Abstract
In biosemiotics, some oppose the study of sign relations to empirical work on bio-mechanisms. Urging consilience between these views, we show the value of Alain Berthoz’s concept of simplexity. Its heuristic power is to present molecules, cells, organisms and communities as using tricks to self-fabricate by agglomerating ‘simplex’ bio-mechanisms. Their properties enable living systems (including observers) to self-sustain, adapt and, at best, to thrive. But simplexity also empowers agents to engage with their surroundings in novel ways. Life thus not only generates know-how but also social organisation. With languaging, people can act and inhibit: they can also simplexify. As a result, we can see a fruit as ripe, feel when things are awry or behave in ways likely to be judged to be apt. While all living beings make situated use of the historical and the local, humans also bind these with the use of both practices and artifacts. As a result, brains come to emulate what occurs in-between persons and their surroundings. In pursuing the basis for our powers, we focus on inhibition. This simplex trick enables a plant to use dormancy, a bird to learn, and a person to mesh languaging with other aspects of action/perception. Indeed, inhibition enriches human style phenomenology as impersonal resources are used to expand our epistemic horizons. Experience links a self-fabricating body, ancient bio-mechanisms, community-based concerns and epigenetically derived know-how.
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Notes
Whereas Barbieri used to emphasise the model of ‘organic coding’ at a molecular level and, paradigmatically, in protein synthesis, he now stresses that mechanisms for ‘coding’ in brains and (whatever is meant by) ‘language’ differs substantially. Accordingly, we write of ‘coding’.
Like Berthoz, we treat simplexity as a neologism (2012, p. 3). Although he did not invent the word he documents its use, above all, in geology, commerce, design and decoration, in such domains it captures kinds of simplicity. Others use it too in organic chemistry, defining simplexity as “the combination of simplicity and complexity within the context of a dynamic relationship between means and ends” (Compain 2003, p. 129). By contrast, we follow Berthoz in assuming that “[f]irst and foremost, simplexity is a property of life” (2012, p. x) and, for this reason, is irreducible to objectivist description. By focusing on properties of life, we treat its conceptual coherence as something for future work; our aim is simply to show its heuristic power.
Little would be gained from defining simplexity in that it is a property and, as such, is without explanatory power. It value lies in how it can be applied to living systems without making a specific ontological commitment. Given its basis in exploring how perception co-functions with action, its focus is on how the materiality of living systems-in-environments make use of historically layered, ecosystemically distributed functionality together with an evolutionary history that gives rise to lineages of living bodies.
For current purposes, we accept that humans developed mimetic capacities (Donald 1991) and, gradually, ways of integrating acting with gesture enabled the dialogicality that appears in infants (Trevarthen 1979). Above all, this linked attention to vocalization and feeling in what became languaging. Maturana (2002) traces languaging to a bio-logic where recursive activity is constrained by how people orient to each other in the context of consensual domains and social practices (cf. Raimondi 2014).
We draw on John Law’s (2004) work in social science since we find that extant approaches to the living tend to favour neat models. In his view, which we share, nature is messy and should not be suppressed. Accordingly, we follow Law in invoking ‘relational materiality’ (a concept he derives from Latour and Woolgar 2013 [1979]).
A split occurred at the Tartu gathering in 2012. While not all biosemioticians share Favareau’s ‘qualitative’ view, those concerned with coding have, since then, formed an International Society of Code Biology.
In Gibson’s terms, a molecular ‘array’ affords the pick-up of what is called odour: An animal uses an evolutionary history of attending to aspects of a species-specific world. While status of ‘affordances’ is debated, like Chemero (2011), we view them as both relational and using the array’s materiality. On such a view, learning uses what Gibson (1979) calls ‘the education of attention’.
Deacon (1998) both invoked ‘symbolic reference’ and attributes ‘reference’ to iconic and indexical activity. This parallels post-Saussurean synchronic views where signs/forms have signifieds that pick out classes of denotata. While post-Saussurean models also posit a mediating ‘language system’, Favareau’s claim (cited above) also posits that odourant molecules are ‘objects’ (with denotata). Even if the Deacon/Peirce/Favareau view demands no underlying ‘system’, objects and denotata are taken to exist for someone. To call molecules objects for the brain is striking; while it may be valid description for a scientific observer, it lacks explanatory value. The value of a turn to languaging lies in a shift of attention to human observing (not semiotic use of objects or symbolic reference) and its evolutionary/developmental roots in mimesis (see, Donald 1991; Trevarthen 1979; Cowley 2012). Even if schooled literates can hear speech as symbolic by ‘taking a language stance’, as Malinowski (1946) shows, linguistic behavior is always culturally embedded. Text and transcription reduces human activity to writing: ‘symbolizations’ are marks thrown together with the help of a writing system (see, Kravchenko 2009). Only ‘written bias in linguistics’ identifies language (qua activity) with the verbal (see, Linell 2004). Post-Saussurean work, like that of Deacon, Barbieri and many Peirceans, reduces language to a verbal aspect. As Andresen (2013) argues, nineteenth century philology (inscriptions taken out of their original context) still dominates how most linguists picture language.
For example, he writes, “[i]n the case of the cell, the sequences of the gene are not distinguished by physical laws since they are energetically degenerate. Where does a new distinction first occur? It is where this memory degeneracy is partially removed, and that does not occur until the protein folding process. Transcription, translation, and copying processes treat all sequences the same and therefore make no new distinctions, but of course they are essential for constructing the linear constraints of the protein that partially account for the way it folds. The folded protein removes symbol vehicle degeneracy, but it still has many degenerate states (many conformations) that are necessary for it to function as a non-integrable constraint” (Pattee 2001, p. 16; our italics).
Alain Berthoz uses ‘perç-action’; however, we mark the term with a cedilla while alternating between verbal and nominal forms.
There are other perspectives. However, Berthoz’s focus is on the brain and, at times, he echoes the neurocentrism of so much work in neuroscience (see, Cowley and Gahrn-Andersen submitted).
In this context, we focus on inhibition. Berthoz (2012) recognises that there are many other simplex tricks that occur in different biological scales. Apart from inhibition (discussed below), these include, refusal, detour, cooperation, redundancy etc.
For the last few thousand years humans have also used symbolizations that draw on writing systems or ‘written language’. It would be beyond the remit of this paper to consider how this has contributed to the rise of the Anthropocene; a start is made by Donald’s (1991) recognition of theoretical culture and, of course, how literacy and computation influence human life, society and thinking.
Peircean and distributed views of languaging differ on whether all face-to-face talk enacts ‘symbolic semiosis’ (for discussion, see, Cowley 2018). On a distributed view, only some utterance-acts suppress participants and situation. In talk the utterer/understander’s stance is often intrinsic to what is said/done.
The in-between is a notion developed by us. As such, it is not found in Berthoz’s writings.
The wording hints at Berthoz’s residual cognitivism (see, Cowley and Gahrn-Andersen submitted). But intentions need not be represented, laws internalized or emulation based in recurrent mental states. Simply, inhibition enables a brain with predictive powers to grant animals what observers call expectations and anticipative modes of action.
This insight is shared with Vygotsky (1978) who, famously, saw thought as the completion of speech (arising from many voices).
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Gahrn-Andersen, R., Cowley, S.J. Semiosis and Bio-Mechanism: towards Consilience. Biosemiotics 11, 405–425 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-018-9346-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-018-9346-7