (c.1885: CP 8.43), as we will see below.
On the terms “teleonomy” vis-à-vis “teleology”, see Deely 2001: 65–66.
On the extension of extrinsic formal causality, the objective causality of semiosis, from specification of vital powers to categorial or physical relations as such, see Poinsot 1632: TDS Appendix C, “On the source of specific and individual identity of relations”, 382/4–26. See further, in Index 4 to the Treatise (the Index Rerum/Index of Terms and Propositions), the entries under “Object”, pp. 552–554, beginning with no. 4, referring the whole text to extrinsic formal causality. Also see the entries for “Foundation”, p. 539.
This erroneous identification of semiotic causality with final causality has been the single greatest obstacle to the understanding of physiosemiosis. As I remarked in the 5th ed. of Basics (Deely 2009d: 269), the sign may be and normally is entangled with final causality at the level of substance, but that is not at all because the sign has a final causality, but rather because the sign has an extrinsic formal specificative causality that is in principle objective virtually over and above the subjective being of the sign-vehicle of that specification.
For example, oxygen, essential for life on this planet now, was originally introduced as a waste product of living beings who neither needed nor could survive within a heavily oxygenated atmosphere.
Likewise unnecessary was his desperate earlier resort to panpsychism as a ploy for introducing thirdness into the realm of inorganic matter (Peirce 1892: 6.158, 1892a: 6.268), which yet failed to solve the problem of experienced thirdness (c.1909: 6.322) as required by the sign for its proper and formal being fully actualized. Thus, while “anthroposemiosis” and “zoösemiosis” designate a sphere within which semiosis directly involves awareness as well as life, and “phytosemiosis” a sphere which involves life but not necessarily awareness, “physiosemiosis” designates the dimension of semiosis which both preceded and currently surrounds as made possible the biosemiotic sphere without itself directly requiring neither life nor awareness.
I say that physiosemiosis looks to the future only in a comparatively accidental or tangential way, inasmuch as, in the case of inorganic agents, which cause only as they are moved, “from the very movement that they undergo they are ordered to producing effects. And similarly in all cases where a good of any kind accrues to the cause from the effect” (Aquinas c.1265-1266: q. 7. art. 10), such as Powell’s example (1986: 297) of the senselessness of saying that “the causal relation whereby one cat scratches out the eye of the other is specified by a final cause”. For even though “one and the same motion is a ‘good blow’ for the one scratching out and a ‘disaster’ for the one losing its eye”, the good (and the “disaster”) pertains directly to the individual circumstances of the cats, not to their specific natures as belonging to a determinate biological population.
Furthermore, in the case of anthroposemiosis, the preservation and generation of culture is future-oriented beyond mere biological propagation, a point that completes the grand view of a progression through past-future relations from physiosemiosis to anthroposemiosis. This is a progression, however, in which the successive levels of transcendence do not fully leave behind, but rather contain and continue the previous levels according to varying requirements.
Regarding what is now discussed as “the anthropic principle” (the developmental inclination of the universe from physiosemiosis to anthroposemiosis), Peirce (c.1885: CP 8.43) had a rather definite opinion: “We may take it as certain that the human race will ultimately be extirpated; because there is a certain chance of it every year, and in an indefinitely long time the chance of survival compounds itself nearer and nearer zero. But, on the other hand, we may take it as certain that other intellectual races exist on other planets — if not of our solar system, then of others; and also that innumerable new intellectual races have yet to be developed; so that on the whole, it may be regarded as most certain that intellectual life in the universe will never finally cease.”
The manuscript from which the quote is taken the scholars date “c.1909”; depending on how literal the “forty years” here is to be taken, it might be as early as 1907.
Peirce distinguishes “genuine” triadic relations (those in symbols) from triadic relations “degenerate” in either the first degree (those in indices) or second degree (those in icons). However, this distinction he derives from mathematics, and I have some question as to the fulness of its applicability to the problem at hand, inasmuch as to understand semiosis as at work in the physical universe prior to life we have to suppose that “degenerate” precedes “genuine” thirdness, which is a bit odd, since “degeneracy” in the physical sense would more easily be conceived as following or consequent upon an authentic state. However, this is not a question I aim to discuss here, save to remark that, in physiosemiosis, we should perhaps speak rather of pregeneracy (“pregenerate Thirdness”) than of degeneracy.
Peirce c.1902, from Chapter 1 of the uncompleted Minute Logic: CP 2.86.
Peirce c.1902: CP 2.92: “Genuine mediation is the character of a Sign. A Sign is anything which is related to a Second thing, its Object, in respect to a Quality, in such a way as to bring a Third thing, its Interpretant, into relation to the same Object, and that in such a way as to bring a Fourth into relation to that Object in the same form, ad infinitum.”
Again, keep in mind that, as above discussed, my use of “genuine” in this context cannot simply be reduced to the mathematical sense of Peirce’s contrast between “genuine” and “degenerate”.
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Deely, J. Building a Scaffold: Semiosis in Nature and Culture. Biosemiotics 8, 341–360 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-015-9237-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-015-9237-0