BASICS OF SEMIOTICS

By John Deely

Preface

The last half-century or so has witnessed an increasing interest in semiotic inquiry, with
a concomitant scholarly production around the world of books, journals, and articles
devoted to the endless facets of the subject. The image of astronomy in 1611 conveyed
by John Donne has been suggested as the image of the modern semiotic universe: "Tis
all in pieces, all coherence gone; / All just supply, and all Relation".

For conspicuously absent in the burgeoning semiotic literature has been a unified
treatise laying out the basics behind the very idea of semiotic inquiry in general, a
treatise providing a map of semiosis as an integral phenomenon (it being understood
that semiosis is but the name for the action of signs, which provides the common
subject matter for the whole range of inquiries covered by the umbrella term
"semiotics"). This book is a remedy for that absence, a first approximation to a
comprehensive rationale for the linking of semiosis at the levels of culture, society, and
nature organic and inorganic.

I have tried to have a fair regard for contemporary and historical scholarship, but
nothing has been included here just for the sake of being included. I have not followed
the practice of allowing the sociological prestige attained by the application of special
methods within semiotics, or by celebrated idiosyncratic preoccupations of individual
authors, to enter eo ipso into the account. I have tried to allow the requirements of the
subject matter to dictate the references at every point. So if there are some strange
omissions, as may seem, the reader is asked first to entertain the hypothesis that the
omissions are due less to ignorance than to the objective of answering the question of
what is really basic in the outline of this subject matter. There can be disagreement over
basics, but, for the disagreement to be fruitful, someone has first to make a stab at
saying what the basics are. Here is my guess at the riddle of how all being "pieces" and
"relation" can yet supply a coherence of substance.

The aim of the book, then, is to fill the need for an answer to the question of just what is
the essential nature and what are the fundamental varieties of possible semiosis. The
substance of the answer to this twofold question is contained in chapters 3 through 6.
Corresponding to this answer is the answer in chapter 2 to the prior question of what
semiotics itselfthe knowledge corresponding to the subject matterbasically is. And
bracketing this whole discussion by way of opening and closing is a kind of sociological
look at semiotics today in chapter 1, balanced by a historical look at semiotics in
retrospect and prospect in chapter 7.

This is a book I have long wanted to write and one that has, for even longer, needed to
be written; but, at least for this author, only recently have the essential insight and
opportunity come together for expressing in a coherent overall framework the basic
concepts of semiotics. I believe the book effectively demonstrates the thesis Sebeok
advanced in his 1975 "Chronicle of Prejudices" (156):
Movement towards the definition of semiotic thinking in the biological and
anthropological [and, I would add, physical environmental] framework of a theory of
evolution represents . . . the only genuinely novel and significantly wholistic trend in the
20th century development in this field.

The twenty-first century, I hope, will bear this out, and we will see an end to the "sad
fact" recorded by Sebeok more recently (1989b: 82)that "the contemporary teaching of
semiotics is severely, perhaps cripplingly, impoverished" by "the utter, frightening
innocence of most practitioners of semiotics about the natural order in which they and it
are embedded." Semiotics indeed "will surely shrivel and wither unless this lesson sinks
in", but the optimism and message of this book is that the lesson, being inscribed in the
very object of semiotic inquiry, has to sink in as the inquiry continues to be pursued.

Debts in writing a book are normally theoretical or practical. In this case, one debt, like
semiotics itself, straddles the twothe work of Brooke Williams in editing the
manuscript. The theoretical debts should be clear enough from the references in the text
itself and from the dedication. Here I will mention only the main practical debts, after
first noting a terminological point that might otherwise cause the English reader some
confusion.

This book was conceived and written in Brazil, while I was a visiting professor on the
Faculdade de Letras of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte
(UFMG). In the background to all that is written here is the recurring linguistic problem
of the final "s" often added nowadays to the technical term "semiotic". Although
English readers tend to take it that way, the "s" on this word is not a plural form, but
rather a kind of malformation puristically speaking. Since the malformation is inevitable
anyway in popular consciousness, in earlier writing for English-speakers, I have taken
the occasion of the linguistic accident of the two forms to convey a difference between
foundational and superstructural inquiries in the field.

That strategy is unworkable in Portuguese. There is no way to accommodate the

distinction of these two forms ("semiotic" vs. "semiotics") at the level of a single lexical
item, because the Portuguese term "semiótica" is required equally for both. To insist in
the context of a Portuguese speaking audience on the form of the distinction as earlier
established in English, therefore, would be tantamount to making an at least twofold
grammatical accident (first of the peculiar class of "ics" words, second of contemporary
popular English) into an obstacle to the effective presentation of the broadest and most
fundamental issues.

In the present work, accordingly, an accident of Portuguese has led me to strike a

compromise which extricates us from relying overmuch on an accident of English.
While I have varied the two forms in context in ways that could be shown to be
consistent with earlier specialized discussions in English, I have not made an issue of
the two forms in their variation in this worka variation which disappears in the
Portuguese. Instead, my concern in the present work has been, rather, to convey and to
establish the overlap and common core in the comprehension of both of the forms as
they occur in general use today, and hence to use them even in their difference as suits
the conveyance of the single form "semi6tica" (or semiotic, or semiotics) for a
presentation of the broadest and most fundamental issues leading to an integral doctrina
signorum today.
In view of the practical circumstances which concretely gave rise to this book, I must
thank first of all the members of the Fulbright Commission in the United States, who
appointed me to the UFMG, and second of all Dr. Marco António da Rocha, Executive
Director of the Fulbright Commission in Brasilia, whose decision to extend my
appointment for another semester made the completion of the book possible. Along with
these gentlemen of the Fulbright Commission I owe thanks to James Barta, President of
Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, for the leave of absence to work in Brazil.

The chapters of the book reflect my work in semiotics particularly since the publication
of Introducing Semiotic in 1982. The present book ends by confirming with new detail
the outline for a history of semiotic inquiry with which that book began. Williams
(1985a: xxvi) has made the point that the synchronic and diachronic, being mutually
implicatory at all points, can be "distinguished but not separated in semiosis". In just
such a way does the overall perspective of the two works differ, that of the earlier book
emphasizing diachrony, whereas a synchronic overview of the general theoretical
possibilities for semiotic research dominates the present book throughout. Introducing
Semiotic lent to the past a shape from the present toward shaping the future. Basics of
Semiotics gives the full proportions of that mediating shape.

In particular, the chapters of this book reflect mainly the two courses and eight lectures I
gave in Brazil during the winter semester of 1988.

Chapters 1, 3, and 4 reflect the plenary address and "short course" given at the VII
Seminário Internacional de Semi6tica e Literatura at Cam-pina Grande in Paraíba on
September 19 and September 20-22. I thank Professoras Elizabeth Marinheiro and
Celina Alves Pereira who arranged the invitation.

Chapter 2 is one of two partial exceptions to the Brazilian pattern of the whole. For this
chapter my main thanks go to Professor Desmond FitzGerald of the University of San
Francisco, who brought the thoughts there expressed into their first rough form through
the invitation he arranged for me to address, on May 29, 1987, a Language Colloquium
being held at his university These ideas were further refined in classroom and informal
discussions at the UFMG in my course on the development of semiotic consciousness,
but the original draft was made in San Francisco.

Chapter 5, the other partial exception, is substantially drawn from an article now in
press with The American Journal of Semiotics under the title "Sign, Text, and Criticism
as Elements of Anthroposemiosis". Besides being a distillation of the text used for my
course at the UFMG on language from a semiotic point of view, putting flesh on the
bones of the integral model for human experience outlined in Introducing Semiotic, Part
II, Section 3, and again in the editors' preface to Frontiers in Semiotics, subsequent
drafts of this distillation were criticized editorially and much improved through the
suggestions of Brooke Williams, Floyd Merrell, Myrdene Anderson, and Dean
MacCannell. To these four editors are due thanks for this chapter.

Chapter 6 reflects in particular ideas presented at the Pontificia Universidade Católica

de Sâo Paulo in a long lecture delivered on November 23. My thanks to Professora
Maria Lúcia Santaella Braga, who arranged the lecture and provided incomparable
hospitality for me and my wife and who, by her enthusiasm alone, persuaded my
audience that the idea of a semiosis affecting even the stars might be of value.
Chapter 7 reflects particularly the Ciclo de Conferências I gave at the Universidade de
Brasília, November 16-18. My thanks to Professor Karl Erik Schollhammer, who
arranged the conferences, and who inspired, in the course of his own class lecture that I
attended on Jakobson's poetics, the formulation of the peculiarly semiotic integration of
history and theory expressed here. Karl Erik's hospitality and conversations were of
exceptional value in gestating this work.

I thank Professor Myrdene Anderson of Purdue University, Professor Nathan Houser of

the Peirce Edition Project at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, and
Professor Ralph McInerny of Notre Dame University for the help they provided from
afar in nailing down a few key references.

Over and above the specific work on the volume, thanks go to the faculty members of
the Departamento de Letras Germânicas of the UFMG for their friendliness to me and
their interest in semiotics. These thanks are due to the Chefe in particular, Professora
Stela Beatris Törres Arnold, who arranged the details of my stay with the faculty I thank
Professora Ana Lúcia Almeida Gazolla, Pró-Reitora de Pós-Graduaçauml;o da UFMG,
for her early suggestion of the extension of my stay.

Special thanks go to Professora Júnia de Castro Magalhães Alves for her careful
readings of the chapters and general interest in the progress of the work and for the
countless ways in which she helped two strangers become at home in a new language
and land. She also embodied the healthy skepticism that should seize any reader
confronting a first "volume of basics". When I told her the third chapter was complete,
she answered "Yes. But is it any good?" Now the question applies to the whole.

Thanks go to the students who, by their attendance in the courses and their discussions,
concretely demonstrated interest in our subject matterwhich is the essential
encouragement for any professor. Among these students, two stand out in the
intelligence of their enthusiasm: Thais Flores Nogueira Diniz and Júlio César Jeha.
Senhor Jeha also helped directly in preparing the bibliography for this work, and in
providing a first draft for the translation of chapter 5.

I thank J. Bantim Duarte, Editorial Director of Editora Atica in Säo Paulo, for extending
a contract for the work in Portuguese translation; and Professora Ana Cláudia de
Oliveira for her linguistic support in bringing that November 25 meeting in the Atica
offices to its successful conclusion.

An acknowledgement goes above all to my colleague Julio C. M. Pinto, who was

himself on the Paraiba program and provided the translation for my lectures there. Out
of that collaboration grew the concrete proposal that became this book. His translation
of the whole into Portuguese for Editora Atica is my deepest source of debt in making
of this Brazilian book a reality for readers in Brazil.

JOHN DEELY 
BELO HORIZONTE 
29 MAY 1989
THEMATIC EPIGRAPHS
"A sign is an objective cause, not the principal objective cause, but a sub- stitutive one,
by reason of which a sign is said to be instrumental, not in- deed as if it were an
instrument of an acting agent, but as it is a substitute for an object, not informing as a
specifying form, but representing from outside what it represents."

"An object in general ... consists in this, that it be something extrinsic, from which
derives and upon which depends the intrinsic rationale and specific character of any
capacity or act; and this is reduced to the category of an extrinsic formal cause not
causing existence, but specification."

"If therefore an end as end specifies, it takes on the rationale of an object, for the
rationale of a specifying object is one thing, the rationale of a mov- ing end quite
another. And thus specification pertains to the order of an extrinsic formal cause; the
impetus of an end, to the finalization moving to produce a thing in being. But to move
relative to the act of being and exis- tence is outside the order of specification."

          JOHN POINSOT 1632A: 195/23-29, 166/4-10 & 177/8-178/7

"It seems a strange thing, when one comes to ponder over it, that a sign should leave its
interpreter to supply a part of its meaning; but the expla- nation of the phenomenon lies
in the fact that the entire universe - not merely the universe of existents, but all that
wider universe, embracing the universe of existents as a part ... - ... is perfused with
signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs."

          CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE 1905-1906: 5.448N.

"Hence the name of this type of causality is 'extrinsic formal causality'. It is formal
causality because it specifies the ... relation, and it is extrinsic formal causality because
the specifiers lie outside the ... relation." And they need not exist.

          RALPH AUSTIN POWELL 1986: 297 & VIVA VOCE

1 
LITERARY SEMIOTICS AND THE 
DOCTRINE OF SIGNS

IN THE United States, in contrast with the predominantly literary and linguistic
development semiotics has undergone in the more typically European contexts, the
development of semiotics has taken a rather different turn, influenced especially perhaps
by Thomas A. Sebeok and the many projects associated with the Research Center for
Language and Semiotic Studies which he chaired at the Bloomington campus of Indiana
University. This development shows promise of providing for the semiotics movement
as a whole a new and larger framework for the conduct of research, one that is, to tell
the truth, more in keeping with the possibilities contained in Locke's original
adumbration of the place of semiotics among the sciences, natural and human alike.

It helps often to have a label identifying important differences, and in this case the
labels have largely been provided by the developments themselves. All that is needed is
to pluck from the tree of established usages the terms most fruitful for conveying the
flavor of the paradigm shift semiotics continues to undergo sociologically, as it expands
outward from the literary and the linguistic to take in further the realm of biological
forms and, indeed, evolutionary development in general. For the very emergence of
semiotic animals is already itself a thirdness respecting the general development of the
physical universe. What these terms are was suggested in the French context by Georges
Mounin, inadvertently and in spite of himself, as early as 1970 (57n.): "the term
semiotic has made its way into French ... as a designation for semiology in general, an
ill-advised usage... ."

What I want to bring out are the underlying reasons why Mounin experienced the
emerging usage as "ill-advised", and, at the same time, paradoxically, I want to point
out that what was ill-advised was not the emergence of the new usage, but the attempt to
equate it with the established usage whereby the designation "semiology" had come to
stand for a part mistaken for the whole prospective of a doctrine of signs. From the
point of view of the North American development, it turns out to have been profoundly
misleading for Decio Pignatari (1971: 27) to announce: "In Europe, Semiotics is called
Semiology...."

Asa Berger correctly noted (1982: 14, 17) that "the essential breakthrough of semiology
is to take linguistics as a model and apply linguistic concepts to other phenomena, texts,
and not just to language itself". So far so good. But if that be the case, then the essential
breakthrough of semiotics, by contrast, is to see that the phenomenon of semiosis
requires a model within which linguistic phenomena taken together appear as a subset
of a much broader range of sign-activity which cannot even be confined to the cultural
side of the line defining our ideas of the natural world. In other words, if semiology is
rightly taken as a proper name for the genre of semiotics studying the sign as "first of all
a construct", in the exact expression of Paul Perron (1983: 1), then semiotics by rights
should be taken inclusively to name that larger realm of which semiology forms but a
distinguished part, including, as it does in anthroposemiosis, the highest achievements
of semiosis, undoubtedly literary.

What I would like to do here, then, is suggest a way of broadening the consideration of
literary semiotics to include in some sense natural phenomena as well as purely cultural
and literary texts. Thereby we may see if the notion of narrative as semiotically
conceived might not recapture something of the classical philosophical understanding
that saw cultural phenomena, including literature, as in some sense an extension of and
linked with a larger world of nature which cultural beings no doubt may take for granted
and even ignore in their round of life, but which remains nonetheless the inevitable
context in which they move and on which they depend even as cultural. For it is this
larger ambience which provides in the first place the materials or, as we may say, the
raw possibilities of cultural creations, including literary texts, just as it subsequently
provides for their sustenance.

In his 1984 International Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies (ISISSS)
workshop on "Semiosis as a Psychologically Embodied Phenomenon", Gary Shank
proposed for semiotics the notion of narrative which I would like to make the center of
my reflections here. Human beings, he suggested, "are essentially narrative as opposed
to the other animals." This is an interesting notion and a highly semiotic one. We hear
much of formal and logical structures in the context of semiotics. Yet the essential
transmission of culture to children takes place first of all under the guise of stories - that
is to say, narrative. The animals other than human do not do this. They do not bring
their young up on stories, but on instinct and examples - examples of a straight
behavioral kind, not examples of heroism or adventure embodied in narrative tales such
as sustain the cultures of humankind and constitute the substance of the enculturation of
children in all societies. We (perhaps the literary semioticians above all) have to face
the question raised by Jerome Bruner in his first class of that 1984 ISISSS (May 31):
"Why can children understand stories so much earlier than logic?"

Anthropologists bring to our attention rich and exotic data that similarly attest to the
importance of narrative among all the peoples of the earth. It can perhaps be said that
the first of the narrative universals we ought to consider, therefore, is the universal role
of narrative as the root of the transmission of culture - the root, as Brooke Williams
points out in her essay on history and semiotic (1985), of the distinctively human
semiosis whereby biological heredity is transcended in the cumulative transmission of
learning that narrative alone makes possible.

From this point of view, a number of clarifications become possible that are of the first
importance for semiotics itself in defining its own future and in seizing on the unique
opportunities opened up by the development in our day of the doctrine of signs. For the
first time in perhaps three hundred years, semiotic makes possible the establishment of
new foundations for the human sciences, foundations making possible in turn a new
superstructure for the humanities and the so-called hard or natural sciences alike. Such a
framework has been often dreamed of, but semiotics for the first time puts it within our
reach, provided only that we have an understanding of the sign and its essential
functionings sufficiently rich to prevent closing off semiotic research within the sphere
of constructed signs.

In this regard, the actual development of semiotics in our time provides a number of
clues that should not be neglected in our attempts to interpret what sort of human
phenomenon we are dealing with. "While every contributor to Semiotica", Thomas
Sebeok pointed out in 1971 (56), "may indulge his personal taste when attaching a label
to the theory of signs", the terminology within the same piece of discourse will not
oscillate ad libitum, for the "initial selection will have signaled" to the sophisticated
readership the tradition with which the author in question stands principally aligned.

It is well known that semiotics as we find it today traces back mainly to two
contemporaneous pioneers, one in the field of linguistics and one in the field of
philosophy. The first of these, Ferdinand de Saussure, envisioned the possible
developments under the label of semiology, which seems to have been a word of his
own coining, fashioned, of course, from the Greek semeion. The second, C. S. Peirce,
chose the name semiotic, also fashioned from the Greek but not of Peirce's own coining.
Peirce derived his vision of the possible development we now see being actualized, as
he himself tells us, from the text with which John Locke concludes his Essay
Concerning Human Understanding.

For Saussure, the "science" of signs was to be a branch of social psychology and
linguistics a subspecies within that branch, albeit the most important one. Of this
"possible science", of course, Saussure himself did not say a great deal. But he did
wisely caution that, "since it does not yet exist, one cannot say what form it will take"
(i.1906-1911: 33) - a wise caution largely ignored, it must be said, by even the most
brilliant of those in our own day who took their early inspiration from Saussure and
proceeded to develop a "science" of signs centered exclusively on literary texts and
other artifacts of culture, which were always treated on the patterns of language and
almost as of a piece with it. Within this tradition, the possibilities of semiotic
understanding, though very rich and diversified, have always been restricted in highly
artificial ways in terms of what Paul Bouissac, among others, has repeatedly pointed out
(for example, 1979, 1981) as glottocentrism.

To this extent, semiotic development has undoubtedly been hampered in establishing

the perspective fully proper to itself by some inevitable entanglement with the coils of
modern philosophy - the work of the Kantian critiques, in particular, according to which
there is no world known or knowable beyond the phenomena constructed by the
understanding itself according to its own hidden mechanisms and ineluctable laws.
Writing within this tradition, Terence Hawkes (1977: 18) reminds us that:

It follows that the ultimate quarry of structuralist thinking will be the permanent
structures into which individual human acts, perceptions, stances fit, and from which
they derive their final nature. This will finally involve what Fredric Jameson has
described as [1972: 209] 'an explicit search for the permanent structures of the mind
itself, the organizational categories and forms through which the mind is able to
experience the world, or to organize a meaning in what is in itself essentially
meaningless'.

This tradition, as I have noted, originally flourished under the banner of semiology, a
term that today remains far from desuetude. It has, however, been greatly and
increasingly influenced in recent years by the other semiotic tradition, which develops
not from Saussure but from Peirce and Morris and a number of scientific workers. It
does not seem too much to say that, under the pressures of this influence, we have
witnessed the coming into being, alongside the term sémiologie, the newer
term sémiotique, a term which, without displacing "sémiologie" entirely, has come to
dominate over it and, to a certain extent, replace it, without, however, so far removing
the intractable bias toward glottocentrism and philosophical idealism that characterized
semiotic development in the Romance areas.

This bias and developing influence, of course, is by no means restricted to the Romance
areas. Within current philosophy, David Clarke (1987: 8; cf. 120-121, 137, and passim)
has made a belated attempt to define semiotic itself in the restrictive terms already
established as proper to semiology: an "attempt to extend analogically features initially
arrived at by examining language use to more primitive signs, with logical features of
language becoming the archetype on which analysis of these latter signs is developed".
It is simply a misnomer to title a book based on such a thesis Principles of Semiotic. To
try to reduce semiotic to the status of a subalternate discipline within the dimensions of
current linguistic philosophy already evinces adherence to the modern perspectives of
idealism which semiotics points beyond.

Among modern philosophers, the one who struggled most against the coils of idealism
and in the direction of a semiotic was Martin Heidegger. His failure to free himself from
the modern logocentrism is, to be sure, a testimony to its pervasiveness in modern
culture, and to the scale of the task semiotic in its fullest possibilities has to face. Yet in
the debate between realism and idealism, he is the one who perhaps most clearly
brought to the fore the fact that (1927: 207), whatever its drawbacks and "no matter how
contrary and untenable it may be in its results", idealism "has an advantage in principle"
over realism. That advantage lies in the simple fact that whenever we observe anything,
that observation already presupposes and rests within a semiosis whereby the object
observed came to exist as object - that is to say, as perceived, experienced, or known -
in the first place.

No one, including Heidegger, realizes this fact better than the semiotician. Indeed, at the
heart of semiotics is the realization that the whole of human experience, without
exception, is an interpretive structure mediated and sustained by signs. So it is perhaps
not surprising that much of the original semiotic development in our time has taken
place along the tracks and lines of a classical idealism in the modern sense, an
environment and climate of thought within which the structuralist analysis of texts and
narratives is particularly comfortable.

Yet we are entitled to wonder if such a perspective is enough to allow for the full
development of the possibilities inherent in the notion of a doctrine of signs - to wonder
if the "way of signs" does not lead outside of and well beyond the classical "way of
ideas" of which Locke also spoke. We are entitled to wonder if what we need is not
rather, as the recent collaborative monograph by Anderson et al. calls for (1984: 1), "a
semiotics which provides the human sciences with a context for reconceptualizing
foundations and for moving along a path which, demonstrably, avoids crashing
headlong into the philosophical roadblock thrown up by forced choices between realism
and idealism, as though this exclusive dichotomy were also exhaustive of the
possibilities of interpreting human experience".

Such a development seems to be what is taking place in the tradition of semiotic. This
tradition, in fact, given its name by Locke, had reached the level of explicit thematic
consciousness and systematically unified expression only very late - as far as we
currently know, not before the Tractatus de Signis essayed in 1632 by the Iberian
philosopher of Portuguese birth, John Poinsot (Sebeok 1982; Deely 1988). But, as
Sebeok remarks (1976: 1), what we are faced with, under many different names
fragmented by the perspectives from which those names spring, is "an ancient
discipline" developing through many channels and byways toward the era of its full
thematic systematization and baptism under its own name and according to the
perspective proper to itself. For this same discipline in nucesemiotic as the doctrine of
signs - is discernible in the most ancient origins of Greek medicine, philosophy, and
linguistic reflections, as recent work has begun to exhibit (Romeo 1976, 1977, 1979;
Deely 1982, 1985; Eco and Deely 983; Eco 1984; Eschbach and Trabant 1983; Doyle
1984).

This tradition of Poinsot-Locke-Peirce, unlike that of Saussure, does not take its
principal and almost exclusive inspiration from human language and speech. It sees in
semiosis a broader and much more fundamental process, involving the physical universe
itself in human semiosis, and making of semiosis in our species a part of semiosis in
nature. Abduction, the process whereby alone new ideas are seized upon - ideas further
to be developed deductively and tested inductively, beginning again the cycle, or, rather,
spiral (Deely 1985a: figure 2; 1985b) - is first of all a phenomenon of nature. It works
with constructed signs, but not only with constructed signs, and not with constructed
signs first of all.

We have here two traditions or paradigms, which have to a certain extent handicapped
the contemporary development by existing within it under sociological conditions of
opposition, an opposition not only uncalled for logically, but one which depends on a
perverse synecdoche where a part is mistaken for the whole. Semiotics forms a whole of
which semiology is but a part.

Let me try to clarify the relationship by applying a linguistic metaphor. Philosophers of

Latin times made the distinction between what they called ens reale and ens rationis a
staple of their discourse, and they assigned in general a very clear sense to this
dichotomy. They nowhere took effective notice, however, of the fact that the so-called
beings of reason have a kind of reality in their own right, and that there is something
curious about a distinction so drawn that one of its terms includes the other - something
that requires further explanation. From the standpoint of human experience, the greater
part of what we call culture, also social roles, is constituted precisely by so-called being
that, from this same standpoint, "reality" - what we experience directly in everyday life -
is a mixture irreducible to so-called ens reale.

Certainly the themes and objects of what I have here called "semiology", that is, the
texts and themes of literature and language-constituted phenomena generally, belong to
the order of entia rationis in the Latin sense. But, in the Latin sense, this object domain
was also shown to be dependent upon a larger whole and ordered to that larger whole -
namely, the universe of nature as we experience it. As autonomous, the sphere of human
culture is but relatively autonomous, as transcending, but only by incorporating and
resting upon, a physical environment shared with all the forms of biological life in a
larger network - biosemiosis - of mutual dependence. The understanding of that larger
whole precisely in terms of semiosis defines the complete task of which cultural
semiotics forms a part.

The perspective of semiotic is the perspective in which "real being" and "being of
reason" come together, not the perspective in which they are opposed. As John Poinsot,
the first semiotician to thematize this point, put it (1632a: 118/2-6):

We are discussing the sign in general, as it includes equally the natural and the social
sign, in which perspective even those signs which are mental artifacts - namely,
stipulated signs as such - are involved.
Poinsot's original point has also been restated in the terms of a contemporary
semiotician. Human evolution, Sebeok tells us (1977: 182-183), is
not only a reconfirmation of the evolutionary processes which went on before man
appeared on the scene, but continues as a dual semiotic consecution that can scarcely be
uncoupled in practice: one track language-free (or zoosemiotic), the other language-
sensitive (or anthroposemiotic). Semiosis must be recognized as a pervasive fact of
nature as well as of culture.

Within this framework, Sebeok (1984a: 3) reminds us, the tradition of semiology is a
subordinate part in relation to semiotics to the extent that semiology is fixed upon "that
minuscule segment of nature some anthropologists grandly compartmentalize as
culture."

Let me cite Sebeok's original description of terms on this theme of the two traditions
(1977: 181ff.):
The chronology of semiotic inquiry so far, viewed panoramically, exhibits an oscillation
between two seemingly antithetical tendencies: in the major tradition (which I am
tempted to christen a Catholic heritage), semiosis takes its place as a normal occurrence
of nature, of which, to be sure, language - that paramount known mode of terrestrial
communication which is La-marckian in style, that is, embodies a learning process that
becomes part of the evolutionary legacy of the ensuing generations - forms an important
if relatively recent component....

The minor trend, which is parochially glottocentric, asserts, sometimes with

sophistication but at other times with embarrassing naivete, that linguistics serves as the
model for the rest of semiotics - Saussure's le patron générale - because of the allegedly
arbitrary and conventional character of the verbal sign.

This theme of "the two traditions" is one that needs to be developed very carefully if it
is to be rightly understood. It is not at all a matter of "two traditions": one ('Anglo-
Saxon') arising from Peirce, the other ('Continental') arising from Saussure, which
"seem to have developed separately and without interpenetration", as Parret erroneously
asserts (1984: 220). Such an assertion is true neither sociologically nor theoretically.
Nor is it a matter (Watt 1984: 104, 106, glossing Percival 1981) of Saussure's "longterm
position in semiotic history, and his present utility", on the ground that "almost
everything that is based on Saussure can just as well be based on older sources, and
nothing is lost by doing so". Still less is it a question of whether (ibid.: 130, glossing
Atkins 1981) "Derrida has not unseated 2000 years of 'Western metaphysics': at most he
has (unwittingly) exposed a few of Saussure's inadequacies, a very different matter."

What is at issue simply is the intent and scope of the term semiotic as Locke introduced
it, and of the notion of "reality" as the perspective Locke labelled opens unto it (Deely
1986b). The "major and minor traditions", rightly understood, are no more opposed than
are "ens reale and ens rationis" in the perspective proper to a doctrine of signs. 1 It is not
a relation of exclusion that obtains but a relation of part to whole - and of a pars pro
toto fallacy that prevails when proponents of the part mistake it for or try to set it in
opposition to the whole.

If in Europe, as we have seen Pignatari allege (1971: 27),"semiotics is called

semiology", we see that, in Europe, something false is directly spoken, but something
true is also indirectly spoken and through a metonymy. Inheritors of the Iberian
university traditions, both Portuguese and Spanish, are in a privileged position to
contribute to this truth, through a recapturing and making vital to the contemporary
development of semiotic of the reflections on the sign undertaken by their own thinkers
between Ockham and Descartes.

2
SEMIOTICS: METHOD OR 
POINT OF VIEW?

SEMIOTICS HAS given rise to a variety of methods. No doubt this variety, already
considerable, is bound to increase under the ingenuity of the growing band of semiotic
workers.
But the question is whether semiotics as a whole consists in or can be identified with
such methods. The question is whether, in coming into its own, semiotics will continue
modern philosophy's obsession with method or will establish its theoretical framework
with sufficient richness and flexibility to accommodate itself to the full range of
signifying phenomena. Will semiotics, in other words, develop the full variety and
flexibility of methods that an eventual understanding of these phenomena will evoke?

A method, after all, implements some aspect or aspects of a point of view; indeed, the
systematic implementation of something suggested by a point of view is pretty much
what a method is. But a point of view that can be fully implemented by a single method
would be, on the whole, a very narrow viewpoint. The richer a point of view, the more
diverse are the methods needed to exploit the possibilities for understanding latent
within it.

This distinction between method and point of view, therefore, is actually a rather
important one. It is like the distinction within logic between extension and
comprehension: without the latter, the former would not be possible.

Modern philosophy was characterized by a search for a method. Descartes searched for
an introspective method that could yield certainty at the foundation of the sciences.
Leibniz searched for a calculatory method for resolving all the problems of philosophy,
particularly those that had a bearing on religion and theological dispute. Spinoza sought
a geometric method applicable to ethical discussion. Newton sought a mathematical
method for interpreting the details of nature. And so on.

I came to think, in my own study of philosophy, that the search for a method was in a
certain sense modern philosophy's failure. So engrossed were the moderns by their
search for the one true method that they overlooked, in their very assumption of it, the
perspective common to all of them that guided their search to begin with and, at the
same time, made it futile. The one thread that unified the modern philosophers to me
was the fact that they each began with the assumption that our ideas represent
themselves.2 These philosophers ended unable to explain and absolutely baffled by how
we could know anything besides our own ideas, since ideas so construed are each one's
own, that is to say, private, ideas.

The situation created by this presupposition was systematized by Immanuel Kant,

especially in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787) but also in the whole set of
the Critiques. What Kant did was to systematize the modem conundrum in such a way
that, while communication as a true sharing of insight is absolutely impossible within
the Kantian system, the appearance of communication can be sustained by the fact that
the a-priori mechanisms of our sense and understanding are specifies-specific and as
such the same in each of us. Thus, it can seem that we are communicating even though
in reality the communication appearing to occur is impossible.

And this is not so different from the situation hypothecated by Leibniz, who explained
communication ultimately through the hookup of the individual monads with the Divine
Monad, the great communications satellite in the sky that made my representations
correspond with yours and so on for every other creature forming and projecting its own
private representations.
Now I say, in contrast with all of this, that semiotics provides not a method first of all
but a point of view. From within this point of view it becomes clear that ideas are not
self-representations but signs of what is objectively other than and superordinate to the
idea in its being as a private representation. Semiotic is a perspective or a point of view
that arises from an explicit recognition of what every method of thought or every
research method presupposes. Semiotic arises from the attempt to make thematic this
ground that is common to all methods and sustains them transparently throughout to the
extent that they are genuine means by which inquiry is advanced. Semiotics, then, or the
semiotic point of view, rests on the realization of a unique form of activity in nature, as
we will look at in some detail in the chapters following, and for which, as we have seen,
Charles Sanders Peirce coined the name semiosis.

This activity, the action of signs, is in fact presupposed by the very idea of method.
Signs, that is to say, are required not only for any given method in philosophy or in the
sciences, natural or human, but for the very possibility of there being such a thing as
method or inquiry of any kind. Semiosis is a process of revelation, and every process of
revelation involves in its very nature the possibility of deceit or betrayal. Every method
reveals something (hence some truth about the world, some aspect of the world, or some
field of investigation), and, insofar as it reveals, is a semiotic method, by which I mean
simply that it is, as a communicative modality, something sign-dependent.

Conversely, any method ceases to be semiotic only as and insofar as it betrays its
character as a method, by treating the signs upon which it relies as if they were merely
objects. So we have bizarre methods, for example, in the recent history of philosophy,
such as logical positivism, with its so-called verification theory of meaning, put forward
as a means of removing nonsense from philosophy, by a twofold (and doubly arbitrary)
stipulation telescoping the signification of dicisigns3 into their truth and further
telescoping their truth into the sense-perceptible dimension or aspect as such of their
signifieds. Thus, only a dicisign designating sensibly accessible significates could be
true, and only true designations of such signifieds could have significance.

No sooner was this method announced than it was rightly denounced as a sham, on
patent and blatant grounds that verification presupposes signification, for what cannot
be understood can be neither proved (verified) nor disproved. This circularity made the
ballyhooed method in fact untenable from the beginning. After more than a quarter of a
century of beating around the bush on the point, we find such "greats" of the positivist
era as A. J. Ayer informing us that, after all, the verification theory of meaning must be
somewhat modified. In order to verify a proposition, the proposition must first be
understood. But, if it can be understood independently of being verified, it must have
some other "meaning" than that which depends directly on verification - some meaning,
indeed, that makes verifi-cation thinkable and possible in the first place. This objection
had been stated already in the first week of the debate, and hardly needed Ayer's belated
acknowledgment to stick. (Indeed, what calls for explanation is the belatedness of the
acknowledgment.)

So the verification theory, though paraded as a method for eliminating as "nonsense"

metaphysical concerns from science and from philosophy itself, was rather a method for
replacing philosophical questions with ideological commitments disguised as
philosophy. The verification theory, in short, insofar as it involved a method, did
exactly what any method does: it implemented a theory and point of view - in this case,
a dogmatic and ideological one hostile to philosophical tradition and incapable of
considering its own foundations without becoming internally inconsistent: a sorry
approach indeed. The root incompatibility of the ideology behind the method with a
semiotic point of view was already a primary sign of this antinomy at the foundations of
the verification theory of meaning. The same would have to be said for Bertrand
Russell's so-called "Theory of Descriptions" within logic, or B. F. Skinner's so-called
"Behaviorism" (after Watson, for whom, unlike Sherlock Holmes' companion,
consciousness counted for nothing): these "methods" did not merely implement a point
of view, but paraded the point of view itself in the guise of a method, thereby
objectifying the sign processes on which they relied in such a way as to make it appear,
or at least enable one to pretend, that no other point of view on the objects considered
could have legitimacy.

I distinguish then, first of all, a point of view from a method, and I want to say that
semiotics, like logical positivism or behaviorism, is a point of view rather than a
method. But, at the same time, unlike positivism or behaviorism, semiotics in its
doctrinal foundation is not an ideological standpoint that can be disguised as a method
of inquiry while in reality closing inquiry down.

While we can make the objection that, in practice, semiotics can never be ideologically
free, as all semioticians as human inquirers hold some ideological stance, the point
remains that any such ideological stance, however intrinsic to semioticians'
understandings of "semiotics", is nonetheless extrinsic to the doctrine of signs, which
does not in itself prescribe a given ideology disguised as a method of inquiry. Semiotics
rather depends upon the maintaining of a point of view, which not only is
transdisciplinary but also is in a basic sense presupposed to and therefore compatible
with every method insofar as the method truly reveals something of the world or of the
nature of the subject matter into which it inquires, including the arteriosclerotic
ideologies confused with methods. That is to say (since even bad methods truly reveal),
the compatibility of semiotics according to what is proper to it as realizing the role of
the sign in every method is its capacity for revealing in the method what that method
conceals as well as what it discloses - that is to say, the abiding difference between a
method as implementing a point of view and the point of view itself implemented. In
this way, a semiotic standpoint is able to reveal when too much has been excluded, as is
always the case to the extent that an ideological stance is being concealed in the guise
of a "method".

To be ideological and to be historically conditioned, therefore, are not necessarily the

same. The latter is true of every attempt at inquiry, including semiotics. The former is
true of semiotics only to the extent that and whenever the perspective proper to the sign
is traded for something else in the subjectivity of the inquirer. But then this trade will
inevitably reveal itself objectively in the public deployment of consequent sign-systems
(for example, in the speech or writing of the inquirer), where it will become visible to
others in the community of inquirers and subject to criticism with appropriate revision
or rejection.

Thus, even the "method of verification", like the "method of dialectics", had need of
some signs in order to deny other signs. Its illegitimacy lay not in the signs it used but in
the signs it refused, to wit, the signs that would have carried the discourse beyond the
arbitrarily stipulated boundaries and were covertly relied upon in order to assert the
illegitimate boundaries in the first place.

What, then, are we to say the semiotic point of view is? And how is it that this point of
view, unlike others, cannot properly be reduced to or converted into an ideology? To
answer the questions in order: The semiotic point of view is the perspective that results
from the sustained attempt to live reflectively with and follow out the consequences of
one simple realization: the whole of our experience, from its most primitive origins in
sensation to its most refined achievements of understanding, is a network or web of sign
relations. This point of view cannot be reduced to an ideology without losing what is
proper to it for the reason that its boundaries are those of the understanding itself in its
activity of interpreting dependently upon the cognate interpretations of perception and
sensation.

Since this network, which when brought to light through reflection establishes a novel
perspective, is first of all a matter of experience, in this book we will stick strictly to the
basics. We will begin at precisely that point where semiotics, in its contrast with
semiosis - that is to say, as a thematically unified and organic network of knowledge -
becomes possible, namely, in the reflective experience of linguistic animals. We will
see that the origin of semiotics and the drawing of the line between human and other
animals are of a piece, and that, at the same time, the origin of semiotics as the
perspective proper to experience by that very fact extends the prospective knowledge
semiotics entails beyond the biological boundaries of specifically human animals to
encompass all those communicative modalities upon which the deployment and
sustenance of specifically linguistic competence depend. Such communicative
modalities begin with the obvious involvement of perceptual and sensory modalities
hardly uniquely human but include ultimately too the physical environs that sustain
these and further communicative modalities beyond the boundaries of what is sensible
according to some given biological heritage.

The detailed extensions of semiotics to the living sphere as a whole, and beyond it to
inorganic nature, are not matters of common experience ("cenoscopic") but rather
matters that depend once formulated on experimental scientific designs for their
establishment. As such, they exceed the province of this book, and are left for other
works. Here I attempt only a sketch of the foundations and framework which make such
detailed extensions feasible. It seems to me, as it seemed to Peirce (1908b: 8.343), "that
one of the first useful steps toward a science of semeiotic [as he generally misspelled the
term taken from Locke], or the cenoscopic science of signs, must be the accurate
definition, or logical analysis, of the concepts of the science." After all, if the basics are
grounded well and firmly grasped, their extensions and applications will result
inevitably in the course of time.

The basic perspective these chapters aim to establish, then, is the perspective proper to
the sign according to the being and activity it reveals in the experience of each of us. As
virtual to all experience, the actual perspective in question is, therefore, testable
analytically by each reader. Moreover, it is rooted first of all in common experience,
precisely as that experience reveals itself as a constructed network built over time both
through the biological heritage of the animal species as such (in our case, the
species homo sapiens) and through the individual experiences whereby, atop the
biological heritage, socialization and enculturation transpire. The basics of semiotics are
a question, in the terms Peirce appropriated from Bentham (1816; see Peirce c.1902a:
1.241-242), of cenoscopic rather than idioscopic development, that is, they concern
layman and specialist alike, and not specialists first of all.

A favorite metaphor, which I got from Sebeok (1975), and which I think he himself got
from Jakob von Uexküll,4 is the metaphor for experience as whole as a semiotic web.
We are all familiar at least a little bit with spiders and how they spin their webs and with
what these webs do, namely, selectively trap other beings in the environment for the
benefit and sustenance of the spider (which is why an ideology is the semiotic
equivalent of reducing the human Lebenswelt to the praeter-human lines of an Umwelt,
as we will see in chapter 5). Of course, the scheme sometimes backfires, as I once had
occasion to observe. I was standing in the dining room of Stonecliffe Hall looking out
into a small rock garden thinking of these matters when a spider happened to descend
into my field of vision on a lengthening silken cord that was intended to be one among
the several already drawn threads of a nascent web. As the animal descended, a sudden
gust of wind nudged the spider ideways into a tangle with already drawn strands from
which the spider proved unable to escape, as I learned from the spider's eventual death
in the tangle. So this matter of spinning webs is not without an element of danger.

There are many approximations in the history of science and philosophy to the semiotic
point of view. One of the easiest ways to approach the whole subject, indeed, is to trace
historically these approximations and developments, as I have sometimes tried to do.
Here I want to leave any historical observations to a later, subsidiary point in our study
(chapter 7), in order to try to explain directly and with some exactness what this
semiotic point of view is and how it develops into a perspective compassing the whole
of our knowledge and belief and experience of reality.

One of the richest and fullest contemporary approximations to the semiotic point of
view is the movement that is known today as hermeneutics. Springing again from the
Continent (like rationalism and phenomenology, which it extends), this movement has
come to challenge within philosophy the dominance of so-called linguistic analysis or
linguistic philosophy in our universities. Important as it is (and I think it is very
important), it yet belongs to what was characterized in chapter 1 as the "minor tradition"
within semiotics proper. "Semiotics proper" is identified with the point of view here
being explained as compassing the prospective whole of experience and therefore the
"major tradition" of intellectual history in general and philosophical development in
particular as we move beyond and away from the sterile oppositions of "realism" versus
"idealism" (terms that characterize, between them, the Greek, Latin, and classical mode
eras of philosophical history).

The major tradition of semiotic development as thus distinguished has this peculiarity,
as we have seen: it includes the minor traditions but not conversely. This inclusion
holds true of hermeneutics in particular (even though hermeneutics owes little or
nothing to Saussure).

The reason is that hermeneutics tends to fasten onto an aspect, to a level or a phase, of
the process of interpretation, namely, the linguistically specific phase, a phase that is
distinctively human, but that is developed within hermeneutics in ways that tend, by
overemphasizing the distinctively human possibilities, to close the distinctiveness of
human interpretation in on itself in a kind of autonomous and infinite regress of
semiosis. This self-enclosure of the linguistically specific phase of anthroposemiosis
disguises and distorts the larger phenomenon of anthroposemiosis in its proper being as
a local manifestation or region within the larger semiotic whole that must eventually be,
even within interpretation, as broad as the process of semiosis in nature itself. Even that
limited aspect of this process we call anthroposemiosis, in any event, assuredly includes
within its compass the achievements of the natural sciences no less than those of the
human sciences to which hermeneutics is over-adapted.

The semiotic point of view cannot be established theoretically by considerations that not
only start from but are also confined to activities species-specifically human. Our
activities of interpretation require being situated within the biological community, if we
are to see with any exactitude how language emerges as something unique, that is to
say, species-specific, to the population of human organisms within a larger semiosis.
For this, it will also be necessary to clarify and remove definitively the all but universal
confusion of language with communication. Such confusion is what led recent
researchers, for example, to think they had taught language to chimpanzees. In fact their
researches had merely seduced them into channeling the communications in which the
animals had been engaged all along into new modalities designated by the researchers
as "linguistic", but which functioned for the animals to be trained ("taught language") as
nothing more than exotic communicative modalities to be mastered as a more or less
necessary adaptation to environmental novelties being imposed upon them from without
by their captors. (It was as if the medievals, on designating a given wall as "seen",
mistook "being seen" for a property of the wall taken in its own existence. The old
debates about extrinsic denomination soon precluded any fallacy so crude, but those
conversations of Latin times were long forgotten by the time trainers of Sarah and
Washoe applied for research grants! The animals, of course, like every other form of
life, had been communicating all along, for which language remained completely
unnecessary. The designation of a communicative modality as language, moreover, does
not in any wise make that modality linguistic on the side of the modality used, any more
than the designation of a wall as seen locates a property on the part of the wall.)

In these terms, it may be said that the semiotic standpoint results in a framework that
gives a context to just the sorts of things that texts provide and that hermeneutics
exegetes. This standpoint is particularly useful in showing those working in the area of
literary concerns that an exclusive preoccupation with artifacts and the human activities
of interpretation at that level is simply too narrow for semiotics as a whole. When such
a preoccupation is taken by itself it leads to autism. Not to perceive that a maturely
developed semiotic point of view provides a larger context for narrativity as something
implied in, rather than defined by, the semiotic standpoint ab initio (as an implication of
its adoption, so to say) is behind the persistent confusion (in the works of Ricoeur, for
example, and in popular academic culture generally) ofsemiotics with structuralism. In
fact, as we have already seen, structuralism, far from being the whole of semiotics, is
only an aspect of semiotics. Indeed, when structuralism is pursued as if it were the
semiotic whole, its practitioners simply import into the fresh vistas of semiotics the stale
consequences of modem idealism, wherein the only thing known by the mind in all of
its contexts is what the mind itself constructs.

One of the main themes and consequences of semiotics in this regard is to provide a
strategy for getting beyond the terms of the debate within philosophy, literature, and
history generally between realism and idealism (comparable to the terms of the debate
between "capitalism" and "communism"). I have seen audiences go into mild shock
over the thought that one does not have to choose between the two, but can instead
simply move beyond them.

I may put this another way. An essential function of the semiotic point of view, what I
think will come to be regarded as its decisive achievement historically, is its having
grounded and given rise to a strategy for transcending the opposition in philosophy
between the so-called realism of ancient and medieval times and the distinctively
modem dilemma characterized by the label of idealism with its many forms (including
"materialism", "positivism", and so forth). In other words, the requirements of semiotics
cannot be met in the terms of any perspectives already established. The first requirement
of semiotics is that it be developed on its own. The attempt to meet this requirement
reveals from the outset that semiotics is capable of mediating a change of intellectual
epoch and culture as profound and total as was the separating of medieval from ancient
Greek times, or the separating of modern times from the medieval Latin era.

The reason for this is that a new definition and understanding of reality, of what we
mean by "the real" as providing a focus of concern for and within human experience, is
implicit in the standpoint of semiotic. Along with this new or redefinition of reality goes
a dramatic paradigm shift in our notion of what is "objective" in its proper contrast with
"subjective" being and "subjectivity" of every kind. Something of this has already come
to light in our opening discussion. Much more will come into view in the chapters that
follow, to be explained at every point in terms that have their bases in each person's own
experience.

Thus I hope to show how the semiotic point of view naturally expands, given the simple
realization stated above, to include the whole phenomenon of human communication -
not only language - and, both after and as a consequence of that, cultural phenomena as
incorporative of, as well as in their difference from, the phenomena of nature. The
comprehensive integrity of this expansion is utterly dependent upon the inclusion of
linguistic phenomena within the scheme of experience in a way that does not conceal or
find paradoxical or embarrassing the single most decisive and striking feature of human
language, which is, namely, its power to convey the nonexistent with a facility every bit
equal to its power to convey thought about what is existent.

Let me make an obiter dictum on this point. When I was working at the Institute for
Philosophical Research with Mortimer Adler on a book about language (i.1969-1974, a
collaboration which did not work out), I was reading exclusively contemporary authors
- all the logical positivist literature, the analytic philosophical literature, all of Chomsky
that had been written to that date - in a word, the then-contemporary literature on
language. And what I found in the central authors of the modern logicolinguistic
developments - I may mention notably Frege, Wittgenstein, Russell, Carnap, Ayer, and
even Brentano with regard to the use of intentionality as a tool of debate (Deely 1975,
1978) - was that they were mainly intent on finding a way to assert a one-to-one
correspondence between language and mind-independent reality and to say that the only
time that language is really working is when it conveys that correspondence. In fact,
however, much of what we talk about and think about in everyday experience is
irreducible to some kind of a prejacent physical reality in that sense. There is no atomic
structure to the world such that words can be made to correspond to it point-by-point.
Nor is there any structure at all to which words correspond point-by-point except the
structure of discourse itself, which is hardly fixed, and which needs no such prejacent
structure in order to be what it is and to signify as it does.

It is wonderful to look at the history of science and culture generally from this point of
view, which is, moreover, essential for a true anthropology. The celestial spheres
believed to be real for some two thousand years occupied huge treatises written to
explain their functioning within the physical environment. Other examples include more
simple and shortlived creatures that populate the development of the strictest science,
such as phlogiston, the ether, the planet Vulcan; and examples can be multiplied from
every sphere. The complete history of human discourse, including the hard sciences, is
woven around unrealities that functioned once as real in the thinking and theorizing and
experience of some peoples. The planet Vulcan (my own favorite example alongside the
canals of Mars) thus briefly but embarrassingly turned up as interior to the orbit of
Mercury in some astronomy work at the turn of the last century. But Vulcan then
proved not to exist outside those reports at all. The objective notion of ether played a
long and distinguished role in post-Newtonian physical science - as central in its own
way as the celestial spheres were in the Ptolemaic phase of astronomy's development -
before proving similarly to be a chimera.

So the problem of how we talk about nonexistent things, where nonexistent means
nonexistent in the physical sense, is a fundamental positive problem with which the
whole movement of so-called linguistic philosophy fails to come to terms. This is not
just a matter of confusion, nor just a matter of language gone on holiday, but of the
essence, as we will see, of human language.

To understand this fundamental insouciance of language, whereby it imports literary

elements of nonbeing and fictional characters even into the sternest science and most
realistic concerns of philosophy, we will find it necessary to reinterpret language from
the semiotic point of view. For this, it is not enough to recognize that language itself is a
system of relationships and contrasts between elements. We shall see that language
itself as an objective network is part of a larger whole of objective relations, what I will
call in chapter 5 the Umwelt or "objective world" of experience integrally taken, in
relation to which the linguistic network exists symbiotically - that is, as itself feeding
upon and being transformed by the structure of experience as a whole in its
irreducibility to the physical environment. In a word, it will be necessary to see how
language is a form, but only a form, of semiosis and of semiosis only in its
anthroposemiotic modality.

I will proceed as follows. First I will outline in chapter 3 the basic subject matter of
semiotic inquiry, which is the activity proper to signs, or semiosis. This, indeed, will
establish the outline for the book as a whole, indicating at the same time the scope of the
perspective properly called semiotic and the myriad of methods - both traditional and
not yet developed - necessary to mine this perspective in full. Then in chapter 4 I will
investigate what it is about the sign that makes it capable of acting or functioning in the
manner peculiar to it.

From these general considerations providing the outlines of semiotics in its prospective
totality, I will move in chapter 5 to the specific consideration of the action of signs
within our experience, because it is best to establish the basic notions as the elements of
a science cenoscopically considered, that is to say, in terms that are derived from what
is accessible to everyone, namely, common experience. At the same time, we will see
that what gives experience its irreducible quality is something quite different from what
makes experience specifically human. In this way, still proceeding cenoscopically, we
will be able to reach, from within anthroposemiosis, by purely analytical means, the
central concept of zoösemiosis as well,5 the Umwelt or "objective world", inasmuch as
the structure of human experience in its fundamental objectivity, though not in all of its
specificity, is the common structure and factor in the experience as such of any animal.6

The newly opened panorama of semiosis at the plant level, both within and beyond the
human environment as such, is as intriguing a concept as it is controversial, well
deserving a serious reflection upon its place within the developing scheme of semiotics
as a whole. No less intriguingthough even less well established - is the question of the
distinctive causality of semiosis as it operates or might be operative in the physical
universe at those levels - both microscopic and macroscopic - and in those spheres quite
independent of plant life (as the animal and human zones of semiosis emphatically are
not). Thus, in order to situate fully phytosemiosis in its prejacency to zoösemiosis and
anthroposemiosis, it will be necessary to try in chapter 6 to give some body to the
highly abstract but central notion of "objective" or "extrinsic formal" causality-the
causality that makes the action of signs sui generis and almost equally at home among
existent and nonexistent actors of the here and now - as it applies also to the universe at
large on the environmental side of the interaction of bodies.

With this our outline of the subject matter as a whole will be completed. We will have
proceeded, in the main, synchronically, with no more than a few diachronic allusions.
The allusions need to be drawn together, and this is the task of chapter 7. The whole at
this point will have made unmistakable something that is consequent upon the semiotic
point of view, if not always unmistakably so, namely, the centrality of history as the
anthroposemiotic transmission of culture to the doctrine of signs and to the proper life
of human understanding even in its most "scientific" moments and synchronically
conceived investigations. Thus, with the basic concepts synchronically and
prospectively established, it will be time to close with some retrospective
considerations, providing at least briefly and by way of an outline some remarks on the
history of semiotics itself, as its shape has begun to form in the mists of the past, from
the standpoint of its basic concepts and the "theory" of semiotics.

So the outline for the remaining chapters is as follows: semiosis, signs, zoö- and
anthroposemiotics, phyto- and physiosemiotics, and the theory and historical outline of
semiotics itself as a distinctive form of human consciousness. Such I deem to be the
basics of semiotics, because these subject-areas or themes taken in concert show what is
interesting and possible for semiotics as a phenomenon of intellectual culture. These are
the concepts that establish the full amplitude of the semiotic point of view and reveal on
the basis of that viewpoint the indefinite methodological possibilities for enriching in
detail our understanding of a phenomenon as unified and yet as diverse as the action of
signs, whereby indeed we exist in community and wherein the mind finds its proper
food for thought.

3 
SEMIOSIS: THE SUBJECT MATTER 
OF SEMIOTIC INQUIRY
IF WE ASK what it is that semiotic studies investigate, the answer is, in a word, action.
The action of signs.

This peculiar type of action, corresponding to the distinctive type of knowledge that the
name semiotic properly characterizes, has long been recognized in philosophy in
connection with investigations of the various types of physical causality. But in that
connection, the "ideal" or objective factor, the pattern according to which the
investigations themselves were able to establish the material, formal, and determinative
dimensions of causality in the productive or "efficient" sense, appeared as something
marginal. This objective factor pertains more to the observation than to the observed in
its independent existence. Hence this factor was not clearly pertinent to the results of
investigations which did not have as their aim the establishment of any essential
connection as such between observer and observed, such as would make "observation" -
an extrinsic formal connection between subject knowing and subject known - even
possible in the first place.

Some of the most difficult and extended passages in Poinsot's early attempt (1632a) to
systematize the foundations of semiotic inquiry arise from the need to make this
heretofore peripheral topic of natural inquiry central to the establishment of semiotic
(see, for example, Questions 2-5 in Book I of his Treatise on Signs). More recently, in
this same context of inquiry, Ralph Powell (1986, 1988) has managed to indicate how
central this neglected and previously obscure type of causality is to the whole
problematic of epistemology, once its semiotic character has been recognized.

Not until about 1906, however, was the peculiar action of signs singled out as a distinct
field of possible inquiry in its own right, rather than through its adjacency with other
lines of immediate investigation, and given a proper name. The investigator who singled
out this field by giving it a name of its own was Charles Sanders Peirce, and the name
he assigned to it was semiosis. At this point the doctrine of signs turned a corner in its
development: Peirce saw that the full development of semiotic as a distinct body of
knowledge required a dynamic view of signification as a process. Semiotics could not
be merely a response to the question of the being proper to signs ontologically
considered. Response must also be made to the further question of the becoming this
peculiar type of being enables and sustains itself by. Symbols do not just exist; they also
grow.

Semiosis as a type of activity is distinctive in that it always involves three elements, but
it is even more distinctive in that one of these three elements need not be an actual
existent thing. In all other types of action, the actors are correlative, and, hence, the
action between them, however many there may be, is essentially dyadic and dynamical.
For it to occur, both terms must exist. A car cannot hit a tree unless the tree is there to
be hit, but a sign can signify an upcoming bridge that is no longer there. Galileo's eyes
and telescope engaged in a dynamic interaction with light from the stars. But over and
above this dynamic interaction he essayed opinions concerning the celestial spheres that
turned out not to exist. And yet the nonbeing of these spheres contributed to Galileo's
imprisonment and propositions concerning them were cited as grounds for the serious
sanctions taken against Galileo by the authorities.

Peirce calls the action as such between existent things "brute force" or "dynamical
interaction". It may be physical, or it may be psychological. In either case, the action
takes place between two subjects of physical existence and is, in a terminology we shall
be obliged to both clarify and insist upon along our way, always and irreducibly a
subjective interaction. Subjective interactions, whether psychical or physical, are always
involved in the action of signs, but they surround the semiosis as its context and
condition, while always falling short of the action of signs proper. In other words, while
the action of signs always involves dynamical interactions, dynamical interactions need
not always involve the action of signs.

The distinctiveness of semiosis is unavoidable when we consider the case of two

existing things affected in the course of their existence by what does not exist, but, if we
understand what is distinctive about semiosis, that distinctiveness remains unmistakable
even when the three terms involved in a semeiosy happen also to be all three existent.
Peirce gives the example of the rise of the mercury in a thermometer, which is brought
about "in a purely brute and dyadic way" by the increase of ambient warmth, but which,
on being perceived by someone familiar with thermometers, also produces the idea of
increasing warmth in the environment. This idea as a mental event belongs entirely to
the order of subjective and physical existence, no more and no less than does the rising
mercury and the ambient temperature of the thermometer's environs. It is, as Peirce puts
it, the "immediate object" of the thermometer taken as a certain type of sign, namely,
one indexical of an environmental condition.

The object of the thermometer as a sign is the relative warmth of the surroundings. The
object of the idea of the thermometer as a sign is no different. The thermometer,
however, prior to being read is involved only in dynamical interactions. On being read a
third factor enters in, the factor of interpretation. The thermometer on being seen may
not be recognized as a thermometer: in that case, besides being a subject of physical
interactions, that is to say, a thing, it becomes also a cognized or known thing, an
element of experience or object. But, if it is both seen and recognized as a thermometer,
it is not only a thing become object but also an object become sign. As a thing it merely
exists, a node of sustenance for a network of physical relations and actions. As an object
it also exists for someone as an element of experience, differentiating a perceptual field
in definite ways related to its being as a thing among other elements of the environment.
But as a sign it stands not only for itself within experience and in the environment but
also for something else as well, something besides itself. It not only exists (thing), it not
only stands to someone (object), it also stands to someone for something else (sign).
And this "something else" may or may not be real in the physical sense: what it
indicates may be misleading, if, for example, the thermometer is defective.

In this case, its immediate object, the idea it produces as sign, becomes in its turn a node
of sustenance for a network of relations presumed to be physical but that in fact,
because of the defective nature of the thermometer being observed, is merely objective.
Here we encounter a primary phenomenon that semiotic analysis is obliged to take into
account: divisions of things as things and divisions of objects as objects are not the
same and vary independently, the former being determined directly by physical action
alone, the latter being mediated indirectly by semeiosy, the action of signs.7

The immediate point to be noted is this: Divisions of objects as objects and divisions of
things as things may happen to coincide, as when the thermometer seen and recognized
is also functioning properly; or they may happen to diverge, as when the thermometer
seen and recognized is, unbeknownst to its interpreter, deceptive by defect. But, even
when they coincide, the two orders remain irreducible in what is proper to them.8

The idea of surrounding temperature produced by the thermometer as sign represents to

the interpreter of the thermometer something that itself is neither the idea nor the
thermometer, namely, the presumed condition of the environment indexically
represented by the thermometer. The idea as a mental representation, that is to say, a
psychological reality, belongs to the order of subjective existence and is the immediate
object of the thermometer as sign. But, within that order, the idea also functions to
found a relation to something other than itself, namely, a condition of the environment
surrounding the thermometer, which condition is both objective (known) and physical
(something existent besides being known), presuming the thermometer accurate; or
merely objective but deviant from the physical situation rather than coincident with it,
presuming the thermometer defective. As founding this relation, in every case objective,
in some cases coincidentally physical as well, the idea itself produced by the
thermometer has in turn produced "the proper significate outcome" of the thermometer
as sign. This Peirce calls the interpretant, a unique and important notion, the key to
understanding the action of signs as a process, a form of becoming, as well as a kind of
being, over and above the unique essential structure that makes signification possible in
the first place.

Peirce suggests (c.1906: 5.473) that "it is very easy to see what the interpretant of a sign
is: it is all that is explicit in the sign itself apart from its context and circumstances of
utterance". In the case at hand: the sign is the thermometer; the context and
circumstances of its utterance are the ambient warmth producing a certain level of the
mercury correlated - accurately or inaccurately, as we have seen - with a scale, the
whole of which apparatus is seen and recognized as a temperature measuring device;
and what is explicit in the sign itself apart from this context and these circumstances is
representation of something other than the thermometer, namely, the ambient
temperature, as being presumably at what the thermometer indicates it to be, although
this may be wrong due to defect in the mechanism. In other words, all that is explicit in
the sign itself apart from its context and circumstances of utterance is "its proper
significate outcome", the objective element of the situation as involving representation
of one by another, irreducible to the dynamical interactions involved, and establishing
channels and expectations along which some of the interactions will be diverted in
ongoing exchanges.

In our example, the idea of the thermometer enabling the thermometer to function as a
sign was in the first instance a mental representation. The interpretant of a sign,
however - and this is a very important point"need not be a mental mode of being", nor,
as we have seen, is it as mental mode of being that the idea produced by the
thermometer functions as interpretant. Whether a given interpretant be an idea or not,
what is essential to it as interpretant is that it be the ground upon which the sign is seen
to be related to something else as signified, which signified in turn becomes a sign
relative to other elements in the experience of the interpreter, setting in motion the chain
of interpretants on which semiosis as a process feeds. In other words, what is essential
to the interpretant is that it mediate the difference between objective and physical being,
a difference that knows no fixed line. This is the reason why, at the same time, the
triadic production of the interpretant is essential to a sign, and the interpretant need not
be a mental mode of being, although, considered as founding a determinate relation of
signification for some animal, it will be.

We see now with greater clarity the difference between the action of signs and the
action of things. The action of signs is purely objective, always at once involving and
exceeding the action of things as such, while the action of things as such is purely
subjective or, what comes to the same thing, physical or psychic and restricted to the
order of what exists here and now.9

Wherever the future influences a present course of events, therefore, we are confronted
by semiosis. Never confined to what has been or is, semiosis transpires at the boundary
between what is and what might be or might have been. Linguistic signs may well be
"the ideological phenomenon par excellence", as Voloinov said (1929: 13); but the
action of signs, which provides the general subject matter of semiotic inquiry, extends
well beyond what we call "language", even though it is only through language that this
range can be brought to light for us as inquirers. Why this is so we shall eventually see.

In order to appreciate the privileged and at the same time restricted role of linguistic
signs in semiosis, however, it is necessary to get these peculiar signs into a larger
perspective revealing something of the other processes, no less semiosic, on which the
possibility and actuality of linguistic semioses depend. For this purpose, it is useful to
outline in broad terms a number of levels within semiosis. These levels, of course, can
be further distinguished indefinitely for purposes of specialized research and
investigation. Here it will be enough to bring out in a synoptic way the prospective
scope of semiotic inquiry, an effort that should also have the effect of neutralizing the
vestigial inclinations to positivism and modern idealism that often in practice corrupt
the semiotic standpoint by assimilating it to what is irretrievably presemiotic in the
previous era and most recent epoch of philosophy.

The highest level of semiosis so far as our experience goes is also the one closest to
us: anthroposemiosis. Looked at one way, anthroposemiosis includes all of the sign
processes that human beings are directly involved in, and, looked at another way, names
those sign processes which are species-specifically human. From the latter point of
view, anthroposemiosis includes first of all language, and secondly those sign systems
that come after language and further structure perception and modify the environment
even for species of animals other than human, although the understanding of these
postlinguistic changes in what is proper to them is possible only in and through
language.

For this reason, language has come to be called in Eastern European circles of semiotic
development the "primary modeling system" and the rest of human culture and
civilization a series of "secondary modeling systems". As Sebeok in particular has taken
pains to point out (1987), however, this way of describing the situation is not entirely
satisfactory, because it is grounded, as is apparent, in a derivative understanding of
anthroposemiosis. More fundamentally and inclusively, anthroposemiosis comprises, as
we have said, all of the sign processes that human beings are directly involved in. From
this point of view, language itself is already a secondary modeling system, not the
primary one, even though, relative to the distinctively human cultural traditions and
developments of civilization, language is the proximate enabling medium and sustaining
network of semiosis. Proximate to language, however, is the larger semiotic web of
human experience that intricately interweaves linguistic semiosis with perceptual

semioses shared in common with other biological species. This larger web delicately
depends upon endosemiotic networks within the body whereby the human organism
itself is sustained by a complex network of symbioses without which the human
individual would perish, and which network proves in its own right to be a thoroughly
semiosic one.

In addition, the interaction between human being and physical environment - whereby,
for example, a person noting the sky anticipates stormy weather and prepares
accordingly - gives rise to further strands of the semiotic web linking the human being
not only with conspecifics and not only with other animals, but also with the general
realm of physical surroundings in the largest sense. From this point of view,
anthroposemiosis forms a seamless whole with all of nature, and the appropriate
metaphor is not that of language as a primary modeling system but the ancient one
of anthropos as microcosmos. Anthroposemiosis is the most complex form of semiosis
not because it harbors unique modes of semiosis, beginning with language, but because,
in addition to harboring unique developments, it harbors at the same time all the other
semiosic developments as well and depends upon them in achieving whatever is unique
and specific to itself, beginning with language.

The semiosic processes of perception and sensation that are common to other animals
besides the human define the level and zone of what Sebeok and Wells first
characterized as zoösemiosis (Sebeok 1963: 74). To their original coinage I add the
umlaut, to prevent a misunderstanding that I have actually encountered, whereby this
rich realm has been unwittingly reduced in hearers' minds to the study of sign systems
among captive animals.

Like anthroposemiosis, zoösemiosis can be regarded from two standpoints. From one
point of view, zoösemiosis is concerned with the overlap of semiotic processes shared
between human animals and other animal forms. But this point of view provides only
part of the story, for each animal species, not only the human one, develops also
species-specific semiotic modalities, and these too are the province of zoösemiotic
investigations. The splendid work of von Frisch (1950) unraveling the species-specific
semiosis of bees, or of Kessel (1955) in uncovering the species-specific symbolic
component in mating activities of balloon flies, provide landmark examples of
zoösemiotic analysis beyond the study of semiotic systems shared between human and
other animals (although humans do indeed mate and benefit, too, from the dance of
bees). From the point of view of zoösemiosis as concerned with the study of species-
specific semiotic modalities developed among the biological forms other than human,
we can see an entire regrou ping of naturalist studies (which have their own
distinguished traditions) under a new label more appropriate to and specificative of what
naturalists have been trying to accomplish all along. Like anthroposemiosis,
zoösemiosis comprises a series of microcosms and speciesspecific objective worlds as
well, each one entangled in natural processes of physical interaction (secondness) as
well as in semiosic processes of objective interaction within and across species. The
collective whole forms an interlocking network of irreducibly semiotic relations, many
of which are physical as well as objective, many of which are purely objective in
specifically diverse patterns.
Most recently, a third macroscopic realm and level of semiosis within nature has been
surveyed and established, under the rubric of phytosemiosis, the semiotic networks of
plants, by the distinguished work of Martin Krampen and his coworkers. Here again a
twofold standpoint is possible. There is undoubtedly semiosic interaction between
plants and various species of animals, as the many insect victims of plants such as the
notorious "venus fly-trap" mutely testify. It is surely remarkable, for example, that
many plants grow in a form that is sexually deceiving to species of insect on which the
propagation or nutrition of the plant depends. The plant world is replete with these
astonishing examples of the extrinsic formal causality at the heart of sign activity. But
there is also the question of semiosis within the plant world itself, as the recent
discovery that trees are able to inform one another of zones of infection, for example,
raises.

Here we reach a boundary line, which we may nonetheless cross by means of abduction,
that is, the formulation of some hypothesis suggesting new ideas for the further
extension of the boundaries of semiotic activity to include the realm of so-called
inorganic nature, both chemical and physical. These ideas need to be developed, tested,
and further refined or even rejected by whole teams of workers.

Besides the three main levels of semiosis that have been briefly described above and are
firmly established regions of sign activity, there is reason to think that sign activity has
also been at work in an anticipatory way even at inorganic levels before the advent of
life in nature, as is suggested by the formula established by Poinsot (1632a: 126/3-4): "it
suffices to be a sign virtually in order to signify in act". This formula derives from
carefully considering the fact that all that pertains to secondness and dyadic interaction
in semiosis belongs to signs strictly through what in them provides the foundations or
fundaments whence result or might result relations of representation of another in which
signifying consists formally as thirdness. 10 Sign activity in the inorganic realm would,
according to this formula, occur less visibly and in the background, then, but virtually
and as a matter of fact throughout the material realm.

On this hypothesis, there is not only the macroscopic realm of biosemiosis whose three
main levels have been outlined and named, with plenty of indication of microscopic
subcurrents equally semiosic, as in the case of endosemiosis stated by Sebeok. There is
also the more inclusive macroscopic realm of evolution in general, let us call
it physiosemiosis, an activity virtual by comparison with biosemiosis but no less replete
with the objective causality whereby the physical interaction of existing things is
channeled toward a future different from what obtains at the time of the affected
interaction. This is a process whereby first stars and then planetary systems develop out
of a more primitive atomic and molecular "dust", but these systems in turn give rise to
conditions under which further complexifications of atomic structure become possible.
Some of these possibilities, inevitably, become actual as well (such as an oxidizing
atmosphere, to choose a local example), continuing the process, as I have shown
elsewhere (1969: shown, that is, as definitively as anything can be shown in the absence
of directly observed data), along an overall trajectory inevitably pointing to the
establishment of biosemiosic phenomena.

On this hypothesis, semiosis, as providing the subject matter of semiotic investigation,

would establish nothing less than a new framework and foundation for the whole of
human knowledge. This new framework and foundation would embrace not only the so-
called human and social sciences, as we have already seen from the partial tradition of
semiology after Saussure, but also the so-called "hard" or natural sciences, precisely as
they, too, arise from within and depend in their development upon experience and the
processes of anthroposemiosis generally, as the wholistic tradition of semiotics after
Peirce has begun to outline.

In many basic respects this is a contemporary development, but it draws its nourishment
from long ago and has its own distinguished lineage of pioneers and precursors. In
particular, we see here a contemporary development fulfilling the prophecy of Winance
(1983: 515): "It is in the tradition of Peirce, Locke, and Poinsot that Logic becomes
Semiotic, able to assimilate the whole of epistemology and natural philosophy as well".
In Winance's remark, "epistemology" is to be taken as a synecdoche for the human
sciences, and "natural philosophy" as a synecdoche for the natural sciences including, as
Aquinas noted (c.1269: Book I, lectio 1, n. 2), "even metaphysics". Representing our
answer to the question of what semiotics investigates integrally, that is, including in a
single scheme both what is firmly established and what we abductively extrapolated, we
may outline the overall subject matter of semiotic investigations as in Figure 1.

Regardless of our hypothetical extension of semiosis beyond the boundaries of the

biological community - whether, that is, we wish to stick with the firmly established
levels or wish also to consider the possibilities of a physiosemiosis in nature antecedent
to and subtensive of the later and more restricted phenomena of biosemiosis - what is
clear at this point is that semiotics is the name for a distinctive series of investigations,
distinctive for the same reason that any investigation is distinctive, namely, by reason of
what it studies, in the present case, semiosis. But how is such an activity as semiosis
possible in the first place?

Figure 1: The Levels of Semiosis

(Columns of the table read from left to right)
through the development of     
semiotic    
modalities between other     
animals and    
humans, of language within the      the action of
   signs
human species, and    SEMIOSIS
consequently of  in the organic realm as
historical traditions and culture such    
generally:  (including endosemiotic
ANTHROPOSEMIOSIS processes): 
BIOSEMIOSIS   
through the development of
  
semiotic 
  
modalities between plants and       
  
  
animals, among animals, and
  
between 
  
animals and the physical
surroundings: 
ZOOSEMIOSIS
 through the development of
semiotic 
modalies within the plant
kingdom 
and the physical surroundings: 
PHYTOSEMIOSIS
through the initial condensation   
in the physical
of stellar systems       environment       
through the subsequent as such            
development of         PHYSIOSEMIOSIS                 
planitary and subplanitary
systems      
4 
SIGNS: 
THE MEDIUM OF SEMIOSIS

MOTION IS THE act of the agent in the patient: so goes the classic definition of
dynamic action or "brute force", what the scholastics called "transitive action", that is,
action that passes from one thing to another through the production of change. In
Aristotle's categories of physical being, action and passion (punching and being
punched, say) are dyadic, strictly correlative, the one as initiating and the other as
terminating. The resultant change is the action of the agent transpiring in the patient,
that is, in the one undergoing the action, and its traces endure as part of the physical
order itself (principally in the patient as outcome but in the agent, too, as vestiges and
clues).

The action of signs is entirely different. It is not productive of change directly. It is

always mediated. It lacks the directness of punching and being punched. Even when the
semiosis is involved with dyadic dynamicity, as it always is, though to varying degrees,
what gives the action of signs its curiously detached and ethereal quality is precisely its
indirection, what Peirce rightly characterized as its irreducible triadicity. The sign not
only stands for something other than itself, it does so for some third; and though these
two relations - sign to signified, sign to interpretantmay be taken separately, when they
are so taken, there is no longer a question of sign but of cause to effect on one hand and
object to knowing subject on the other. In short, for the relation of sign to signified to
exist in its proper being as semiotic (smoke as a sign of fire, let us say), regardless of
whether that relation exists dyadically as well (say, as an effect to cause relation
between smoke and something burning), reference to the future in a third element, the
interpretant, is essential. And this third element is essential, regardless of whether the
thirdness is actual here and now or only virtual and "waiting to be realized" (as in a
bone to be discovered next year as having belonged to an extinct species of dinosaur not
previously known to have wandered as far as Montana).

Seeing that the being proper to signs has, historically, this essentially and irreducible
triadic character was an insight hard come by, as Poinsot's survey of the opinions
contesting as late as 1632 attests (Tractatus de Signis, Book I, Question 2, esp.
154/35ff.). In certain respects, the point did not become fully centralized thematically
within the doctrine of signs until Peirce displaced the ontological typologies of earlier
semiotic analyses with the epigenetic typologies of the sign considered as the nexus and
but temporarily "fixed foot" in a continuing and continuous process of signification,
wherein the relation between objective and physical being constitutive of experience
and modificative of each physical status quo is sustained dynamically (and hence
dependent throughout). Nonetheless, the essential point was established early that
(Poinsot 1632a: 157/38-41) "in the very innards and intimate rationale of such a
substitution for and representation of a signified", as is a sign, there is an indirection
over and above any directly physical connection. Peirce's later work serves to
underscore that the original controversies had resulted in a definitive achievement of
semiotic analysis, which Poinsot formulated thus (1632a: 156/23-157/10, 157/19-27):

Although an object in respect of a power is not constituted essentially in a relation to

that power, but rather does the power depend upon the object, nevertheless, in the case
of a sign, which is vicegerent for an object in the representing and exhibiting of itself to
a power, this relation is necessarily included, and by a twofold necessity: both because a
substitution for anything is always in an order to something, and since a sign substitutes
for and functions in the capacity of the thing signified in an order to the office of
representing to a power, the sign must necessarily express an order to a power; and
because to represent is to make an object present to a power, therefore, if a sign is a
medium and substitute of the signified in representing, it necessarily involves an order
to that to which it represents or makes present. For in the case of these relations which
exist in the mode of substituting and representing, it is impossible that they should
respect that whose vicegerent they are, and not that on account of which or in an order
to which they substitute, because it is in substituting or functioning in the capacity of
another according to some determinate rationale and in an order to some determinate
end that one thing is a vicegerent of that other.
It is as a result of this indirection, of their triadicity, as Peirce points out (c.1906: 5.473),
that there is nothing automatic about the action of signs. The action of signs, in other
words, depends upon that very feature whereby being a sign is a singularly unstable
condition, and our concern here is to give an account of the uniqueness of this
singularity.

The sign first of all depends on something other than itself. It is representative but only
in a derivative way, in a subordinate capacity. The moment a sign slips out from under
this subordination, as frequently happens, at just that moment does it cease for a while
to be a sign. A sign seen standing on its own is not seen as a sign, even though it may
remain one virtually.11 Thus on its own, it is a mere object or thing become object,
waiting to become a sign, perhaps, or having formerly been a sign, perhaps, but, on its
own, not actually a sign at all.

So a sign is a representative, but not every representative is a sign. Things can represent
themselves within experience. To the extent that they do so, they are objects and
nothing more, even though in their becoming objects signs and semiosis are already
invisibly at work. To be a sign, it is necessary to represent something other than the self.
Being a sign is a form of bondage to another, to the signified, the object that the sign is
not but that the sign nevertheless stands for and represents.

This is the most important fact about the sign, because it is what is most decisive for it:
its thorough relativity. There are signs that are also objects in their own right, just as
there are objects that are also things. But there are no signs that are not relative to some
object other than themselves, and that object or those objects to which the sign is
relative we call the signified or significate, the essential content of the sign insofar as it
is a sign.

Because the essential content or being of the sign is relative, the key to understanding
what is proper to the sign is the notion of relativity, relation, or relative being. Without
this content, the sign ceases to be a sign, whatever else it may happen to be. Stripped of
its thirdness, the sign slips back into the dyadic order of mere actual existence or,
perhaps even further, into the monadic order of mere possibilities and dreams beyond
which there is nowhere to go. Conversely, what enables some mere possibility or some
actual physical entity to become also a sign is the fact, contingent or necessary as the
case may be, that it acquires a relation to something else such that it stands for that
other. So, if we can understand what it means to say that a being is a relative being, we
will be in a fair position to say further what a sign is in its proper being, since this being
is perforce relative. And, as we shall see, it is the peculiar and unique character of
relative being - in the sense that pertains to the sign in its proper being, but that also
obtains physically in the order of nature independently of being experienced - that
explains why such a peculiar activity as semiosis and such a peculiar phenomenon as
truth and falsehood (which is an offshoot of semiosis) is possible in the first place.

Here again we deal with a matter that has a lengthy and tangled history. As our concern
is doctrinal, however, I do not have to presume intimate knowledge of the history of the
question of relative being on the part of the reader. It will be enough for the present if
the reader understand the terms and distinctions that will be here directly made. Then,
later, he or she may investigate the historical materials that made the terms and
distinctions of the present explanation possible, in order to evaluate what other reading
of the historical development might also be possible and useful for advancing the
understanding of semiosis.

I will proceed, therefore, to merely state the matter directly, without burdening the
reader with detailed citations from and references to the many authors since Aristotle
who contributed to the development of the matter to the point where a direct statement
of the present sort became possible. I will instead cite only a few texts clarifying the
most central points, and only from those authors, particularly Poinsot, who were able to
point out directly how these central points contribute directly to establishing the basics
of a doctrine of signs.

And further to ease the reader's grasp of the basic notions, let me frame the discussion
of relative being with a very concrete example, put in the form of a question: When a
child dies, in what sense is the child's parent a parent? The concreteness of the question
may serve as an antidote to the inevitable and perhaps extreme abstractness of the
subject to be explained. For in dealing with the question of relative being, particularly in
that aspect decisive for understanding the activity and being proper to signs, even
though we are dealing with what is most basic to the experience of all of us in its being
as experience, we are yet dealing with that one aspect of direct experience which
escapes entirely direct sensory perception. For relative being in this sense - the
intersubjective as such - is indirectly given even at the level of sensation rationally
distinguished from and within perceptions. A lover may not be understood but can at
least be seen and touched. A relation in the sense constitutive of the sign in the being
proper to it as sign can not be seen or touched. It can be understood, but, without that
understanding, it cannot be grasped directly at all. Animals make use of signs without
knowing that there are signs, Maritain noted - that is to say (1957: 53), "without
perceiving the relation of signification".

"Perceiving", moreover, may be understood in several senses. There is at one level a

purely sensory perception, distinct from and superordinate to (as containing and further
specifying) external sensations. At this level the relation of signification can be grasped
in actu exercito, that is to say, grasped in a practical way as employed in interaction to
make one's way in the physical surroundings and especially to get control over them or
turn them to one's advantage. There is at another level an intellectual perception, also
containing the lower levels of sensory perception and external sensation in a
superordinate way, and at this level the relation of signification can be not only used and
manipulated in actu exercito but also distinguished from the vehicle conveying it and
the object it conveys. It can be considered in actu signato, that is, directly and according
to what is proper to it, not as an object directly experienced (for directly we experience
only the objects related, sign vehicle on the one hand and object signified on the other
hand, albeit as connecting in a single experience). This possibility, we will see,
underlies anthroposemiosis in its difference from zoösemiosis. But first it will be
necessary to achieve an understanding of relation in this abstract sense, only indirectly
given in experience, and then to see how it applies to both zoösemiosis in the
establishment of an Umwelt and to anthroposemiosis in the transformation, principally
through language, of the biological Umwelt into the distinctively human Lebenswelt (if
yet species-specific, at least no longer closed upon itself).

So we take up our question: In what sense is the parent of a dead child still a parent?

To answer this somewhat unpleasant question, let us begin by considering the notion of
parenthood itself, a clearly relative form of being. It is early enough in the development
of reproductive technology to confine our consideration here to the traditional form of
parenthood, that which results from a sexual exchange between a male and a female of
the species, as a result of which the female conceives and comes to term. At that
moment, initially unknown to the couple responsible, they have become what formerly
they were not, parents of this offspring.

Right away it is easy to see that "being a parent" or "becoming a parent", in the minimal
sense, results from an action that is over and above the being of each of the individuals
taken as independent biological organisms in their own right. It is true, of course, that
there are also cultural notions of parent and parenthood that overlay and are in some
degree detachable from this biologically rooted notion, according to which one may "be
a parent" in the cultural sense by raising offspring not begotten by one's own sexual
actions or "not be a parent" by failing to live up to the responsibilities ensuing from
one's own sexual action. But the observing of these refinements serves here to make
clear the more determinate and limited sense in which we are posing our question.

Thus, the being of a parent is identified with, but not identical with, the being of each or
either of the two organisms begetting the child. Being a parent is an aspect of the being
of both, a characteristic of the being of each of them, but not in the sense that each has
an individual skin color, say, or weight.12 This characteristic we are considering, newly
acquired, attaches to the generating organisms not as independent individual organisms
in their own right, nor even as dyadically interacting organisms, but only as organisms
interacting in such a way as to have achieved, deliberately or not, "a third kind of being,
consisting in and resulting from the coordination in time of two extremes", the
generating pair taken together as one extreme (the unity of transitive action, "the act of
the agent in the patient"), the child generated taken as the other. In short, the
characteristic of being a parent rests not on the dynamic interaction of sexual activity
alone but on that taken together with, coordinated with, a certain outcome that exists
precisely as a trajectory independent of either parent in his or her individual being.

At the same time, the child is "their child", and they are "this child's parents", as it were,
permanently. But, of course, all three may die, separately or together. What is
permanent is not in the material and biological order but in the order of discourse and
understanding. It is a matter of a truth, whether it be known or not, forgotten or
remembered: that child was of those parents.

At a certain moment, the individual organisms existing unto themselves acquired as a

permanent part of their being, not from the standpoint of existence, but from the
standpoint of understanding, the quality of being parents of that child; and the child,
from the first, had as a quality of its being, being the offspring of those parents. To be
fully understood, the individuals who became parents must be understood with regard to
the child, and the child, to be fully understood, must be known in relation to the parents.

Of course, on the side of existence, the parents are not a mere relation to the child, and
the child is not a mere relation to the parents. Each exists in its own right, separate from
the others. Nonetheless, although neither is the relation characterizing their being,
neither can be fully known unless that relation be included.

Here we have the first and most general sense in which being is relative: according to
the requirements of understanding. Within experience, every individual exists in such a
way as to require being thought of in terms of things that the individual is not, in order
to be understood for what the indiviudal is. This requirement transcends the independent
aspect of the individual existent and in fact reveals that independent aspect to be itself
dependent upon other factors, some present and still essential (like the atmosphere and
gravity, for example) and others past and essential no longer to the individual existing
before us (like the dead parents, say, or the prehistoric organisms that began the process
of establishing an oxidizing atmosphere).

In the middle ages, the philosophers were mainly concerned with understanding and
classifying the ways in which an individual could be said to be able to exist in its own
right independent of our knowledge of that existence as a matter of individual or actual
fact. They were disconcerted to find that certain aspects of even possible existence
could not be reduced to a determinate classification, but invaded every possible
determinate classification. To their credit, they did not simply trivialize or brush aside
these discoveries, despite the fact that they were unwelcome in terms of their theoretical
goal and anomalous to it. Instead, they established a rudimentary systematization of
these vagrant aspects of being (ens vagans, they said, a rather colorful phrase) by
assigning them the name of "transcendentals", that is, characteristics transcending any
one determinate mode of possible existence in the physical order of being.
Later on, probably after Duns Scotus (c. 1302-1303), this name of "transcendental"
became transferred or extended to that intractable sense of relative being that turned out
to pertain to the understanding of even the most independent modes of physical entities,
and which previously (after Boethius, c.510) had been called only by the confused and
confusing title of relatio or relativum secundum dici, what we have called being relative
according to the requirements of discourse or understanding.

However, being a parent whose child is living proof here and now and being relative
according to the requirements of discourse, are not the same thing. For the parent was
relative in other ways according to the requirements of discourse before the child came
along, and to this condition the child added something real. This addition was more than
a mere new aspect of the organism become parent, more, that is, than an aspect
permanently modifying the discursive demands of that organism-become-parent on an
omniscient understanding (indeed, modification of this sort the sexual intercourse alone,
without any issue of offspring, would have achieved!). The relativity according to the
requirements of discourse is permanent in a way that the prospective nurturing relation
between parent and offspring is not. For this relation, both must exist; for the former or
transcendental relation, continued existence is not necessary.

So there is a second sort of relative being, one that is not identified with either side of a
related pair but that exists between them and exists in no other way. This relation may
or may not be known. For example, a male may engage in a sexual relation that results
in an offspring only after he is no longer around to know about it. In such a case, the
child is determinately the child of this parent, even though the parent does not know he
is a parent and the child may never know who its parent is or was. In such a case, while
both father and offspring exist, the relation between them is independent of being
determinately known, as is proved by the neither of them determinately knowing it, but
is nonetheless determinate between them: that one is the father of this child, this child is
the offspring of that parent. The relation is purely physical.

In the more acceptable case, where the offspring is both known and nurtured by the
parent, the physical relation is objective as well as physical. That is to say, it is
recognized as existing as well as existing. This relation, objective and physical or
merely physical, is distinct from and superordinate to the individual being of both
parent and child. It is not merely that intelligible aspect proper to the individual being of
both whereby, henceforward, in order to be fully understood, each must be thought in
connection with the other. Unlike this permanent aspect of intelligibility, the physical
relation and the objectivity that may or may not accompany it are transitive: they are a
type of relation that comes into being for a while and then ceases or, in the case of the
objective relation, that may pass in and out of being many times, in each case remaining
as a relation unchanged in its essential content.

Moreover, when the child is not only of this parent but known to be of this parent, the
physical and the objective relation are the same. This is never true of the transcendental
relation. The relation wherebythis organism must be understood (if it is to be fully
understood, which of course it need not: it is a question of an ideal requirement which
becomes actual to the extent full understanding is accomplished) as parent
of that organism is never the same as the relation whereby that organism is to be
understood as child of this parent. For the transcendental relation in each case belongs
to the individual being in what of it is not the other individual. Poinsot summarized the
point thus (1632a: 90/23-27): "a transcendental relation is not a form adventitious to a
subject or absolute thing, but something imbibed thereto, while connoting something
extrinsic upon which the subject depends or with which it was engaged". In short (ibid.
90/33-37):

A transcendental relation is in the subjective entity itself and does not differ from its
subjective being, and so its whole being is not respecting another, which is what is
required for a relation according to its being.
It is, therefore, a question of two different ways in which relativity can be exercised.
One way is identical with the subjective being of an individual and part and parcel with
it, and a second way is over and above the subjective being of the individual precisely
as the actual connection here and now is realized between one subject and another.
Relativity in the first sense, transcendental relation, is identical with the possibility for
understanding a being.

Relativity in the second sense, to which we have yet to assign a distinct name, is
identical with the actual connection between two subjective entities here and now,
whether that connection be physical or objective. When a being which is the parent of a
child is also known to be the parent of that child, the relation between the parent and the
child is both physical and objective. If the child dies, the physical relation between them
ceases, but it remains that the erstwhile parent must be thought of as having been the
parent of that child if the parent is to be understood according to the full extent of its
intelligible being. When the parent is not only knowable as parent of the child now dead
(i.e., transcendentally relative), but is here and now thought of in relation to the now
dead child, the once physical relation is now re-established in an objective way: the
parent is not only thinkable in truth relative to that child, but actually thought in relation
to that child. The relative in the first sense is in itself "something absolute on which
follows or could follow" a relative in the second sense, which is the difference between
something that is relative in the transcendental sense and something relative as a
relation purely and strictly so called.13

We see then that transcendental relation captures the realization that everything that
exists does so through a series of interactions. Some of these interactions preceded the
now existing thing; other of the interactions are ones the thing itself is engaged in; and
yet other of the interactions are consequent upon those that the thing itself is engaged in,
although it is not itself engaged directly in those consequences, either because it is there
and then elsewhere engaged or because it has itself ceased to be, period. On the other
hand, there are the relations themselves attendant upon all these interactions. They are,
comparatively speaking, ethereal. They are not the related things; they are the relations
themselves. They are not in the things; they are between them. Yet they exist, physically
when not known, objectively when known, objectively and physically when the
knowing and the beings related temporally coincide, purely objectively when the two
diverge, either through the passage of time (objective historical relations) or because the
relations conceived have not yet existed (a future machine) or cannot exist physically in
the way that they are conceived (nine-foot insects on the surface of this planet).
Transcendental relations are not relations strictly and properly but comparative
requirements of action and intelligibility. What are the relations strictly and properly is
that which is consequent upon the interactions or actual understandings not as effects
but as the patterns according to which effects eventuate and causes act. Thus,
parenthood is a relation, but a parent is an agent, and a child is an effect. The foundation
of the relation of parenthood in any given case is a determinate outcome of a
determinate action, but the relation itself is neither the contingent action nor its
determinate outcome. The relation is the pattern, the thirdness, linking the two and
superordinate to each.

Let us expand our example for a moment, choosing an illustration no less concrete but
even more homely. Consider a room with all its furnishings piled in the center, and that
same room with these same furnishings tastefully arranged. Not one thing in the room is
different in the two cases, only what is between the things, namely, their pattern or
arrangement. Yet what a difference in the room. And the difference is a genuine
difference; it is a "physical" difference in our sense. 14 Moreover, the relations cannot be
changed directly. Only the things in the room can be directly acted upon, whence the
change in the relations follows.

We see then what is singular about the being of relations in the strict sense: when a
physical individual or any subjective aspect of a material being is conceived in the
mind, what is conceived is not that individual as it exists apart from the mind but
precisely that individual in relation to the conception. But, when I conceive of a
physical relation strictly as such, both what exists apart from the thinking and what
exists through the thinking are identical, are relations in the same sense. A subjective
mode of being objectively represented in the mind is in principle other than the
represented thing, even though and when the two may coincide: Homer I know in
thought, others knew him in person as well; the centaur I know in thought as well as any
other man knows the centaur. But an intersubjective mode of being objectively
represented is in principle no other than the thing it is represented to be. Both what is
thought and the basis on which it is thought, both what is apart from the mind and what
is conceived in the mind, are relations in the same sense, are in their content identical,
even though and when the two may diverge.

This is a point that seems first to have been made explicitly by Cajetan (1507: in 1. 28.
art. 1. par. 9):

Relation is the one type of being for which the qualification "existing in the mind" does
not detract from what is proper to it, as this qualification does detract from what is
proper to every other type of being. For a rose formed by thought is not a rose, nor is
Homer in opinion Homer; but a relation formed by the mind is a true relation.

Nor is the distinction between a rose in physical existence and a rose in objective
existence a distinction of essentially diverse entities, of which the one is a mind-
independent being and the other a mind-dependent being, as we have said occurs with
relations: it is a distinction rather of one and the same essential type according to two
different ways of existing, namely, in itself subjectively or in knowledge relatively.

How this point is essential to semiotic we shall shortly see. At this juncture, what needs
to be noted is how the being of experience divides respecting the notion of being
relative into the subjectively orintrasubjectively relative and the pure or intersubjective
mode of relative being. And what is unique to the right hand of the division also needs
to be noted, namely, that intersubjectively relative being alone is indifferent to having
its ground or "cause" in the broadest sense in thought or in dynamic interactions:
whether a strict relation is physical only, objective only, or a mixture of both, what it is
in itself and what it is in conception remains exactly the same, to wit, a connection or
actual nexus, a pattern, joining what is otherwise diverse.15 Since it is a question of
being at this point, and of the being, as we shall see, whence semiosis is possible as a
fact of nature, we are at an appropriate point to suggest the name "ontological relation"
for that pure form of intersubjective being that is indifferently physical or objective and
contrasts in what is proper to it with the various forms of intrasubjective being
otherwise making up the physical order of "transcendental relation" in its full
extent.16 The trick is to remember that the transcendental relation denotes what is not a
relation (an individual or inherent characteristic modifying an individual) as it connotes
a relation between the individual denoted and some other individual(s) or event(s),
while the connoted relation denotatively taken would be an ontological relation rather
than a transcendental one.17

In other words, in the classical terminology of subject of a relation, terminus of a

relation, and foundation or ground of a relation (the basis on which subject and terminus
are related), the transcendental relation covers the subject of the relation precisely as
founding the relation and also the term of the relation in whatever other aspects it may
have over and above that of being a terminus purely and strictly, whereas the
ontological relation covers strictly the relation itself as an intersubjective mode or
pattern between subject and terminus whence they are caught up in common (Poinsot
1632a: 84/45-85/19):

A relation accrues to a subject without any change that is directly and immediately
terminated at the relation, but not without a change that is terminated mediately and
indirectly at that relation. Just as risibility results from the same action by which a man
is produced, so from the production of a white thing is produced similitude to another
existing white thing. But if another white thing did not exist, by virtue of the generation
of the first white thing that similitude and any other relation that would result from the
positing of its terminus would remain in a virtual state. Whence distance neither
conduces to nor obstructs the resultance of a pure relation, because these relations do
not depend upon a local situation; for near or far, a son is in the same way the son of his
father. Nor is the relation in the other extreme produced by the terminus itself through
some emission of power when it is brought into existence. Rather is the existence of the
terminus the condition for a relation's resulting from an already existing fundament by
virtue of the original generation whereby that fundament was brought into being as
inclining toward any terminus of such a fundament. Whence even though the generating
has now ceased, it yet remains in its effect or power, inasmuch as it leaves a fundament
sufficient for a relation to result.
We see then what is peculiar about the notion of relative being taken in its full extension
thus divided: it includes everything that falls within our experience and so is difficult to
grasp precisely because the implied term of opposition - nonrelative being, or absolute
being - is at the concrete level a phantom of the mind, like the notion of "nonbeing" in
general. It is not a question of some beings that are relative and other beings that are not
relative, but a question rather of beings all of which are relative, though relative in two
sharply contrasting though connected senses: Every being that exists in its own right is,
by virtue of that very fact, subjectively relative throughout its existence; but, in addition
to this subjective relativity according to which a being proximately depends on some
things more than others and influences some things but not others, etc., there is the
further relativity according to which the subjects are here and now intersubjectively
connected actually to this thing rather than that, and later to another rather than to this,
until such time as they cease to be. There is, in short, a twofold dimension or level to the
relativity of being: on the one hand, there is an underlay of subjective relativity
according to which everything ultimately implies everything else but not in equally
direct or proximate ways at the level of possibility or intelligibility, even though
everything is not actually related to everything else at the level of existence and physical
interaction; and, on the other hand, there is at the same time an overlay of
intersubjective relations, both physical and objective, according to which some things
are actually interactive with some things but not with others in this or that way.

We are now in a position to answer our question about the living parent whose child has
died. The parent remains a parent at the level of transcendental relation, while ceasing to
be a parent at the level of physical relation, although this physical relation continues to
exist objectively to the extent that the parent or anyone else thinks about it. The same
relation formed now only in thought formerly existed also physically, and it is by virtue
of that same relation that the parent is a parent.

Of course, if, as happens, a supposed father, say, was deceived into thinking that a child
was his when in fact it was begotten by another, the objective relation according to
which he was called and thought to be, perhaps even by the child, "father", continues
without ceasing in any sense upon the death of the child. It is thus by the relation on its
physical side that the father is in fact the father, while it is by that same relation (or by
what is thought to be that relation even though it is in fact a different relation owing to
the nonexistence of a physical relation for the objective relation to be the same as) that
the father is called "father". Thus is the truth of dicisigns a consequence of the relations
they embody according to whether what is asserted objectively coincides with or
deviates from what exists relative to another order of being than the objective.

This peculiarity of ontological relation - whereby it, and it alone in the whole of
physical reality, is indifferent to the source or ground of its being - underlies semiosis as
a unique type of activity in nature. The same relation or set of relations that exists at one
time purely objectively may be transferred as such into the order of physical being.
When this happens, the physical order itself is reorganized and realizes possibilities that
previously were remote rather than proximate and actual. This, as we will consider in
chapter 6, is what happens throughout physiosemiosis, as a given environment becomes
modified more and more in the direction of being hospitable to life, and then
subsequently still further in the direction of more and more complex or "higher" forms
of life.18 Here it will be enough to show how the ontological singularity unique to
relation in the order of physical being provides the ground for the prior possibility of
semiosis at the level of the experience of organisms, which is our main concern here,
inasmuch as, as we have already seen, it is at the upper levels of biosemiosis that the
basic concepts of semiotics have been fully established.

The common ground of biosemiosis lies in what used to be called "natural signs", but
what is now more commonly divided, after Peirce, into indices, icons, and symbols
(although of course not all icons or symbols are natural signs, either). A footprint in the
sand is indexical of a person's passing, and of the direction of the passing, unless the
footprints be the skillful work of a man passing east in such a way as to leave the
impression of a man passing west, in which event the footprints remain indexically
accurate to a degree but iconically misleading in another degree, and are in fact symbols
of an exceptional skill.
Natural signs are essential to the survival of most if not all species of animals. They
need to be taken for what they are, or, in the reverse case, mistaken for what they are
intended to be mistaken for, if the animal in question is to secure its food. What happens
in such a case? Precisely that the foundation for a physical relation is taken or mistaken
for a corresponding objective relation, as a result of which food is provided or safety
secured.

The relation of clouds to rain is a relation of cause and effect. When that relation has
also been experienced, an interpretant becomes established. What was formerly a mere
physical relation, a relation of secondness, acquires now, through the interpretant, a
thirdness whereby that same relation functions also semiotically Because the physical
relationship as such need only be dyadic, whereas the semiotic relationship is
necessarily triadic, there is the possibility of error, or misinterpretation. There is also the
possibility of deception. The objective world wherein actual semiosis transpires is only
occasionally the same and in large part different from the physical environment. But to
the extent that it is the same, to the extent that it overlaps - and this is the extent to
which every species depends for its survival on food, which is a considerable extent -
that extent and that overlap result from the indifference of intersubjective being to the
difference between what is objective and what is physical, as we have seen.

Thus, it is the being proper to relation that is also the being proper to signs, even though
relations properly speaking need not be semiosic relations. Not all relations in the
ontological sense pass through actual experience, but all relations in the ontological
sense are indifferent to the order of physical existence, such that, once taken up into
actual experience, they also take on an objective life relatively independent of physical
being. It is in this way that they provide the raw material of biosemiosis. The actual
being proper to the sign is the being of an ontological relation taken up into the
experience of an organism, whether directly from the biological heritage of that
organism (so-called "instinctive notions") or culled rather from individual experience,
where it serves to connect objectively perceptual and sensory elements. The action of
signs first arises precisely from physically related environmental factors coming to be
seen objectively as related, and, conversely, from objectively related factors being
presented as physically related. The uniqueness of semiosis as an activity and the
detached and ambiguous quality it has as an action results from the being peculiar and
proper to the ontological relation whereby, as we have seen, it can be neither directly
altered nor directly perceived. The permeability of relation as such to realization in
either the physical or the objective order also makes the two indistinguishable in direct
experience. This is a matter not of confusion but of the reality proper to experience,
wherein the objective and the physical are intertwined in the sign. This permeability is
why the natural sign provides a common denominator in biosemiosis, even though it
can be natural in different ways for different species.

An example of a natural sign unique to the level of anthroposemiosis may help to grasp
the general point at stake here. Let us consider the case of a fossil bone. This bone may
or may not be known to exist. If not, let us suppose it yet belongs to a class of bones
well established among those expert in the Pleistocene. One day the bone is uncovered,
but by a gardener, not a paleontologist. Since the bone is in an advanced state of
fossilization, let us suppose that our gardener does not even recognize it as a bone, let
alone a fossil bone. For that, a more developed interpretant is required, one proportioned
more exactly to what the bone relates to in its living past. Nevertheless, a fossil bone is
just what it is. Such an interpretant as is required for its recognition nowhere existed
actually in the middle ages, let us say, but now, among our postulated Pleistocene
specialists, it exists indeed as a common property.

What is this interpretant? Certainly not an idea psychologically considered. It is rather

an idea in the semiotic sense, moreover as fashioned publically through the training of
paleontologists, such that those who have by training acquired it possess in their minds
a foundation or "fundament" whence will result or "dimanate", under appropriate
conditions, a network of relations including that bone. 19 But first, one of them at least
will have to see the bone in question.

Supposing that occurs. Supposing that one of our students of the Pleistocene visits our
gardener just as the gardener is about to deposit into a trash bin the bone which had
irritatingly obstructed his gardening. "What is that you have there?" Now our gardener,
being also a student of Peirce, may at this point respond, casually tossing the bone
toward the trash, "A brute fact at the level of secondness."

But our paleontologist had not asked her question idly. She had spoken out of a glimmer
of suspicion, a hint of recognition, as it were - she was voicing in context a low-risk
abductive gamble. Into the brute fact at the level of secondness something of thirdness
had already, thanks to her training, begun to enter. "Let me have a closer look", she
said, moving toward the bone discarded as a peculiarly shaped rock. "This", she
announces on careful inspection, "is no rock. This is a rare fossil bone, which just may
revolutionize a bit of our understanding of the Pleistocene in this area." Whereupon,
clutching the bone with great excitement, she ran off in the direction of the university.

What has happened here? A physical relation, recognized for what it had been, thanks to
the dynamic interaction of its fundament (the bone) producing physical changes in the
student of paleontology's optic nerves, became at the same moment also a sign of what
had been. A transcendental relation, the bone of a dinosaur, which once had a physical
relation to that dinosaur, but no more (the dinosaur being dead), yet gave rise to an
objective relation corresponding somewhat with the physical relation that had been. The
gardener's rock had become the paleontologist's sign.

5 
ZOÖSEMIOTICS AND 
ANTHROPOSEMIOTICS

CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY had much to say about Aristotle's definition of the human
being as a "rational animal". The problem was that, in this definition, the term "animal"
was somehow never quite taken seriously, and most of the discussion centered on
showing how "being rational" contrasted with "being animal" in such a way as to render
animality unimportant. In the extreme case - the work of Descartes (1637, 1641) - the
contrast was emphasized to the extent of being transformed into an outright opposition,
and a new definition of the human as a "thinking thing" was proposed to replace the old
definition entirely.
"Thinking things" - humans - were opposed to "extended things" - all bodies, including
the animals other than human. In this way, the ancient definition was bifurcated: the
first part (which supposedly designated a uniquely human factor in one among the
animals) became the whole definition of the human being, while the second part (which
supposedly designated something shared by human beings with other species or types of
cognitive animate beings) was made to reduce those other types of beings to a material
uniformity that became the whole definition of what was opposed to the human and in
contrast with it, namely, bodies of whatever sort.

This modern dualism of mind and body was rooted in a certain interpretation of the
mind's ideas as being themselves the objects directly given in experience. As we will
see, the idea thus interpreted as an objective representation - as an object before being a
sign - is incompatible with the interpretation of ideas as signs. A suspicion of this
incompatibility, indeed, may have been the reason why Locke, in proposing the
introduction of semiotic into the scheme of human knowledge, saw as a first task for
semiotic the bringing of "ideas" - the inner side of knowing - along with "words" - the
outer manifestation of the knowing - into the perspective of the sign. For he rightly
guessed that the successful completion of this task would result in a radically different
account of knowledge and experience than what was developing in the then-modern
philosophy, including his own.

The semiotic understanding of what a human being is can only be an upshot of that
radically different account. If we are to propose, for example, "linguistic animal" as a
semiotic definition, we will find that, in order to interpret the defining terms
semiotically, we cannot avoid taking animality very seriously indeed, if only in order to
understand language. What comes first in the expression, we will find, comes second in
the interpretation of the expression. For in the expression, "linguistic animal", the
linguistic term not only presupposes for its sense what is first of all an animal
construction, namely, an Umwelt, but also differentiates the objective relations
comprising an Umwelt not from above, independently, or externally, but from within.

A. THE CONTENT OF EXPERIENCE

Although belonging to the cognitive dimension of experience, semiotics does not have
its roots in a theory first of all. First of all it is rooted in a process, the process of
semiosis, specifically as that process is responsible for the very possibility and for
whatever there is of actuality in the experience of any living being. This actuality, in
certain cases (such as our own), can then be reflected upon and come to constitute in its
own right an object according to what is specific to it, namely, the dependency of
experience throughout on the action of signs. At that moment of reflective insight,
semiotics begins as a moment of anthroposemiosis.

Like any other work of reflection, the development of semiotics is subject to errors,
false starts, and blind alleys. At the outset, perhaps the single problem that has most
often thrown off reflections on the sign has been getting straight the distinction between
a sign and a representation and, consequently, the difference between signification and
representation. We have touched on this distinction in chapter 4 particularly, but here
some further remarks will be helpful. The confusion comes from the fact that every sign
must be a representation, but, whereas every signification involves representation, not
every representation must be a sign. In other words, the sign is a representation of a
certain type but of a certain type only, whereas a representation may or may not be a
sign.

A representation may be of itself, or it may be of something other than itself. In the

former case it constitutes an object, but only in the latter case does it constitute a sign.
This is why, as we have seen in chapter 4, the sign in its proper - its irreducible - being
always involves a pure relationship. In the technical terms established there, we may say
that a representation as such may be a merely transcendental relationship, whereas a
sign is also always an ontological relation. In the sign, the transcendental element of the
relation - the representational factor - is merely fundamental, that is, the foundation or
ground whence springs the ontological relation to something else - the significate or
signified. And it is in this relation to another that the sign formally consists.

In the case of a representation as such, what is fundamental and what is formal may
coincide (the case of objective self-representation). When that occurs, the representation
exists as an object of awareness. But, in the case of a sign, what is fundamental (the
representation grounding and founding the relation of signification) and what is formal
(the relation of signification itself) never coincide. It is a question of modality, as I have
explained in technical discussions elsewhere (esp. 1986e: 39-40). As a result, although
an object may also function experientially as a sign, it need not so function (the moon,
well known to ancient man, never served for him as a reminder of the U.S. Apollo
Space Program of the 1970s, nor need the god Apollo and the moon have been brought
together in order to signify a program to reach the moon). And a sign that is also an
object may, accordingly, cease to be sign in any given respect for any given case or
instance of perception (as when we tie a string to remind us of something and then
forget what the string is to remind us of, or when we can't remember a word we have
previously looked up, and so forth).

The confusion of signs as such with representations has been, historically, perhaps the
most common cause of misunderstanding of the role of signs in experience. This
confusion is what led Descartes and Locke to posit ideas as the objects of our awareness
and then to trouble themselves mightily with the problem of figuring out how these self-
representations might or might not be causally connected with or resemblant of the
assumed (but not directly experienced) existence of extramental things. Once it is
understood, however, that objects as such are always representations but representations
as such are never signs, it becomes clear that, to whatever extent ideas are signs, they
are differentiated from, rather than identified with, the objects of our awareness here
and now. The distinction between representation and sign, in what concerns semiotics,
is the distinction between object and sign. A representation may or may not be an
object, but to be an object is necessarily to be a representation, while for being a sign
being a representation is not enough.

These are extremely important distinctions, the full understanding of which involves not
a few subtleties. The point of entry into a semiotic understanding of ideas as signs is the
point of exit from the modern interpretation of ideas as representations, as the objects of
which we are directly aware when we think. Precisely as signs, ideas are separated from
rather than identified with the objects they signify, and objects signified that in turn
become signs do so by themselves becoming differentiated from what they signify. As
signified, objects always presuppose a relation to something other than themselves on
which their being as objects depends, for, as objects, they exist precisely as cognized.
Indeed, their being as object is at the terminus completing such a relation.

The foundation of such an objective relation, however - the element of representation in

the signifying - need by no means be itself an object, nor could it be in every case. For
the being of objects represented as other than what does the representing implies among
the representing elements some at least that lay the ground of objectivity without
themselves being part of that direct ground. The experience of objects that in turn
signify other objects must not be allowed to obscure this fundamental point, if the
standpoint of semiotic is to be achieved. This is a second subtlety on which integral
achievement of the semiotic point of view very much depends.

The need for an objectively sensible element as sign-vehicle is not essential to the
functioning of the sign as such, but only to the transformation of objects already known
in their own right into signs of other objects as well. The essential function of the sign,
however, has already been achieved in the making present of the object in the first
place. For, in that case, the intraorganismic factor (the psychological state, say, or the
nervous condition) on the basis of which the object exists as known to begin with, is
already serving to engender the relation whereby the factor in question serves to make
present in awareness that which it itself is not, namely, the object. The object may itself
then in turn also function as a sign of other objects or be taken inferentially as a "reverse
sign" to abduce the existence of its corresponding idea or psychological state on the
basis of which it exists here and now as something experienced or known. But the signs
at the base of objectivity never present themselves directly as objects. This is a simple
matter of fact, whose possibility is explained (the reason for the possibility of which is
given) by the being of the sign as essentially relational over and above the subjectivity
of whatever is related by it, as we saw in Chapter 4.

The objects of experience as such, thus, depend in every case on signs, and they
themselves further differentiate within experience into other signs, so that one object,
which as object represents itself, comes also through associations of various kinds to
represent other objects besides itself. In that way, an object comes to be a sign as well as
an object in its own right.

But it is not only into signs that objects dissolve through experience. They also dissolve
(or resolve) into objects of very different types. Here we come to a third subtlety on
which a grasp of the main entry point into semiotics depends: just as signs are prior to
and distinct from objects within experience, so objects are prior to and distinct from the
things with which they happen to be partially identical. At the most primitive levels of
experience, and throughout the most sophisticated experiences, no doubt certain
elements of objectivity are also prejacent elements of the physical surroundings. But it
is not as prejacent that they are objective. As prejacent, in their prejacency, they were
not objective in our sense at all. Whatever is objective exists through an actual
representation, that is, as cognized or known. If what exists as known also happens to
exist, in whole or in part, physically as well, that is, independently of the cognizing,
then we say that it is, besides being an object, also a thing - a case of a "physical
object". Thus, within our experience, things are included both among objects and among
what objects may become signs of. But objects may also be and become signs of non-
things, of mistakes, errors, lies, wishes, or fantasies of various kinds, including
realizable dreams of a better future than what is existing could alone portend. Whatever
is known is, as such - that is, as known - objective, be it Hamlet or Napoleon. But
whatever exists objectively may (as in the case of Hamlet) or may not (as in the case of
Napoleon) exist only objectively.

We are not, therefore, going beyond the boundaries of experience by introducing here
the notion of "thing", for precisely within those boundaries some among objects present
themselves as having an existence that exceeds the knowing of it. The notion of things
in its contrast both to objects and to signs arises inevitably and quite early in the
experience of each of us, through the resistance we meet to our desires and, indeed, our
expectations, with such regularity that there is no adult real or conceivable who does not
have the idea of an environment surrounding him or her that is comprised of a great
variety of objects possessing a being or existence that exceeds the individual's
experience of them, in precisely the sense that much of this variety anteceded the
individual me, much of it is unknown to me (it is full of surprises, welcome and
unwelcome), and much of it will survive my demise.

Things, in this most general sense, are whatever in my experience is experienced as not
reducing to my experience of it, and as having an embodiment, moreover, in the
environmental structures such that it is not a mere figment of thought or imagination,
but has also an existence proper to itself that is physical or "real" in the sense that it
obtains apart from my thinking of it. Things have bodies, in a word.

But note, too, the transformation semiotics imposes on our use of the common term
"objective". The word "object" and its derivatives need to be appropriated from
common usage to become termini techniciin the context of semiotics. "Object" or
"objective structure" refer, in contrast to the various usual usages, to the becoming of
things through and in experience. Objects are not what things are in a being prior to and
independent of experience. Objects are what the things become once experienced - that
is, once they take on the existence proper to experience. But objects are not only things
experienced. Objects are more than things, even when - which is not always the case -
they are also things. Objects always involve a "relation to an observer", so to speak, or,
more exactly, to an organism experiencing. Things only sometimes involve such a
relation.

Within experience, the status of objects not designated to be signs with other objects so
designated is peculiarly unstable, not because of a deficiency in the sign but because of
an instability in the status of the object as such. This instability characterizes the object,
regardless of whether a given object (a star, say, or a vampire) is also a prejacent
physical element in the environment, whereby, as we have seen, every type of object,
every objectivity and objective structure as fitted into experience, owes its being to the
sign. The seemingly derivative and unstable status of signs that are objectively
constituted within the order of experience, then, is due to the fact that any object can
become a sign of any other object, and every object in experience begins as or quickly
becomes a sign of several other objects (which ones depending on context and changing
over time).

There remains, however, a constancy underlying this apparent variance. What does not
change, what remains invariant at the base of experience, is the role of the sign as giving
being to objects of whatever type in the first place, and providing the medium for their
growth and transformations.

Thus, when we speak from the strict standpoint of experience (which of course we must
in all contexts where we hope to avoid delusion), the sign is not by any means one thing
among many others: the sign is not any thing at all, nor is it even first of all a distinct
class of objects. As a type of object or objective structure contrasting with other
objective structures, the sign is singularly unstable and derivative, for it is what all
things - not just some - become in experience. But first of all and most radically, a sign
is neither a thing nor an object but the pattern according to which things and objects
interweave to make up the fabric of experience, wherein one part so stands for other
parts as to give greater or lesser "meaning" to the whole at various times and in various
contexts.

This status of the sign - whereby it is itself not a sensible or perceptible item (even when
it has such an item for its foundation or "vehicle") but the arrangement of such items
according to what they signify and provide as the content of significance to experienced
objects - is, we shall see, the key to the higher level process of linguistic semiosis,
which, as we shall also see, draws the line between human life forms and the other
animals. Making this intelligible but imperceptible and insensible status itself
objectified, thereby introducing into objects the dimension of stipulability, as we shall
see, is precisely what constitutes anthroposemiosis in its difference from zoösemiosis
and marks the beginning of language (prior to its exaptation for communication, for
example, in speech) as a distinctive modeling system.20

But in order to develop this point effectively, we need first to develop more integrally
the notion of embodiment as a fundamental objective structure. We saw above that the
notion of having a body is proper to that type of object that is also a thing. But not only
things have bodies. Embodiment is a general phenomenon of experience, inasmuch as
whatever we encounter, learn, or share through experience has about it an aspect which
is accessible by some sensory modality, be it only the physical being of marks or sounds
subsumed within language and employed to create some text (a literary corpus, we even
say). Herein resides and is conveyed some object of consideration that (we learn on
occasion, whereas at other times we know - or think we know - from the start) has no
other body besides a textual one. Examples are the medieval unicorn, the ancient
minotaur, the celestial spheres which gave occasion for the condemnation and
imprisonment of Galileo.

This was what we meant above in distinguishing, within our notion of

objects experienced as things, the notion also of objects that may or may not be things.
A thing experienced and an object of experience are not wholly the same. Of course,
every thing experienced is by that very fact also an object of experience. But not every
object of experience, by any means, is also a thing in the sense of having - such as
experience indicates to be the case with much of nature - an existence prejacent to the
human community and independent of an embodiment within that community.

Illustrative of this distinction are objects that are sometimes identical with physical
things, as "the north star" names a unique natural entity contextualized to a specifically
cultural but also magnetic and planetary frame of reference. At other times objects are
identified with physical things without achieving a unique identity therewith - as the
boundary for a certain stretch between Iowa and Illinois "is" the Mississippi River or as
the President of the United States was first identified with Washington and later with a
whole string of successors. At other times physical structures are made to instantiate
objectivity without by any means being identical with the object locally embodied, as a
statue of Romulus and Remus as founders of Rome, or a statue of the minotaur, has the
physical aspect of a thing without that physical aspect being at all what is proper to its
objectivity, in contrast to the mountain stream which enters experience as an object with
a physical being precisely proper to and part and parcel of its objectivity. So, too, many
objects of experience have no physical existence in addition to their embodiment within
texts. Cinderella, we think, along with her glass slipper and pumpkin coach, are purely
objective, in a way the rocks and stars are not. The celestial spheres, long thought to
embody the very stars, turn out not to embody them at all. The stars proved to be the
bodies, and the spheres proved to be but objects in the merest sense of fictions cut out of
the whole cloth of experience by the understanding, which confused their objectivity
with the physical existence proper to things become object, that is, experienced.

We the better see thus that the world of experience as experienced is through and
through objective, the leprechaun no less than the cancer cell or silver bullet (used to
kill werewolves) or mountain stream. We see, too, that the physical universe on its
material side exists within and as part of the objective universe of experience, indeed, as
its lining and skeleton, so to speak. But we see also that the objective and physical
worlds are by no means coterminous, as each extends in its own way well beyond the
confines of the other.

Of course, strictly speaking, only the objective world, in all its diversity mixed with
physicality, exists as experienced. The physical surroundings may or may not also so
exist - that is, objectively, or as experienced - and then only partially. At least, this is the
notion of physical being and existence that experience imposes on each of us, the notion
that there is more to what we experience in its aspect of embodiment than reduces down
to our experience of it, so that there are no doubt "things we have yet to learn and things
we may never know".

A particularly interesting aspect of the requirement that objects have an embodiment, be

it only "textual" or linguistic in the sense of conveyance by some
sensible moyen subsumed into the order of language, comes into view in those cases
where the objects discoursed about are by definition independent of the world of bodies
entirely: the case of supposed spirits or of the angels and deity of Western religious
conviction. Here the objective embodiment - the texts explaining and arguing about the
nature and reality of these beings - is precisely denied to be of the essence of the object
experienced through the discourse about it. This case is in sharp contrast, say, to the
unicorn, which only contingently proved to want for a bodily form beyond the
discursive, or textual, corpus.

Although these considerations hardly exhaust the variety of ways in which objectivity
and physical existence or being interweave, they are perhaps sufficient to make
unmistakable the point made in our earlier chapters to the effect that the contrast
between objective and physical being in what we experience is a fundamental contrast
between two orders or frameworks that are not identical at every point, even when they
happen to coincide. The objective and the physical depend upon one another without
being coextensive and without being articulated in the same way. This last point is
extremely important to take fully into account. The structure of experience and the
structure of nature are, because of it, relatively independent variables.

We thus have a general rule: physical being, while it reveals itself within experience as
involving a dimension that exceeds experience, also reveals itself on the material side as
providing for experience a necessary lining. That is, experience, without being reducible
to the points where physical and objective being are coincident, consists formally in an
objective structure embodied through a lattice of physical relations that would not be
just what they are apart from experience, but that are not the whole of experience either.
The objective world (the world of experience) at once enfolds in part and restructures in
part the physical environment within which it sustains itself. This is also true of the
biosemiotic network of objective worlds taken as a totality (cf. Bargatzky 1978;
Lovelock 1972, 1979, 1988).

We see thus that the action proper to signs is at the heart of the interplay between
objective and physical being that constitutes experience, and illustrates in the
constituting that the sign must be, as we saw in chapter 4, a purely relational being in
order to function and act as it does in playing precisely this mediating role, beyond the
dynamics of physical interaction (whether material and physical or psychological and
psychic, as Peirce c. 1906: 5.484 joined Poinsot 1632a: 195/3-9, 18-29 in pointing out).
The sign manifests itself in semiosis not at all as a physical thing, nor even as a peculiar
type and variety of object. The sign appears, rather, as the linkage whereby the objects,
be they bodily entities or purely objective, come to stand one for another within some
particular context or web of experience.

The semiotic web, it turns out, embraces not just the living world (the biosphere) nor
even just the realm of cognizing organisms. The so-called physical world itself exists
within the world of experience. But it is not as experienced that the physical world is
properly called physical. As experienced, as we have seen, it is properly
called objective. The further discrimination among objects of experience, between those
that are also physical existents and those that are only objects of experience, is itself a
matter of experience. The engrained dichotomy between the subjective on the one hand,
which is all that is essentially private or illusory, and the objective on the other hand,
which is what is public, real, and independent of the observer, simply fails to hold up
when duly weighed and considered in the light of the only instrument we have for
discriminating the true (or more sound) from the false (or less sound). A trichotomy is
necessary, and a trichotomy of a most peculiar kind.

The essential category for the experienced as such is the category of the objective:
whatever exists in any way as known. Opposed to the objective in this sense is both the
physical in the sense of the things of the environment prejacent to and able as such to
survive the demise of experience, and the subjective in the sense of the psychological or
psychic depths of the individual insofar as they are not available objectively here and
now. In other words, we have a trichotomy where the subject stands at the center of a
web of relationships comprising precisely an objective world. Through the web, each
subject is also entangled in other webs with other centers, the whole comprising an
objective network. The filaments and strands of this network of intersecting webs catch
aspects of subjectivities that exist through their bodily dimension as elements active in
the physical environment below and beyond the ways in which the subject experiences
that environment and reconstitutes it structurally as an objective world shareable with
some others. The strands of this network then hold these aspects up for scrutiny from
the centered perspectives and thereby objectivize the subjective aspects and incorporate
them as aspects now of something else besides, namely, an Umwelt, a shared objective
world, in its contrast to environment.

B. SPECIES-SPECIFIC OBJECTIVE WORLDS

With this understanding of objectivity in mind, a useful concept for discussing the being
of signs as constructive through experience of a world precisely objective throughout is
that of the Umwelt. Originally formulated at the end of the nineteenth century by the
biological researcher Jakob von Uexküll and developed through further researches well
into this century (von Uexküll 1899-1940), this concept, with important modifications
of its originally overly-Kantian and needlessly antievolutionary context of formulation,
is commonly used in semiotics today in connection with the doctrine of signs.

The environment selectively reconstituted and organized according to the specific needs
and interests of the individual organism constitutes an Umwelt. The Umwelt thus
depends upon and corresponds to an Innenwelt, or cognitive map, developed within
each individual. The Innenwelt enables the individual to find its way in the environment
and insert itself into a network of communication, interest, and livelihood shareable
especially with the several other individuals of its own kind. If the organism could not
objectify enough of the physical surroundings to catch its food, for example, it would
not, as Jacob more or less picturesquely remarked (1982: 56), live to tell the tale.

Of course, the possibility of coincidence of environmental with objective elements

actually realized within experience and indefinitely expandable through the critical
control of objectification lies at the heart of science and constitutes the basis and ground
for all studies and experimentation properly termed scientific. But this possibility as
critically verifiable is already owing to a special feature - textuality, as we shall see -
whereby the specifically human Umwelt, the Lebenswelt, as it is times called, is a
uniquely malleable Umwelt open in ways no other Umwelt on this planet is open to
reconstitution along alternative lines of objectification, both within itself and in its
relations with the external environment physical as such.

The Umwelt in principle, thus, is a "model world" from the point of view of possibility:
it is one of the infinite variety of possible alternatives according to which the bare
physical furnishings of the environment can be arranged and incorporated into an
architectural superstructure of possible experiences, supposing especially this or that
biological form. But from the point of view of its inhabitants, an Umwelt is the actual
world of experience and everyday reality. In comparison to this actual world of
experience, the prejacent physical in its proper being is secondary, derivative, and not
necessarily recognized according to the intrinsic requirements of its own being.

We think today, for example, generally, that a human Umwelt incorporating the
institution of slavery is a less acceptable species-specific habitat than one that is free of
slavery. The "model world" of the twentieth century is sharply different in this regard
from the "model world" acceptable to and inhabited by the ancient Greeks, Saint Paul,
medieval man, and so forth. The Umwelt of Sparta differed sharply from that of Athens,
and much appropriation of physical resources within the shared environment was put to
the use of determining which objective model should dominate over or even supplant
the other. Rome sought to destroy not the physical lining of the Carthaginian Umwelt so
much as the Umwelt itself as sustained by that lining.

The notion of reality and the notion of the Umwelt are, from the point of view of
experience, inseparable. Yet what is distinctive about human experience in contrast to a
purely perceptually structured consciousness is, quite precisely, the discoverability that
Umwelt and environment (or physical surroundings) are yet not coextensive. From this
bare suspicion of the understanding in its difference from sense arises the whole
enterprise of science and technology, on the one hand, and morality as distinct from
mores, on the other.

The problem of the action of signs in the context of our own experience, therefore, is,
fundamentally, the problem of the common source of all Umwelts (the emergence of
objectivity in its difference realizedfrom the physical environment as such), and,
formally, the problem of the emergence within objectivity of the realization of its
difference from the physical surroundings. This latter realization, we shall see, is
tantamount to the invention of language or - what comes to the same thing - the advent
of textuality. There may be forms of semiosis already at work in physical nature itself
anterior to the advent of anything living and continuing independent of it, to be sure.
But only with the Umwelt do we encounter in its full actuality the first phenomenon of
semiosis, the explicit realization of the function essential to the sign: 'referral' or renvoi,
the word by which Jakobson, as Sebeok well put it (1984a: 66) "deftly captured and
transfixed each and every sign process conforming to the classic formula, aliquid stans
pro aliquo" (one thing standing for another).21

This point is among the most fundamental points to be made in regard to the sign: there
is no object that does not depend in its objectivity on the simultaneous action of the sign
as making present in experience something other than itself, something that it itself is
not.

The further point concerning what is species-specific to experience in a human Umwelt

is well-made through an observation of Maritain's (1957: 52-54): on the one hand,
animals other than humans make use of signs, but they do not know that there are signs;
on the other hand, the birth of language and the grasp of the relation of signification as
such - as distinct from the sign vehicle, or sensible embodiment of the sign as ground of
semiosis, as well as from the object signified - are the same. For "what defines language
is not precisely the use of words, or even of conventional signs; it is the use of any sign
whatsoever as involving the knowledge or awareness of the relation of
signification".22 In this relation as such consists formally and strictly, as distinct from
fundamentally and perceptually, the sign in its proper being: "and therefore a potential
infinity" - what later authors have called 'unlimited semiosis'; "it is the use of signs in so
far as it manifests that the mind has grasped and brought out the relation of
signification".

This feat opens the possibility of a text and establishes therewith the boundary beyond
which zoösemiosis becomes specifically anthroposemiotic. At this moment the
specifically closed Umwelt is opened up to the prospect of infinity; zoösemiosis
becomes anthroposemiosis, capable of a progression into infinity.23
 

C. SPECIES-SPECIFICALLY HUMAN SEMIOSIS

Once the relation of signification has been grasped on its own, as distinct from a
particular object signifying another particular object signified, it becomes possible to
detach that relation from any particular objective sign vehicle and, taking this invisible
content itself as the basis for further representations, to attach it, instead, to some other
object. This other object will now serve, by choice, in lieu of the original vesselthat is,
will now serve as ground for a relation originally grounded elsewhere. With the
possibility of such a choice, a new kind of sign and a new mode of signifying comes
into existence objectively, thestipulable sign.

What we call "linguistic signs" are a specific variety or sub-species of the stipulable
sign. The members of this sub-specific set are arbitrary in their ground over-all,
although natural inasmuch as they consist in relationships no less than (and precisely as
do) other kinds of signs as such - for example: signs embodying connections that are
physical before becoming also objective and social (such as the connections between
clouds and rain or smoke and fire); or signs formed of connections that are objective
associatively rather than physically (such as the connections between candlelight and
lovers, napkins and meals); or of connections that are manipulative (such as pressing a
lever and receiving a pellet of food) rather than stipulative; or social signs subsequent to
language embodying connections which are only objective and cultural (such as the
connection between flag and country). The ability to grasp the actual stipulation of
linguistic signs, in contrast to making associations based on their perceptible aspects, is
just what is meant by "intelligence" in the species-specific sense of linguistic
competence.24 This ability is "a subspecies of semiotic competence", as Johansen says
(1985: 279), which overlays the biological species-specific competence with a
developmental dimension historical in a Lamarckian sense, thus introducing into the
objective world of the species the permeating element of textuality.

Using the older terminology of images and ideas along with conceptual premises that
are pre-zoösemiotic, Maritain attempted thus to describe the situation (1957: 53):

Normally in the development of a child it is necessary that the idea be "enacted" by the
senses and lived through before it is born as an idea; it is necessary that the relationship
of signification should first be activelyexercised in a gesture, a cry, in a sensory sign
bound up with the desire that is to be expressed. Knowing this relationship of
signification will come later, and this will be to have the idea, even if it is merely
implicit, of that which is signified. Animals and children make use of this signification;
they do not perceive it. When the child begins to perceive it (then exploits it, toys with
it, even in the absence of the real need to which it corresponds) - at that moment the
idea has emerged.

But this description fails in its purpose, unless it is further made clear that the
detachment of the relationship from the related elements is achieved in such a way that
the relation in its proper being as imperceptible can be made an objective foundation or
basis that, directly as such (that is, as imperceptible), is able further to serve to stand for
and represent some other relationship yet again. (Whether that other relationship
terminate at an object that is also imperceptible in turn is not what matters, although it
does emphasize what is distinctive to the semiosis in question). A dog, for example,
wanting to be let out, can indeed learn to fake the need to evacuate as a way of
manipulating its master "even in the absence of the real need to which it corresponds".
And yet, at that moment, an idea in the sense in question has not emerged, no matter
how playful the dog may become in its efforts.

At the heart of the difference between the human Umwelt and the Umwelt of other
cognitive organisms is the "idea" in this specifically semiotic sense: the relationship
itself that constitutes signification is grasped in its proper being at once imperceptible
and distinguishable both from a given signified and from a given sign-vehicle - and
therefore as detachable from any given vehicle and attachable to any other vehicle, as
well as directable to some other object, or to the same object only, in its new
attachment. This difference makes for the possibility of a text as such.

Texts are not only literary. They can be any physical structure at all made to embody
ideas in the semiotic sense. Indeed, the whole of culture, in this radical sense (cf.
Danow 1987), is a text. In this sense, culture as a text is a network of signs whose lattice
of articulations is chosen at critical nodes, though not at all nodes (which would be
impossible, an outer limit of the intelligible, pushed, for example, in Joyce'sFinnegans
Wake). These critical nodes are chosen differently and to different degrees in individual
cases but are also, as chosen, subsequently detached in effect from the initial choices
and naturalizedthrough the habit-patterns of a community as "conventions" in the strong
sense of "the way we do things (by preference unthinkingly) here".

The network exhibits a hierarchical or quasi-hierarchical structure relative to the

physical side of the objects experienced within the network's frame.25 Thus, a
technological artifact embodies critically controlled and stipulated relativities no less
than does an artistic or literary creation, and all three would serve as documentary
evidence to some future historian or anthropologist or to an extraterrestrial seeking to
understand the contemporary human Umwelt. But, whereas the objective relations
embodied in the technological device directly relate also to its physical constitution as
such in order for it to function as an instrument, the objective relations embodied in an
artistic structure dominate the physical constitution of the whole in quite another
fashion. Finally, the objective relations constitutive of the literary work tend to be a
variable relatively free in respect to their embodiment, that is, their sensorially
accessible base. For this reason the written word tends to function as the primary
analogate for our understanding of text, inasmuch as here the relation of signification is
exhibited not only as subject to critical control (that is, as cultural) but also in the form
most subject to critical control (that is, the linguistic form) while still retaining
permanence in the exhibition (the written in contrast to the spoken word).

To create a text is therefore to become aware of the difference between physical

surroundings and objective world and to play with this difference, thereby erecting a
system of signs at once expressly in consciousness of the difference and enhancive of it.
To create a text is predicated on the understanding that "the role of the object in the
semiosis is", as Johansen puts it (1985: 235), "not confined to being an element in an
experiential situation interpreted to tell if a symbol applies or not". To create a text is
hence to proceed accordingly in the use of signs freely to structure objectivity in a
contour and manner accessible only to a conspecific, in the precise sense of another
organism able to share that understanding and to grasp signs fashioned on its basis (that
is to say, encoded according to patterns neither reducible to nor accessible within the
perceptible dimension as such of the sign structure). To create a text is thus a function
of musement.

For an understanding of this function two terms must be clarified: code and idea.

D. THE "CONVENTIONALITY" OF SIGNS IN ANTHROPOSEMIOSIS

When the term "ideas" is defined semiotically, that is, as the individual discovery of
relation as such as the connection and difference between sign and signified, the
question becomes: how is such a discovery shared? How is a relation of signification
grasped for itself as detachable from this sign-vehicle and attachable rather to that one,
communicated in its difference? That is the question to which the term "code" is
proposed as answer. In other words, "idea" is to Innenwelt as code is to Umwelt as
species-specifically (and regardless of planetary location) human. To understand what a
text is and to understand the human lifeworld in what is specific to it are the same.

The perceptions of an animal that learns through experience, and the beliefs of a human
animal as subject to rational criticism, are keys to textuality as the species-specific
human form of objectivity. We distinguish among "fancies" the two distinct iconic
forms: images, derivable from and reducible to a correlation between objects sensorially
accessible as such (given a specific biological endowment), and conceptions or ideas,
which express relations of signification in the being proper to them as relations (that is,
as indifferent to their subjective ground and, consequently, as detachable from any
given sign-vehicle as object for attachment to an objective ground elsewhere and
otherwise). Ideas in this sense, conceptions within perceptions of the world, are unique
to, and species-specifically definitive of, anthroposemiosis.

But in order to establish the basis for shared conceptions, these ideas must be embodied
in a publicly accessible objective structure, which is not the case as long as their only
embodiment is the cerebral cortex of the individual for whom a given idea has taken
form. A given objective relation, seen in its detachability, must not only be detached but
also attached elsewhere: it must be assigned a new ground in such a way that that new
ground can in turn be experienced as a sign-vehicle relative to the objectivity originally
grasped elsewhere. The code is the correlation and proportioning of a sensibly
accessible element to an objectivity that is understood as correlated thereto. The idea
must be correlated with some physical element within experience that is taken to serve
as ground for the relation in which the idea expressly consists. That correlation is what
constitutes a code in its difference from an idea.

Code and idea alike are logical interpretants, 26 but the logical interpretant considered
now on the side of Innenwelt (idea), now on the side of Umwelt (code). A code thus
channels and directs relations among objects in a publicly accessible way. A mastery of
the encoding will result in a partial duplication (a sufficient overlap, we might say)
within the decoder of the ideas behind the original encoding, thereby imposing, to that
extent, a common conception (an intersubjective moment) within and beyond the
perceptually shared objectivity. The Umwelt, in itself perceptual through and through
according to the species-specific constraints of a biological inheritance, is now modified
and restructured from within by further objective relations not themselves constrained
directly by the biological heritage. Code, in short, belongs to the object experienced and
idea to the organism experiencing. Both alike serve to ground, channel, and define or
specify the relationships of dependency that comprise the objective world in its integral
being subsumptive of the physical.

So far we have noted that semiosis, in the fullest sense of the action of signs, extends
well beyond the boundaries of culture, as even well beyond the boundaries of animal
societies, to include the dynamics of plant life and even the dynamics of chemistry and
physics down to the quantum level insofar as there is a question of future
outcomes and law governed interaction. Our concentration has been on the explicit
absorption and redistribution of elements of physical environment within the relational
network of objective world through cognitively mediated experience. We have focused
on the construction of species-specific Umwelts corresponding to Innenwelts for the
purpose of providing the proximate genus in contrast to which the specific difference of
a human world - a Lebenswelt - might become visible.

That difference, we now see, is textuality, in the precise sense of the introduction,
through understanding, of relations into the objective world that are not grounded in the
perceptible elements, as such, of that Umwelt as correlated with a species-specific
biological heritage. These relations alter the objectivity itself experienced and add to
that experience the element of critical control as a possibility. Such control is not in the
bare sense of something modified or modifiable through the muscular effort and plan of
the organism (such as, for example, the beaver contemplating a mountain stream before
and after building its dam), but in the rich sense of recognizing the possible, in its
objective being, as distinct from the whole order of physical elements as such actually
given here and now.

The exaptation27 of the human modeling system (let us say, language in the ground
sense) through speech into a communication system is therefore only one aspect of
textuality: specifically, that aspect wherein the communicative intention finds an
embodiment that is distinct from the other purposes that enter in when action is directed,
beyond language, to the establishment of the postlinguistic structures of civil
organization, shelter, trade, clothing, and so forth. These other systems, too,

depend on the stipulable sign actualized in a determinate way (a "conventional sign") in

the fullest sense of an alternative contingent embodiment of the relation of signification
grasped in itself, as distinct from any given subjective ground. But these other systems
are required to take account of their material embodiment as objects created to perform
more than a communicative function (in the case of a house, for example, to withstand
the elements; in the case of a machine, to work reliably; and so on). In contrast, the
language as exapted to communicate, through embodiment in a system of sense
perceptible elements, needs to take no more account of the bodily form than is
minimally necessary to the one function in its purity. For this function no more is
needed than to convey the code, according to which the relations constituted by ideas
have been transferred from the Innenwelt to the Umwelt, as determinative of the
experience of others able to grasp the code precisely in its conventional being (its
situation of being incidental to the sensible constitution of its immediate ground, its
"arbitrariness" in happening to be this way from customs dimanated from stipulations).
Thus, the animals other than humans perceive the difference between the general's
uniform and that of the private, but only the human animals have a chance to understand
the difference not in its material effects (for the animals, too, experience social power
relations) but in its formal constitutive (which is first of all cultural and only
derivatively social).

In this sense we can agree with Barthes that "every semiological system has its
linguistic admixture" (1964: 10; cf. Culler 1982: 21). At the same time our point is more
basic: every linguistic system has its semiological surplus. The language is not only not
an autonomous system, still less "a semiotic into which all other semiotics may be
translated" (Hjelmslev 1961: 109). The structural peculiarity of language is not
unlimited in that sense. But language is unlimited in the sense of being able to draw all
other semiotics (and semiosis) into the trajectory of the communicative intention freed
from a species-specificbiological inheritance. The "linguistic admixture", far from
providing the foundation of all other semiotics, pertains rather to their surplus and
perfection in community - that is to say, as they are drawn into and made shareable
through the diaphanous medium and network of relations (the codes in particular)
through which the objective world receives a texture of intelligence.

In such community, the contexts of nature itself and of biosemiosis in particular are
enhanced and transformed according to objective possibilities not prefigured as such in
or by the biological heritage of the species. These possibilities are opened up, rather,
through the Lamarckian means of convention, which is transmissible through the
praeterphysical vehicle of correlating codes embodied in physical elements reworked
with understanding. Included in such transmissible convention are the physical elements
of linguistic communication. These achieve a semiotic pre-eminence by virtue of being
independent of any specific purpose, in order to be, in the context of communication, at
the service of every other purpose. Language as a communication system - as a publicly
available coding of the Umwelt - is thus the objective reflection of the freedom of the
intellect as a growth in time.28

At the same time the coding of the Umwelt is not restricted or reducible to linguistic
coding in this sense. According to our anthroposemiotic definition of ideas, the coding
of the Umwelt is the series of marks made by intelligence on the objective world in
whatever respect and whether deliberately or as a concomitant attribute of intelligent
action. The conventionalizing of objective relations makes of the context of Umwelts
and physical relations the one texture of human experience. This "conventionalizing",
this "loosening up" of the objective world as naturally determined (by biological
heredity on one side and physical environment on the other) whereby reality itself
becomes in some measure "freely chosen" (in Powell's phrase, 1983), constitutes the
network of codes in the broadest sense, including the linguistic code as a subset. This
conventionalizing of objective relations is not something actual or actualizable in only
one way. It is something multiply actual (the diversity of the natural languages) and
only virtually universal.29Such a virtual universality is destined always to be defeated in
time by the particular actualizations called into being by specific circumstances on this
planet, and most likely on planets elsewhere, as giving rise, through semiosis, to a
biosphere and intelligent life in the sense that we are speaking of it here as
anthroposemiotic. Yet between these particular realizations there yet always remains the
virtuality whereby one system of coding could be, given sufficient ingenuity, translated
into the other, so that the virtually universal also defeats the actual particular in its own
way, though only potentially and in the background.

In such a context we can appropriate Eco's conclusion (1977: 52): "To see cultural life
as a web of codes and as a continuous reference from code to code is to restore to the
human animal its true nature" - as long as we realize that the "nature" we are restoring
the human animal to is its nature as semiosic in actu signato. The human animal, as
inventor of the Rule, needs also to realize that this inventor is in dire need of being wary
of the surrounding virtualities which measure, in every case, how truly reasonable the
"rule" is against the background and in the context of what humanity must depend on
(such as the rain forests or the ozone layer, and biosemiosis in general) in order to
pursue its seemingly (but not entirely in fact) "unlimited semiosis". Otherwise, we risk
making a semiotics on the model of the Hobbesian King, answerable to nothing below
and hence immune to considerations of justice or injustice.

The codes themselves of culture already incorporate through the content of what they
are used to convey (their "surplus", semiologically speaking) what is more than culture
and binds it to the further reality of surroundings as physical. This whole which is more
than language and within which language functions as a relational dependency
suspended between what it presupposes and what presupposes it is the primary reality of
human experience as a whole. We move from the idea of reality as an order of existence
independent of the observer to a semiotic idea of "reality" as including also the observer
in all that is dependent on the observer, along with whatever in experience reveals itself
as a part of something - the old idea of "reality" - independent of the observer ("physical
being" in its praeter-objective character as the lining of experience). We move from the
classical modern idea of reality, which was the ancient and medieval idea as well (Deely
1984: 265-266), to the postmodern idea of reality as the text of specifically human
experience. We move from communication in the service of biological ends to a
communication system opening as well possible worlds beyond any species-specific
objective one, or any imaginary reductionistic purely physical one (the myth of
Positivism).

Such is the movement within objectivity from sign to textuality, that is to say, to an
objectivity which includes within its network of objective relations a dimension or
aspect, an "affordance", in Gibson's phrase (1979 - though not his sense: see
Cunningham 1988), whereby objectification itself can be subjected to critical control
and reshaped by stipulation. This brings us to the matter of criticism. This is a method
proper to les sciences humaines, indeed, but an activity no less essential to the
evaluation of presentations in the natural sciences and, in general, the activity distinctive
of anthroposemiosis in its linguistic and cultural development beyond animal societies
and the communications proper to zoösemiosis.

E. CRITICISM AS THE EXPLORATION OF TEXTUALITY

We have seen that the codes demarcating culture in its proper being incorporate, while
at the same time contrast with, the physical side of objects and the objective "things"
comprising together the Umwelts (the experience and structures of experience) of the
various species interacting within the objective human world or (outside our awareness
perhaps - but vitally and biologically in contrast with "culturally") within the organismic
population comprising the human species as a biological entity. We have also seen that
such codes are only incompletely actualized (within consciousness especially), while
remaining operative virtually as a totality at cross purposes with itself (in the residual
oppositions of perspective encoded into the objective world through past discourse and
social interaction). Hence, for example (Eco 1977: 31; cf. Carleton 1649: sec. 6): "From
one speaker to another there can be differences in the complexity of semantic analysis
of a term: these differences produce sub-codes on the basis of which one speaker could
assign meanings to the terms which other speakers would not assign to them; the
different mastery of such sub-codes reveals class differences in social interaction".

Consequently, criticism is not merely "literary". It is an activity of mind that ranges

across the entire horizon of objectivity textualized, including those types of
objectification characterizing natural science. There are as many authentic roles for
criticism as there are ways of bringing into the objective sphere, with greater
explicitness and formalizing, the roles played or playable by the traces left in experience
of the workings of intelligence over these many generations present through the past.
Such traces are especially apparent in the linguistic sign ("the ideological phenomenon
par excellence", as Voloshinov remarked [1929: 131), but also in general in that surplus
of semiosis we have come to call "textuality" or "culture" in the sense of postlinguistic
structures (Deely 1982: 198 n. 1, after Morris 1946).

Given this purview, the semiological systems of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida
find in spite of themselves a theoretical ground within what Sebeok calls (1977: 181)
the "major tradition" of semiotic development. So also do the systems after Eco (1973:
153; 1976) that, without being called semiological by their proponents, yet share the
ideology of equating semiosis with the tracings and workings of codes precisely as
conventional (in the base sense of standing in part on that irreducible element of the
arbitrary which is inseparable from even though not identical with the stipulability of
signs) within culture, lucubrating (in consequence) absorption of the indexical and
iconic as such.

This label, as we saw in chapter 1, is a reference to a strategy for encouraging a view of

semiotics not as a theory in either the traditional critical sense or in the traditional
scientific sense, but as what Locke called a doctrine of signs (1690: 361-362;
commentary in Deely 1986a, 1986c), a term which must be carefully construed. In the
context of Locke's Essay, as Sebeok first pointed out (1976a: ix), "doctrine" has a
unique sense, one redolent in particular of the Latin Renaissance mainstream
understanding of philosophical knowledge in its double contrast with empirically
soluble formulations on one side and theological formulations dependent on religious
authority on the other side (Deely 1982: 127-130, 1986b). A doctrine of signs, within
this notion of philosophical doctrine generally, specifically transcends the opposition of
culture to nature, and thereby precludes an autonomously linguistic or literary semiotics,
pretensions toward which, as we have seen, Sebeok (1977) rightly dubbed collectively a
"minor tradition" respecting semiotics as a whole.

Such a doctrina signorum was specifically inaugurated in Poinsot's work (1632a: 38/16-

20, 117/28-118/6), though the fullness of its object was not stated before Peirce, who
coined the name semiosis(c.1906: 5.488) for the action through which this relative being
of signs so artfully disengaged and delineated by Poinsot is sustained and fulfilled
through actions. Thus, the doctrine of signs has for its unifying object, as we saw in
Chapter 3, the action of signs explicitly recognized as an activity or process constructive
not only of human experience but of all organismic experience and, we shall argue, of
the physical environment itself. The argument of the chapter following is that the
environment in its physical being is already developmental, and therefore virtually
semiosic, by virtue, that is, of its tending to give rise to and to subsequently support and
lend itself to appropriate transformation by the plethora of Umwelts (including the
species-specifically human one) precisely in their contrast - as objective worlds - to the
physical realm they presuppose. The objective worlds not only rest upon this prejacent
physicality, they subsume it in part as it is in its own right, even while restructuring it
directly in the objective order as well as subjectively through physical interactions as
subjects.

The decisive move in this strategy for establishing the doctrine of signs on the basis of
its full and proper possibilities for understanding today turns, not surprisingly, on our
conception of language. We saw above, in line with our view of language as (prior to
exaptation) the species-specifically human Innenwelt, that the essence of language is
arguably equatable with the discovery of the relation of signification and the consequent
reconstitution of experienced signs as stipulatable. This latter point refers to the
subsequent use of any sign in the light of an apprehended difference between, on the
one hand, an object signified as such, and, on the other hand, a sign-vehicle
(or signifier) as such, in their mutual difference from the linkage itself between the two
as able to be abstracted and codified for purposes of communication. By the same
stroke, we saw, a field of infinite possibilities opened up - the field of unlimited
semiosis. As Merrell briefly put it (1988: 257): "if a dog and the idea of a dog were
separate, then there would be a relation between them, and therefore an idea of this
relation, and so on, ad infinitum."

In giving a place to textuality as the objectivity proper to human beings, we see that
what is required at the foundation is a notion of language larger and more fundamental
than the network of differences conveyed through the employment of the arbitrary array
we call (in relation to the network of conventions and contrasts constituting them
formally) "linguistic signs". Maritain observes of this larger notion, this surplus creating
the admixture whereby the whole of culture is textualized (1964: 91):

The term language does not relate only to the words which we use, it covers also all that
which serves us to make ourselves understood, and therefore the whole imagery which
we use and which is that of the persons to whom we speak, at such and such a moment
of time and in such and such a place on earth. (Supposing that through some telephone
through duration we could tell a contemporary of Julius Caesar something which
concerns our epoch, could we speak to him of airplanes and of electronic machines, of
the British Parliament, or of the Presidium of the Communist Party? The other person
would not understand anything; it would indeed be necessary to use the imagery
furnished by his own type of culture, as well as his own words and his own syntax.)

Given the coextensiveness, then, of textuality with the objective world of human
experience (of a Lebenswelt in contrast to a pure Umwelt, let us say), the question
becomes one of how to construe the "linguistic admixture" demonstrable within every
semiological system - that is, within the totality of human experience, including the
experience of "nature" so-called. This question brings us to the heart of the matter of
what semiotics finally is, and what it has to contribute to the study of either branch or
any subdivision of the accepted division of university studies today into the "sciences"
on the one hand and the "humanities" on the other, including literature.

F. A MATRIX FOR ALL THE SCIENCES

The main point in this regard is that semiotics pertains to a renewal of the foundations
of our understanding of knowledge and experience across the board, and hence to a
transformation of the disciplinary superstructures culturally distributing that
understanding (the traditional disciplines as currently founded). Semiotics also pertains
to the renewal of any single currently established discipline within, say, the humanities,
but only by way of achieving a proper understanding of semiosis itself in some
particular. It is thus not just a question of putting aside the ill-advised or, as Culler more
mordantly muses (1981: 20), "futile attempt to distinguish the humanities from the
social sciences". It is, rather, a question of new foundations for the "sciences" in the
ancient sense of the whole panoply of disciplinarily diversified human knowledge - be
the object of the diversity "human", "natural", or "social" (in the current description).
Semiotics is a perspective concerned with the matrix of all the disciplines, precisely as
they are offsprings within experience of anthroposemiosis.

This claim is at the heart of semiotics' so-called "imperialism". It is not a question of

imperialism, however, but of recognizing the role of experience as the ground of
understanding throughout and the centrality of history in making of that ground a rich
soil. It is more a question of recovering from the imperialism of the natural sciences,
physics in particular, as the distinct heritage of positivism, and of seeing the subsets of
semiosis within anthroposemiosis for what they are in relation to the whole.

Floyd Merrell makes the point nicely, in a note on his recent text (1988: 262 n. 12):

. . .in general the hermeneutical movement has been beneficial insofar as it has directed
attention to the role of interpretation and understanding in the humanities. However,
Stephen Toulmin observes, and rightly so [1982: 99-100], that this movement 'has done
us a disservice' also because it does not recognize any comparable role for interpretation
in the natural sciences and in this way sharply separates the two fields of scholarship
and experience. Consequently, ... the central truths and virtues of hermeneutics have
become encumbered with a whole string of false inferences and misleading
dichotomies.

A truly "radical hermeneutics", such as Caputo calls for (1987), must first of all come
round to the semiotic point of view, for that point of view, that standpoint, achieved its
first systematic expression precisely by an author (Poinsot 1632: 38/1ff., commentary in
Deely 1985, 1988) realizing and thematizing the point that interpretive activity or
"hermeneutics" (the privileged term for the notion then was "perihermenias", as noted in
Deely 1982: 188n.16) is coextensive with the life of the mind - and, we would add
today, extensive of nature itself as engendering life.
This is the governing insight of the semiotic enterprise integrally conceived in all its
phases and periods. Semiotics provides a perspective on the whole of experience in
what is proper to it as experience. In achieving this, it becomes "first" among the
sciences not as one among the others, such as traditional metaphysics envisaged, but
as doctrina contrasts to scientia (Williams 1985; Anderson et al. 1984; Sebeok 1976a:
ix) and as what is first in the understanding contrasts with what is derivative therefrom
(Deely 1987, 1988, 1988a).

It is thus a question of realizing what is proper to the semiotic point of view, and of
distinguishing what is foundational from what is consequent thereto and partial thereof.
From the beginning, both from outside (for example, Ricoeur 1981 and after) and from
within (for example, Bakhtin 1971,30 Culler 1977), the semiotics movement has suffered
from practitioners who mistook some part of semiosis for the whole of semiotics and
who systematically strove to reduce the perspective of semiotic to the perspective of
that preferred part with which they identified it. From within, the problem has been
more serious, in that the European influence after Saussure, only now beginning to be
absorbed and meliorated in the broader American influence emanating from Peirce, has
created in the popular consciousness a de facto equation of semiotics with structuralist
and literary concerns. To this day, in much of the literature sociologically defining the
contemporary development of semiotics, a naive assumption remains transparently at
work equating the semiotic point of view with literary preoccupations and tending
toward the explicit extreme of equating semiosis with "the product of encoding signs"
(Morgan 1985: 8). Thus, as prominent an author as Robert Scholes is able to assert
(1982: ix) that, "usually defined as the study of signs (from a Greek root meaning sign),
semiotics has in fact become the study of codes."

To all such views (the gamut of writings more or less dominated by the tendency within
semiotics toward this explicit extreme) apply Sebeok's blunt rejoinder (1984b: 2) to
Hawkes (1977: 124): "Nothing could be a more deluded misconstrual of the facts of the
matter, but the speciousness of this and associated historical deformations are due to our
own inertia in having hitherto neglected the serious exploration of our true lineage".

What is fundamentally misguided about the semiological tendency to treat

intertextuality as a self-contained whole, centered on the literary sign and closed in upon
itself through an unlimited (but autistic) semiosis, is the compartmentalization of culture
from nature by the inappropriate importing of the presuppositions of idealistic
philosophy into the perspective opened by the sign. The perspective opened by the sign
is as removed from idealism as it is from realism in the requirements proper to its own
development. The study of sign action cannot properly be confined to the boundaries of
the artifactual nor measured by the paradigm of linguistic exchanges. If such study is
artificially so confined and measured, it is cut off from the context required ultimately
even for the intelligibility of the literary, as Johansen demonstrates in his "Prolegomena
to a semiotic theory of text interpretation" (1985).

If, while striving to be semiotic, a perspective takes for its object specifically literary
textuality as constituted terminatively, that is, as itself objectified and scrutinized as
known - much as if it were the "given" for semiotics comparable to the stones of the
geologist or the reptilian bones of paleontology - such a perspective has yet to achieve
the standpoint proper to the sign. The perspective proper to semiotics arises rather,
exactly as in Locke's anomalous conclusion (1690: 361-362), with the idea of the idea
as a nexus of relationships that carry the cognizant subject beyond itself and constitute
at the same time, on the basis of a cognitive map of the environment, an Umwelt, which
is strictly irreducible to the prejacent physical and species-specific for every life form,
including the human one. This human Umwelt or "Lebenswelt", as we have seen, in
contrast to the Umwelten of purely zoösemiotic life forms, has a unique texture through
which it is transformable into an asymptotic number of variant models, through the
unique moyen of language.

In the end, the idea of reality as the species-specific objective world is what gives
intelligibility and place to the activity of all criticism, whether it aims at developing one
side of the contrast between the environmentally given and the specifically constructed,
as in literary criticism, or at distinguishing the specifically constructed in order to
concentrate on the environmentally given, as in much scientific criticism. The
relationship of Innenwelt to Umwelt is such that we finally understand that what has
been called "fiction", for example, is not an imitation of something else so much as an
expression of a semiosis that makes of the something else just as easily an imitation of
what began as fiction (see Toews' analysis of contemporary historians in terms of
'William of Baskerville' in Williams and Pencak 1991). In this way, as Culler puts it
(1981: 38), "one of the effects of semiotics is to question the distinction between literary
and nonliterary discourse".

It is a question of remodeling the world - the objective world - but as this objective
world includes in its proper being something also of physical surroundings. The
question is not so much simply that "realism is in essence deeply mythic" (Con Davis
1985: 56) as that reality - the reality of human experience, wherein the line between
what is dependent upon and independent of interpretive activity can never be finally
drawn because that very line itself shifts with each new achievement of understanding -
is in essence thoroughly semiosic.

Literature, as the most presuppositioned and purely objective phase of anthroposemiosis

(able to deal directly with the object as nonexistent instead of having to discover its
nonexistence by chagrin, as sometimes happens in natural science or in history),
requires the most complete account of signification. While a literary "text itself need not
refer to any past experiences", nonetheless, "experience of objects, actions, or events,
similar to what is referred to in a given text, is a prerequisite to the understanding of it"
(Johansen 1985: 261-262; cf. King 1987).

G. A MODEL FOR DISCOURSE AS SEMIOSIS

That and how the universe of discourse - any discourse, including literary - is bound up
with the experience of the parties" to the discourse is what the literary scholar Dines
Johansen has shown in an essay expressly regarding the problem of situating literature
and literary criticism within the more general purview of semiosis as it is regarded in
the major tradition of contemporary semiotic development. We can usefully introduce
Johansen's model for anthroposemiosis (1982: 473, 1985:266), as including specifically
the literary The model is here editorially modified, mainly by enhancing by explicitly
labeling the identification of the ten axes defining the planes constitutive of "the
semiotic pyramid". Johansen's reasons for introducing this model are also our own
(1985: 265): on the one hand, it is intended as a heuristic device which should make it
possible to recognize the multiple relationships of each element; on the other hand, it
should further the inquiry into the nature of the signifying process by calling attention to
the interrelations between certain aspects of meaning production and interpretation, and,
of course, by provoking objections:

FIGURE 2. The Pyramid of Anthroposemiosis

     

1. Proposition Plane 2. Communication Plane

     

3. Convention Plane 4. Representation Plane

     

5. Proposition Plane 6. Communication Plane

     

7. Convention Plane 8. Representation Plane

     

9. Proposition Plane 10. Communication Plane

          FIGURE 3. The Planes of Semiosis within Discourse

For purposes of making explicit critical possibilities afforded by this model for
approaching explication of texts of whatever objective type, we might here fruitfully
redistribute the pyramid according to the ten interdependent triangular planes
comprising the model - six radiating from the sign-pole, four from the organismic poles
of interpreter and utterer - in order to underscore how presuppositioned and farthest
removed from autonomy ("the myth of intertextuality and intersemioticity", as we might
say) a literary semiotics is in the scheme of experience. In effect, Johansen's pyramid
can be made to serve as an interpretant for Bakhtin's remark (1975: 48) that the
language of a novel "is a system of intersecting planes" which, moreover, bind it to
common experiences underlying scientific texts as well (Figure 3).

If one enters seriously into Johansen's argument that the semiotics of texts, when
pursued integrally rather than according to faddish abstractions, involves one with all
these planes simultaneously (but according to emphases that, of course, can be varied
for the purposes of the analysis at hand), one also begins to see how a literary semiotics
might be constituted in the full scope of the possibilities afforded to it by the doctrine of
signs.

These possibilities are made visible precisely when the foundational inquiries of the
doctrine of signs are made commensurate with the full scope of semiosis, as a process
subtending the whole of nature so far as nature involves a development in time along
lines that transcend the physically established patterns of any given moment in the
cosmic evolution. As that framework makes itself visible in the diverse works
contributing more and more consciously to its edification, we see that the "place marked
out in advance" for semiotics and giving it "a right to existence", in Saussure's curious
expression (i.1906-1911: 33; cf. Russell 1982), is something that cannot be defined in a
way exclusive of any activity of interpretation but rather can be defined only inclusive
thereof.

To study the sign is to uncover semiosis, and therewith a web as vast as nature itself.
The arrangement, the web of renvoi sustaining the environmental and sensible elements
at each moment according to patterns that are not themselves sensible nor reducible to
what is sensible, constitutes the semiotic object in its full possibilities for understanding.

This is a "reality" quite different from that prejacent given in which the mind had no
part and to which the observer contributed hopefully nothing, conceived by the
medievals and sought by the moderns. Nor is it a reality wholly reducible to the mind's
own workings on the basis of a hidden outer realm and a hidden inner mechanism of
understanding linked only by the phenomena constituted by the mind itself, as Kant
concluded. Something much richer than either reduction, something more collusive
even than the rapport between fly trap and fly in the realm of insects and flowers, this
newer paradigm - in a phrase, semiotic reality - recognizes that the boundary between
what is dependent upon and what is independent of interpretive activity can never be
finally fixed from within experience because the boundary itself fluctuates in function
of the development of understanding, whether "speculative" or "practical", "scientific"
or "literary".
Like the human sciences themselves, "semiotics is not only a field of different
approaches to a unique object but also a field of sometimes conflicting philosophical
definitions of this unique object" (Eco 1979: 77). Furthermore (and in this it provides
the matrix for natural science as well), semiotics is the field studying the process
whereby any object is constituted in its full actuality as known: not simply as a process
in nature, but also as the prise de conscience whereby nature becomes fully aware of
itself and achieves its final totality in the transcendence over physical being. This
process of transcendence begins with the historical Umwelten and is fully realized in the
reflexivity of the Lebenswelt that makes of each text a prospective intertext
incorporating life and fiction and the whole of nature as well through a semiosis
metaphysically unlimitedand even physically, though limited, not wholly determinately
so. This situation has been personified by Floyd Merrell (1988: 260) in a creature far
more worthy of the talents of Disney artists than the pedestrian Roger Rabbit. Imagine a
filmic rendering of the Chimerical Octopus, constructed on the following plan:

Consider each sign possibility to be a point ... with an infinite set of lines connecting it
to all other points in the universe. .... Each signpoint is like a chimerical octopus whose
body is the point and whose tentacles are the infinite number of lines emanating from
that point ready to suck in one or more of all the other sign-points, which then become
its interpretant and hence another sign-point. (Actually, more in accord with Laplace
and God, each tentacle would have an eye at its extremity enabling it to 'see' all other
sign-points simultaneously.)

This entire conglomeration of lines, to be true to form, will have certain characteristics:
(a) the whole can be 'cut' at any point and reconnected along any one of its lines, like
Peirce's amorphous 'book of assertions' [1903: 4.512]; (b) at a given instant the
conglomerate is static (the synchronic dimension), but it holds the possibility for all
future connections (the diachronic dimension) - this instant is not the Saussurean slice
out of the semiological salami, it is the entire conglomerate given 'en bloc', holding all
past, present, and future possibilities; and (c) the conglomerate is self-contained,
twisting and doubling back on itself, like Einsteinian space-time (called the "block"
universe), or like an infinity of infinitely thin Möbius strips intersecting each other at
the point of their twist. However, (d) with respect to finite sign users, unlike point-
octopuses, all observations and relations must remain inside: there is no global vision,
for immanence rules - commensurate with quantum theory, which has demolished the
classical view of subject/object and observer/ observed. And (e) there can be no
complete description of the whole since, commensurate with Peirce's plastic 'book of
assertions', logical connections do not remain the same over time, and since, with our
own finite number of appendages and sensory organs, we can never process all signs in
an instant.

H. SUMMATION

Among the human sciences, semiotics is unique in being a study concerned with the
matrix of all the sciences, and in revealing the centrality of history to the enterprise of
understanding in its totality. The centrality of history to understanding is revealed
through the codes of culture that alone sustain, beyond the individual insight,
the commens (Peirce 1906: 196-197) or shared mentality that defines a language (such
as English), a discipline (such as physics or literary criticism), a subculture (such as the
Gays), a nation (such as Israel), and, ultimately, civilization itself in all its conflicting
strands of historically embedded interpretations giving structure to the everyday
experience of the conspecifics capable of language. We can thus say, in view of the
larger sense of language sketched by Maritain and insisted upon independently by
Bakhtin (1971: 214, as cited in Todorov 1981: 56): "in living speech, messages are,
strictly speaking, created for the first time in the process of transmission, and
ultimately" (that is, prejacent to, and independent of, the anthroposemiosis itself) "there
is no code" - even though, like sound waves on the side of nature, codes may play a
supporting role and even result from the message.

In this perspective, criticism can contribute in its own right to bringing into explicit
objectivity contributions of the understanding that have been left in a virtual state of
exercise rather than expressly signified and recognized. This would be criticism at its
best, criticism displaying the rich art of evaluating and analyzing with knowledge and
propriety the works of civilization, especially art, music, and literature, wherein the free
play of intellect and the full contrast of the objective to the biological and physical
orders come into pre-eminence. Such a criticism, far from being equated with semiotics,
would participate in the development of semiotics, a development drawing into its
network of renvoi the whole of past thought, present science, and future civilization.

In this way the critical exercise will also contribute to, and perhaps even establish
within semiotics, a formula more adequate to the full understanding of anthropos than
any that has been devised heretofore.

6 
Physiosemiosis and Phytosemiosis

We noted in chapter 3 that Peirce, by bringing the action along with the being of signs
into the focus of a thematic inquiry, took one of the decisive steps in establishing the
full possibilities for developing a doctrine of signs. This step marks the difference
between the contemporary development of semiotics and all earlier stages, historically
speaking, of a move toward semiotic consciousness. For, while the being proper to signs
exists actually only within the context of experience (in precisely the sense that
experience presupposes cognition), the action that underlies this possible being by no
means presupposes cognition.

How to understand the actions of signs outside the context of cognitive life? If this
could be achieved, the scope of semiotics as a possible science would become as wide
as could be, for it would be commensurate with an activity and type of causality
coextensive with the physical universe. Such a "broader conception" of the sign, as
Peirce called it, would embrace all four of the levels identified in this book, to wit, the
two levels of cognitive semiosis (anthroposemiosis and zoösemiosis), and two lower
levels of semiosis not dependent on cognition as such (phytosemiosis and
physiosemiosis), as appears in the following passage (Peirce c. 1907: 205-206):
The action of a sign generally takes place between two parties, the utterer and the
interpreter. They need not be persons; for a chameleon and many kinds of insects and
even plants make their living by uttering signs, and lying signs, at that. Who is the
utterer of signs of the weather ... ? However, every sign certainly conveys something of
the general nature of thought, if not from a mind, yet from some repository of ideas, or
significant forms, and if not to a person, yet to something capable of somehow 'catching
on', . . . that is, of receiving not merely a physical, nor even merely a psychical dose of
energy, but a significant meaning. In that modified, and as yet very misty, sense, then,
we may continue to use the italicized words.

Peirce's remark (1905-1906: 5.448n) that "this universe is perfused with signs, if it is
not composed exclusively of signs" may be regarded as a kind of capsule summary of
this broader conception, and his much earlier enigmatic assertion (1868: 5.314) that
"man is a sign" would be a kind of corollary.

But can this broader conception be justified? Is it warranted by the nature of semiosis?
Clearly, the very attempt at such justification would require going beyond the bounds
conventionally established for scientific thought, which we may say had already by
Peirce's day more or less dogmatically embraced the view of nature as engaged
exclusively in chance interactions of a brute force character.

Conventional boundaries as such, of course, had no interest for Peirce when the inquiry
demanded their violation, and such seemed the case with the problem at hand. To
Peirce, the fact that a sign always signifies something to or for another suggested the
need to reconsider the taboo notion of final causality, or so-called teleology.31

At least in the context of the biological sciences, such a move was to some degree
inevitable. Later biologists (for example, Simpson, Pittendrigh, and Tiffany 1957;
Pittendrigh 1958; Mayr 1974, 1983) would prefer to speak of "teleonomy", to make the
point that actual purpose in the individual sense is not necessary to account for the
behavior (such as the rhythmic climbing of the female turtle onto the sand and laying its
eggs) that the observer must ascribe to plan in nature in order to make scientific sense of
the observations (a point also made by von Uexküll).

But, in the larger physical universe of atoms, stars, and intergalactic dust, even such a
moderate version of teleology is extremely difficult to sustain as pertaining to the
particles and interactions themselves, especially those of a more random sort such as
meteor showers, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the dispersion of light, etc. True,
there is the fact of stellar evolution and planetary formation, in relation to which the
formation of the elements out of more primitive atomic materials and the distribution of
matter seems to be law-governed in statistically determinable ways rather than random.
This non-randomness led thinkers such as Henderson (1913: 305) to argue with
considerable persuasiveness and empirical support that "physical science . . . no less
than biological science appears to manifest teleology". But the "teleology" here, if such
it can be called, appears to be entirely external to the interactions themselves.

The problem is that, before the advent of living matter and continuing in the inorganic
environmental factors taken in their own right, the inorganic components themselves
(no matter how much they may be modified and dominated by vital processes and
organic symbioses in a gaia situation, the situation of a living planet), seem
overwhelmingly to enter the process of cosmic evolution only indirectly, through the
direct process of random or chance interactions. Once these have occurred, the
inorganic components are inevitably redirected by the nature of the particles or bodies
interacting and result, through this redirection, in processes of complexification and
cosmic development overall. The consequent development overall, however, does not
disguise the fact of the random foundation. This undeniable substructure of chance
encounters in a realm of brute secondness seems to pose a barrier to any possible
extension of semiosis beyond the boundaries of the living world.

Nonetheless, by linking the action of signs to future-oriented changes in the world of

nature, Peirce had clearly pointed the way to what Sebeok called attention to in the early
1960s as "a vision of new and startling dimensions: the convergence of the science of
genetics with the science of linguistics ... in the larger field of communication studies".
In this view (Sebeok 1968: 69):

the genetic code must be regarded as the most fundamental of all semiotic networks and
therefore as the prototype for all other signaling systems used by animals, including
man. From this point of view, molecules that are quantum systems, acting as stable
physical information carriers, zoösemiotic systems, and, finally, cultural systems,
comprehending language, constitute a natural sequel of stages of ever more complex
energy levels in a single universal evolution. It is possible, therefore, to describe
language as well as living systems from a unified cybernetic standpoint ... A mutual
appreciation of genetics, animal communication studies, and linguistics may lead to a
full understanding of the dynamics of semiosis, and this may, in the last analysis, turn
out to be no less than the definition of life.

This indeed is a grand vision. It falls, however, considerably short of the broader
conception Peirce had in mind in linking the sign to final causality.32 At the same time,
it is probably as far as a conception of semiosis can effectively be made to reach on the
basis of linking the causality proper to signs with any defensible notion of final
causality.33 The linkage, quite apart from the question of its correctness, is insufficient
to establish the range of the connection required for semiosis to pervade nature all the
way to its cosmic foundations. Thus, while the "new and startling vision" of Sebeok
considerably propelled contemporary semiotics beyond the boundaries of a
glottocentrically conceived anthroposemiosis and in the direction of considering sign
processes as at work throughout the biological world, it still provided no ground for a
notion of physiosemiosis, for seeing the action proper to signs as already at work in
physical nature itself beyond the bounds of organic matter or prior to its advent.

To provide this further ground and to establish the Peircean broader conception of
semiotics, therefore, would be the same thing. This other decisive step, taken together
with the Peircean one of bringing the action along with the being of signs into thematic
focus, is what is required to establish the full possibilities for a doctrine of signs.

This step depends on the further discovery that there is a more general causality at work
in the sign than the final causality typical of the vital powers. This more general
causality specifies vital activity but specifies also the causality at work in chance
interactions of brute secondness. It is this causality, not final causality, that is the
causality proper to the sign in its distinctive function of making present what it itself is
not, for it is this causality, not final causality, that transforms, for example, accidental
scratches into a clue leading the detective to the apprehension of the murderer.

The causality distinctive of semiosis, in its contrast with physical modes of causality,
need not be goal-oriented in any intrinsic sense. On the contrary, it needs to be a
causality equally able to ground sign-behavior in chance occurrences and planned
happenings. On any construction, final causality cannot do this.

The decisive step in this regard was taken fully neither by Poinsot nor by Peirce. It can
be taken from what is set forth in Poinsot's Treatise on Signs (1632a: Book I, Question
4, and Appendix C)34 but only once the problematic of the sign as a whole has been
redefined so as to make the action of signs equiprimordial with their being. Thus, taking
the decisive step requires first that we straddle the work of both thinkers, even though
the step to be taken is more immanent to what Peirce had in mind for semiotic than it is
to anything Poinsot explicitly envisioned for the doctrine of signs. Here, where each of
them in steps taken separately had come up short, in a doctrinal convergence between
them, lies the basis for the decisive final step of extending semiotic understanding
beyond the sphere of cognitive phenomena to the whole of nature itself. With this step,
the broader conception Peirce dreamed of becomes realized.

To see how the dream becomes real, let us begin at the point where Peirce was tempted
to despair of his broader conception. Then, by expanding outward from this point,
removing step by step each of the reasons for a temptation to settle for a more restricted
notion of the sign, we will be able to end up with a warranted version of the broader
conception and of all four of the levels it implies.

Before there are actually signs, there are signs virtually, that is, there are beings and
events so determined by other beings and events that, in their own activity as so
determined, they determine yet further series of beings and events in such a way that the
last terms in the series represent the first terms by the mediation of the middle terms. As
Craik put it (1967:59), "It is only the sensitive 'receptors' on matter, and means of
intercommunication ... which are lacking".

The actions and relations in such a series are actually at the level of secondness. But,
even at that level, they anticipate the intervention of cognition and experience: they so
stand to one another in relations of determining and being determined that they
constitute a pattern of knowability, a virtual thirdness, which, should it come to be
actually known in some context of experience, will exhibit precisely that element of
thirdness, that irreducible elemental type of representation, constitutive of the sign
relation.

The years 1908 and 1909, in this respect, seem to have been a period of crisis and some
despondency for Peirce in his project of establishing semiotic. In 1908, in a letter to
Lady Welby, he tossed in despair his famous "sop to Cerberus", introducing the notion
of "person" into his definition of sign (1908a: 88-89):

I define a sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its object,
and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant, that the
latter is thereby mediated by the former. My insertion of the term 'upon a person' is a
sop to Cerberus, because I despair of making my own broader conception understood.
If, as is to be expected, the term "person" here is equivalent to "human being", then the
term "sign" so qualified would be restricted to the region of anthroposemiosis. In order
to reach Peirce's "broader conception", therefore, it is necessary to remove this
qualification and consequent restriction, which we may do with the following abstract
formula: a sign will be any A so determined by a B that in determining C that C is
mediately determined by B. Thus, B determines A, and, precisely in the respect in
which B has determined it, A determines C. Therefore C, in being immediately
determined by A, is at the same time mediately determined by B. We see here the most
primitive and abstract form of the semiotic triangle that is behind the "pyramid of
anthroposemiosis" looked at in the last chapter.

 
FIGURE 4. Abstract Version of the Semiotic Triangle

In other words, C is passive to A in just the way that A is passive to B; but, precisely by
reason of being passive in this way, C is virtually active respecting both A and B as a
representation or representative element. Let B be rain and A the clouds whence the rain
precipitates, and C be the experience of an organism caught in the rain. The effect of
being caught in the rain will establish for the organism a new relation to B whereby A
will henceforward exist for C as a sign of B, thus:

FIGURE 5. Concretization of the Triangle within Animal Experience

Or let A be the bone of a dinosaur buried in what we saw in chapter 4 would become a
garden, and let B be the dinosaur long dead. C in this case would not be the effect of the
bone on the gardener, for that, as we saw in concluding Chapter 4, did not result in any
actualization of the transcendental relation - the representative element - of the bone to
the dinosaur. The effect of the bone on the gardener did not make of this relation a sign.
Nonetheless, the element representative in this respect was there, identical with the
bone, but needing to be actualized. It was there, of a piece with the bone in physical
being, but virtually distinct therefrom. When the paleontologist came along, however,
this virtuality was actualized. The perceptual effect of the bone on the paleontologist,
but not on the gardener, triggered the virtual element whereby the bone actually
represents the dinosaur. Hence Poinsot's formula (1632a: 126/3-5): "It suffices to be a
sign virtually in order to signify in act".

FIGURE 6. Concretization of the Triangle within Human Experience

Thus, again, let B be the dinosaur, A the bone, and C a geological formation in which
the bone has been turned to stone.

FIGURE 7. Concretization of the Triangle within the Environment

In this case the interpretant is a physical rather than a psychical structure but one that
has been so determined by A as to represent through A also B. In this way the
interaction is a virtual semiosis, that is, a series of interactions at the level of secondness
that, at the same time, provides an actual pathway through time whereby it is possible
that what happened long ago might be partially understood. The present, indeed, from
such a standpoint, might be regarded as a mosaic of traces from the past, each providing
the starting point, for a sufficiently knowledgeable present observer, of a journey into
what used to be. Notice that it is not necessary that such possibility be actualized in
order for it to be possible. Nor is it merely "possible" in some abstract, conceptual
sense. Our example, for example, exists in the geological formation virtually. The bone
(A), or the rock formation that used to be a bone (C), is "not a sign formally but
virtually and fundamentally", as Poinsot puts it (1632a: 12-18):

For since the rationale of moving or stimulating the mind remains, which comes about
through the sign insofar as it is something representative even if the relation of
substitution for the signified does not remain, the sign is able to exercise the functions
of substituting without the relation.

We see, thus, at once: how the interpretant is fundamental to the semiosis, that the
interpretant need not be a psychological state or idea, and why the interpretant is itself a
sign or link in what Eco calls the chain of "unlimited semiosis".
Since it is through its fundament that the sign is a representation, and it is through this
being of representation that the sign is involved in the brute force interactions of
secondness and physical existence, it follows that the virtuality of signs is present and
operative throughout the realm of nature, and not just among the animals where signs
exist and function in their proper being actually as well as virtually.35

Moreover, this virtual semiosis prior to any cognitive life is not restricted to passive
reflections in present being of past interactions, such as we have considered so far.
Virtual semiosis is also at work in the ways that present interactions anticipate future
conditions radically different from what presently obtains. In other words, present
effects are virtual signs not just retrospectively, but prospectively as well. They portend,
and do so in two ways. First of all, in any given interaction of bodies, over and above
the resultant relations of cause and effect (acting and being acted upon), there is the fact
that each of the bodies involved interprets and twists the action according to its own
intrinsic nature. In this way, as Powell puts it (1986: 300), "the extrinsic specification of
causal relations always reveals indirectly the intrinsic species of the bodies which are
their extrinsic specifying causes". For example, if I strike the armor of a tank, a
porcelain bowl, or the trunk of a tree with a hammer, the relation of agent to patient is in
all three cases the same; or, as Powell again puts it (ibid.), "spatiotemporal/real causal
relational systems do not have determinate intrinsic species as bodies do". However,
owing to the intrinsically diverse properties of steel, porcelain, and wood pulp, the
effect will be likewise diversified in each case.

Thus, dyadic interactions, as extrinsically specified by the bodies involved at the level
of secondness, also project a virtual level of thirdness that anticipates changes in future
states respecting the interactions occurring here and now. And the measure of these
interactions occurs through precisely the same type of causality operative in the sign,
whereby it achieves indifference to the being and non-being, presently considered, of
what is signified.36

Here, however, in the direction of future states, the virtuality of the semiosis is more
complicated. The reason is that the direct deflection of the results of the interactions
itself can lead to changes in the immediate constitution of what does the interacting - as,
for example, when one of the interactants is destroyed by the interaction, or when the
interaction triggers a new phase in the development of one of the interactants, or when a
specifically new type of being (such as a new atomic elementary formation) results from
the interaction. Here, Peirce's idea of scientific laws existing as habits in nature as a
whole would seem to find, as it were, a semiotic grounding. For, over and above the
individual interactions of bodies, there is a macroformation of the universe that takes
place directionally, as it were, toward the establishment of conditions under which
virtual semioses move always closer to actuality.

Out of cosmic dust, stellar systems form through subatomic, atomic, and molecular
interactions. At various stages of the process, new elements not previously given
precipitate from the interactions, even as now on earth we can in laboratories bring into
being a few elements not yet existent in nature itself. These elements, in turn, provide
essential to the formation in planetary systems of the conditions under which living
beings become possible, and theses beings, in turn, further modify the planetary
conditions so that successive generations of living beings are incompatible with the
original conditions of life. Oxygen, essential for life on this planet now, for example,
was originally introduced as a waste product of living beings who neither needed nor
could survive within a heavily oxygenated atmosphere.

Through this entire series of intersecting and often conflicting processes resulting in
cosmic evolution over-all, the specificity and identity of any given process at each step
is guaranteed not by individual bodies but by systems of commonly specified real
relations between bodies, that is, by specifically identifiable categorially determined
systems of ontological relations. Within these systems individual bodies further
determine their immediate interactions according to their own intrinsic natures. In the
case of organisms this determination in turn depends on a whole sub-system of
interactions indisputably semiotic in nature, as Sebeok has pointed out (1977a, 1988,
1989a). The relational systems as a whole and the interactions within them form
throughout a single web of at least virtual semiosis, governed at each point by the
objective causality of the sign virtually at work throughout. This causality corresponds
to the plan in von Uexküll's distinction (1934: 42-46) between goal and plan in nature
and is, as Powell points out (1988a: 180, 186), "prior to the well-known Aristotelian
four causes, the agent, the final, the formal, and the material cause":

It is precisely the function of extrinsic formal causality to displace the agent and final
causes by a more elementary cause which is not committed to explaining how
interaction could be understood. Thus the solar system is explained as a mechanism
specified by extrinsic formal causes without needing any explanation by agent causes
(let alone by final causes which have not been recognized by science since the
seventeenth century). For Einstein's general theory of relativity precisely eliminated
gravitational forces from explanation of the solar system, by substituting the curvature
of space time for gravitational forces (Hawking 1988: 29-30). Now gravitational forces
are agent causes, whereas the curved space-time that governs the path of the earth
around the sun is an excellent example of extrinsic formal causality . . . because that
path consists of specified temporal relations between the earth and the other bodies of
the solar system . . . plain cases of extrinsic formal causality.

Thus, Peirce's discouragement at establishing his broadest conception of semiosis

proves unnecessary,37 once it is understood that the specification of categorial relations
in the universe at large already puts into play the causality upon which the action of
signs depends: already at the level of their fundaments, signs are virtually present and
operative in the dyadic interactions of brute force, weaving together in a single fabric of
virtual relations the future and the past of such interactions.

This is semiosis, but semiosis of a specific kind. I propose that we call it

physiosemiosis, so as to bring out by the very name the fact that it is a question here of
a process as broad as the physical universe itself. For this process is at work in all parts
of it as the foundation of those higher, more distinctive levels of the same process that
come into existence as the conditions of physical being themselves make possible the
successively higher levels first of life, and then of cognitive life. Thus, the definition of
semiosis is not just coextensive with the definition of life but broader than it.

Nonetheless, the transformation of physiosemiosis within specifically living

interactions, even prior to any question of cognition as such, is dramatic, and requires a
specifically identifying label. For physiosemiosis simply links the intelligibility of past
and future, while looking to the future beyond interacting individuals only
accidentally,38 whereas the semiosis virtual to living matter is essentially oriented at
once to the preservation as well as the propagation of the units interacting, and is
thereby essentially future-oriented.39

It is probable that orientation to the future is operative in semiosis from the first.
Certainly this is true if Henderson's unorthodox early view (1913: 305) that "physical
science . . . no less than biological science appears to manifest teleology" ultimately
proves correct.40 Nonetheless, the above distinction between physiosemiosis, which
depends on chance events for achieving its future orientation, and the semiosis of living
matter, which essentially turns chance events toward the future, suggests the boundary
line between physiosemiosis and phytosemiosis, the "semiotics of plant life", as
Krampen calls it, or of living matter in general.

Krampen, basing his view on the work of J. von Uexküll, uses a contrastive "method of
opposition" to show how the meaning-factors work in an environment which lacks the
Umwelt-structure introduced by cognitive interactions (cf. T. von Uexküll 1982: 5-6).
"Using the example of the leaves of an oak tree", Krampen remarks (1981: 195), "Jakob
von Uexküll shows how phytosemiosis functions":

One of the meaning factors, as far as oak leaves are concerned, is the rain. Falling
raindrops follow precise physical laws governing the behavior of liquids upon striking a
leaf. In this case, according to Jakob von Uexküll, the leaf is the 'receiver of m', coupled
with the m factor 'rain' by a 'meaning rule'. The form of the leaves is such that it
accommodates the physical laws governing the behavior of liquids. The leaves work
together by forming cascades in all directions in order to distribute the rain water on the
ground for optimal use by the roots. To put it in more common semiotic terminology,
the leaf's form is the signifier and the physical behavior of the raindrop is the signified.
The code coupling leaf and raindrop is the oak tree's need of liquid for the transport of
nourishing salts into its cells. Of course, from the point of view of present planetary
conditions, plants have played and continue to play, especially in the great rainforests, a
crucial evolutionary role, one that began with bringing about an oxidizing atmosphere
(about a billion years ago), then sustained ever afterward the basic matrix required for
the development and continuance of all higher forms of animal life. Perhaps by reason
of his reliance on von Uexküll,41 perhaps for reasons of his own, Krampen considers
this situation only synchronically, in terms of its end-development, as follows (1981:
197):

There is one fundamental rule of correspondence between humans and animals on the
one hand and plants on the other, this being of critical importance for life: Plants
produce the oxygen all humans and animals breathe. In other words, the life of plants
corresponds as a counterpoint to the breathing lungs of humans and animals as a point.

But, of course, there is considerably more to be considered here than a merely external
correspondence and exploitive dependency. Here again we reach one of those points
where the semiotic point of view exceeds the bounds of glottocentrism and in this sense
manifests its affinity more with the ontological veins of ancient and medieval thought
than with the nominalistic strains of renaissance and modern philosophy. Consider the
following text, which is singularly uncharacteristic of the mainstream of modern
philosophy as it waxes increasingly glottocentric in contemporary times. (I choose this
text in part for its fortuitous extension of the phytosemiotic image of the oak tree cited
above from Krampen on the basis of von Uexküll's work.) The text is from a turn-of-
the-century philosopher, Jules Lachelier (1933: XVIII-XIX):

It seems to me, when I am at Fontainebleau, that I sympathize in all my energies with

the powerful vitality of the trees which surround me. I am too encrusted in my own
form to be able to reproduce their form; yet, on well considering the matter, it does not
seem unreasonable to hold that all forms of being sleep more or less deeply buried in the
ground of each being. Under the sharp contours of my human form any careful observer
could see the vaguer contours of 'animality', which veils in turn the even more fluid and
incomplete form of simple organic life. Now one of the possible determinations of
organic life is tree, which engenders in turn the oak tree. So the "being of an oak tree" is
somewhere hidden in the foundations of my being, and may even strive sometimes to
emerge and appear in its turn dias in luminis oras [in the upper world of light] - but
humanity, which has gotten ahead of it, prevents it from doing so and blocks its way.42

This text strikes us in our cultural milieu as something idiosyncratic or even bizarre. Yet
in truth it is no more than a faithful echo of the older traditions of the Western
philosophical mainstream. We need only recall the reflections in this area common to
Greek and Latin thought, before the unique development of modern philosophy
effectively shifted concern away from natural being to the universe of human discourse
in such ways as effectively to close the range of philosophy within the conventionalized
realms of human culture.

According to this older, broader mainstream, the life of the plant exists within the
animal itself precisely as base and part of its proper life. That is to say, there is a
common life principle that is the first principle of all planetary life as such. I quote from
a typical medieval commentary (Aquinas, c.1266-1272) on Aristotle's original
conception (c.330BC) of "psychology" as the science of living things:

Aristotle defines the primary principle of life, which is called the vegetative psyche or
soul; in plants this is the entire soul, while in animals it is only a part of the soul .... To
understand his definition, it must be seen that there is a definite order among the three
operations of the plant soul. For its first activity is taking food, through which the living
thing preserves its existence. The second and more perfect activity is growth, by which
the living thing develops both in size and vital energy. But the third, most perfect, and
fulfilling activity is reproduction, through which something already as it were existing
perfected in its own right, transmits to another being and perfection. For, as Aristotle
observes in Book IV of his Meteorology (c. 1, 4-18), anything achieves its greatest
perfection when it is able to make another such as it itself is. Since therefore things are
appropriately defined and named by their outcome, whereas the fulfillment of the
activity of plant life is the generation of another living being, it follows that it will be a
proper definition of the first principle of life, that is to say, of the plant soul, if we define
it as what is generative of another like itself on the plan of being alive.43

This ancient way of conceptualizing the nature and essence of life in general, and of
plant life in particular, coincides fairly squarely, in contemporary terms, with our
understanding of the genetic code. Such a conceptualization places a wholly unexpected
back-drop of tradition behind Dr. Sebeok's bold claim that, if indeed the genetic code is
a semiotic system (such that genetics and linguistics, as codes, subtend the upper and
lower reaches of semiosis), then indeed in the full perspective of Western philosophical
tradition "a full understanding of the dynamics of semiosis" would, in the last analysis,
"turn out to be no less than the definition of life".

At the same time, as our above remarks have suggested, the full understanding of the
dynamics of semiosis also turn out to include yet more extension than the definition of
life. For phytosemiosis in turn needs to be seen as an extension and specification at a
new level of the more general process and processes of physiosemiosis, upon which
plants too depend.

In this perspective it becomes also clear that the proposal of Krampen (1981: 187)

to establish phytosemiotics, i.e., the semiotics of plants, as an area of inquiry into sign
processes, parallel and on an equal footing with anthroposemiotics, the study of human
communication, and zoösemiotics, the study of sign processes occurring within and
between species of animals, the three areas forming together the discipline of
biosemiotics
is a reasonable ramification of the "vision of new and startling dimensions" to which
Sebeok pointed in the early 1960s. From the point of view of the analogy between
linguistics and genetics, and within the dialectic of concepts set up thereby, the
establishment of phytosemiotics alongside anthroposemiotics and zoösemiotics
completes a tryptic. Within this analogy, phytosemiotics has already a right to existence,
its place marked out in advance. What is surprising, perhaps, is less Krampen's proposal
than the fact that twenty years elapsed between Sebeok's statement on the dimensions of
semiotics and the concrete advancement of such a proposal. Far from being the aberrant
proposal it seemed when viewed from a standpoint of more or less explicit
glottocentrism, it appears in an integrally semiotic perspective as an important and
daring step in the dialectical maturation of the doctrine of signs.

This is not to say that the notion is without difficulties or that its final status vis-à-vis
anthroposemiosis and zoösemiosis is assured. In fact, even in Krampen's original
proposal, two quite distinct possibilities for the definition of phytosemiotics are
outlined. The first and explicit scheme is for a relatively autonomous area of inquiry,
"on an equal footing with anthroposemiotics and zoösemiotics", as Krampen puts it,
using opposition as "the method by which the specificity of plant semiosis can be
shown" (p. 192). By the use of this method, Krampen is able to show, as the ancient
philosophers also argued, that (p. 203) "many life processes within the animal and
human organisms function according to the principle of the vegetative world, i.e.,
according to the principle of phytosemiotics", although of course "the phytosemiotic
level is contained within the zoösemiotic one at a new level of complexity" (T. von
Uexküll 1982: 5-6).

Rich as are the results of this method in Krampen's hands, I am not convinced that they
succeed in establishing phytosemiotics on an equal footing. Or, to put it another way, I
am not convinced that the communication among plants and between plants and the
physical environment and the communication between plants and animals is, on the side
of the plants themselves, fully an actual process of semiosis, such as it certainly is on
the side of the animals.

My hesitations here are an extension of the distinction, as we have drawn it above,

between virtual and actual semiosis. This extension can be couched in the form of a
distinction between communication, which is virtually semiotic, and actual signification
proper. The two have in common the nature of being thoroughly relational states of
affairs - in addition to which all conscious communication, whether self-reflective or
not, within or between organisms, is by means of signification. But, although it is true
that all relational phenomena are communicative, it is not conversely true that all
communicative events adequately realize, even when they virtually contain, the triadic
character required for an action fully semiosic. All relation involves signification
potentially, but this becomes actual only through the intervention of cognition.

With these distinctions in mind, the situation of semiosis in the context of

communication phenomena (relations) can be outlined thus:

FIGURE 8. Semiosic Activity and Relational Phenomena

In this scheme, the dynamics of semiosis in the strict and full, or overt, sense are co-
extensive with the dynamics of cognitive life rather than with the dynamics of life itself.
My original objection (1978a) to Sebeok's proposal that the genetic code is already a
semiotic network was based on this consideration.44

At the same time, the genetic code is unquestionably a communication network and a
communication network whereby the present shapes the future, both in its being and in
its virtual knowability. Through the genetic code the limitless possibilities of organic
life are opened up, just as through the linguistic code the infinity of cognitive life is
rendered possible in anthroposemiosis - which is, after all, "le coeur de l'analogie", as
Sebeok pointed out.45

Although there are hierarchical distinctions to be made in the levels of semiosis as well
as circular feed-back laces between the levels, the picture that now emerges shows the
problem to be mainly one of according proper emphases. First of all, the quasi-
presemiosic (the "merely virtually semiotic") character of plant life, or still more of the
processes of formation of star and planetary systems in the first place, needs to be given
due weight. Second, what needs to be given due weight is the remarkable ordering
whereby semiosis (thanks to the inorganic processes of planetary formation and the
organic processes of vegetable life), which is virtually present and operative throughout,
first becomes sustained actually in its proper possibilities, then grows both in size and
vitality, and finally transforms into itself (at least by tendency and right of domination)
all that preceded and once lay outside its actualized sphere. As Henderson remarked
(1913: 312):

The properties of matter and the course of cosmic evolution are now seen to be
intimately related to the structure of the living being and its activities; they become,
therefore, far more important in biology than has been previously suspected. For the
whole evolutionary process, both cosmic and organic, is one, and the biologist may now
rightly regard the universe in its very essence as biocentric.
Some recent speculations in physics (for example, Wheeler 1984) seem to bear out this
point.

In any event, if it is true that "things are appropriately defined and named by their
outcome", the semiotist is entitled to regard the universe in its very essence as
'semiocentric'. The "new and startling vision" of the sixties, which at first seemed too
grand, proves, after all, not grand enough.

The post-modern era that semiotics introduces is no longer ontocentric as were classical
and Latin times, neither anthropocentric as the renaissance nor glottocentric as the
moderns, but semiocentric. Hence we can complete and complement the once-famous
maxim of Aristotle, "anima est quoddammodo omnia" ("the soul in a certain way is all
things"), by adding: "in a certain way, all things are semiotic" ("omnia sunt
quodammodo semiotica"). That is, in a certain way (quodammodo), because of semiosis
at work throughout the whole of nature transcendentally and virtually, inasmuch as
physical nature sustains itself through interactions which also determine the possibilities
of what is there to be known on the environmental side or in the physical dimension of
objects within experience, as well as ontologically and integrally within experience
itself as sustaining the network of objects as such (the Umwelt) in the first place.

Not only can anything signify through cognition, and not only through cognition can
anything fully signify, but, also phenomena not in themselves actually semiotic are
nonetheless entangled in semiosic virtualities. Such is the situation that has to be
accounted for. We have to take account not only of the fact that all things become
semiotic once an awareness of them, however partial, is acquired, but also of the fact
that all things in the process of becoming objectified work as if to have a say in the
semioticity of their objectification. They not only respond to the web they are caught in,
they also make the web respond to what it has caught.

Semiosis is above all an assimilative interactive process, especially as manifested in a

form of life, but not only there. Semiosis is the process whereby phenomena originating
anywhere in the universe signify virtually in their present being also their past and their
future and begin the further process of realizing these virtualities especially when life
intervenes and, within life, when cognition supervenes. The process does not begin with
the cognition, it merely enters a further phase, a new magnitude of thirdness.

Let me comment, finally, on the second of the two possibilities for the definition of
phytosemiotics I see outlined in Krampen's work, namely, the study of plants from the
point of view of their symbiosis with animals. From this point of view, phytosemiotics
would be defined as the study of the peculiar dependencies of animal upon plant life and
of the benefits to human life in particular that could be derived from such a study. The
method of opposition used by Krampen would necessarily form a substantial part and
lay the foundations for this study. "This semiotic analysis", Krampen remarks (1981:
192), "may well form the positive scientific basis lacking so far in the conservationist
activities that have, until now, largely been based on negation and ideology." And yet,
viewed in this way, phytosemiotics would be, to borrow an older terminology, a study
subalternate to rather than on an equal footing with zoösemiotics and anthroposemiotics.

Since this definition is in my opinion unquestionably valid in establishing

phytosemiotics as an important and new semiotic perspective or field of inquiry and
since, furthermore, it includes the methods and results of the alternative definition, I
might summarize by saying that from Krampen's work I am convinced of
phytosemiotics, but not of its equal footing with zoösemiotics or still less with
anthroposemiotics. There seems to me a basic sense in which semiosis is hierarchical, a
series of irreducible levels or zones that are integrally actualized only in the final layer
that folds back, as it were, and assimilates the previous levels into itself so as to give
them their final being as semiosic.46 In either event, from the point of view of an
anthroposemiosis that has become transparent to itself and grounded in principle, it
remains that "the vegetative world is nevertheless structured according to a base
semiotics which cuts across all living beings, plants, animals, and humans alike"
(Krampen 1981: 203).

With the notion of phytosemiotics, then, Krampen has outlined a new area important
even to the future of semiotic development (Krampen 1981: 208):

Despite the impression of progress raised by the constant introduction of new and
sophisticated tools between human effectors or receptors and the human Umwelt, the
human organism cannot escape the basic vegetative rules of endosemiotics and remains
locked together with plants by a mutual rule of correspondence: If men cease to care for
plants, i.e., cease to understand their meaning factors and the meaning rules at the basis
of their formation rules, they will asphyxiate themselves. As Thure von Uexküll has put
it: 'Man is led, from his extravagant position as the observer positioned outside nature
and as its unscrupulous exploiter, back into nature, in which he must arrange himself for
better or worse.' Phytosemiotics can help to improve this arrangement.
At the same time, phytosemiotics marks not the final step but only a penultimate one in
reaching the outlines of the full extent possible for the doctrine of signs.

We have now seen that the Peircean idea of extending semiotic understanding beyond
the sphere of cognitive phenomena to the whole of nature itself, as a network virtually
semiosic in character, had already been grounded in Poinsot's original treatise on
semiotic foundations. We have likewise seen that the development of the doctrine of
signs, drawing on contemporary experience and standing as well on the shoulders of the
giants who contributed to the establishment of its foundations, reveals that, as Peirce
alleged, the universe is indeed perfused and virtually made up entirely of signs, among
which "man" is one.
To sum up the relation between the signs of the universe and the human being as sign, I
propose this formula: "man" is an interpretant whose ideas are signs, having the
universe in its totality as their object.

7 
RETROSPECT: 
HISTORY AND THEORY 
IN SEMIOTICS

A. THEORY OF SEMIOTICS

The object or subject matter of semiotic inquiry is not just signs but the action of signs
or semiosis. This action, we now see, occurs at a number of levels that can be
distinguished or identified as specific spheres or zones of sign activity.

Semiotics, therefore, contrasts with semiosis as knowledge contrasts with that which is
known. Semiotics is knowledge about semiosis; it is the theoretical accounting for signs
and what they do.

This is actually an important distinction, because, if we are right in what we have said
about the extent of semiosis, the history of semiosis and the history of the universe, at
least insofar as the universe inclines toward a species of our linguistic type as part of
itself, are the same thing. But the history of semiotics, by contrast, is quite another
matter and, while complicated, is considerably more manageable. It will be the story of
the attempts, more or less fitful, to take account of that which underlies semiosis and
makes it possible, namely, the sign. What is a sign such that it makes possible semiosis?

This is the foundational question of semiotic inquiry, the basic question, to which we
have essayed an answer in chapter 4, and for which the preceding and following
chapters may be regarded as supporting amplifications. Beyond the scope of this book,
however, over and above this question, there is the investigation of the role of signs in
particular spheres, such as architecture, the fine arts, literature, the codes of dress, legal
codes, heraldry, prognostics or symptomatology in medicine, linguistics, historiography,
geography, geology, ecosystems, astronomy, chemistry, physics, etc.

But these specialized inquiries into signs of this or that type, the actions of signs in
creating and molding this or that objective sphere of experience, oddly enough, have
heretofore been normally pursued apart from any thematic consciousness of what a sign
is in its distinctive objectivity, of what is distinctive about the objectivity of the sign.

Semiotics thus is the attempt to account theoretically for what is distinctive about the
sign, both in its being and in the temporally coterminous action that follows upon that
being, according to the ancient saying that "as a being is, so does it act" (agere sequitur
esse). To the extent that such a reflexive attempt comes to permeate specialized
investigations about signs, the reflection imparts to those investigations - no matter how
well established and "traditional" - its own thematic unity and assimilates them to the
field of investigations properly called "semiotic". Thus, "the field of investigations
properly called semiotic" includes by right all the traditional disciplines in virtue of their
dependency in what they are as typically distinct structures of signification upon a
network of sign relations constituting them; but in fact the field includes those
disciplines only at the moment when and to the extent that, besides being seen to be
structures of signification, they are looked at and analyzed thematically in terms of this
virtually semiotic constitution. The field of investigations virtually semiotic is
coextensive with the field of all investigations, but the actual field of semiotic
investigations properly so-called is much smaller at any given moment. It exists as a
demand of the future on present thought, in the form, like knowledge itself, of a task
being completed rather than of a task done. It finds itself at every moment, to borrow a
description from Peirce (1868: 5.316), "dependent on the future thought of the
community".

In this way, the history and the theory of semiotics intertwine and grow together. But
there is also a certain reflective moment, or series of moments, more or less critical,
anterior to which semiotics properly speaking, in its contrast with semiosis, does not
exist or exists in a very febrile condition.

The history of semiotics in this manner is always twofold. It is first of all a gathering
together and identification of those moments of self-consciousness about the sign when
signs are not only used but recognized in their contrast with what they are used for. That
is to say, semiotics must first, in order to achieve its history, identify and hierarchize
those moments where the sign comes to be recognized for the role it plays in its own
right and not just deployed quasi-invisibly in dealings with objects.

Then, retrenching the thematic consciousness thus attained, semiotics as a moment of

consciousness expands outward over the whole realm of knowledge and belief to elicit
from within each of the disciplines objectively constituted an actual awareness, more or
less reluctant, of the semioses and semiotic processes virtually present within them by
their very nature as finite knowledge.

In this way, the traditionally established disciplines become themselves transformed

semiotically, by being brought to a higher level of self-consciousness and, at the same
time, a lower level of isolation within the community of inquirers. This is what is meant
by the inherent interdisciplinarity of semiotics, and how semiotics tends to function as
an antidote for overspecialization, by imposing an objective awareness of the common
processes of signification on which the most specialized achievements of knowledge
depend.

This is the expansion of semiotic consciousness along, so to say, the axis of

synchronicity.

But the expansion of semiotic consciousness also transpires, and by the same impetus,
diachronically, so to say, back across time, over the previous epochs of civilization, art,
science, and philosophy, for example, or literature and theology, in order to rethink
them and reconsider their products precisely from a semiotic point of view. In this way,
semiotics brings about a rewriting of previous thought and consequently of history.

We see, then, that, synchronically and diachronically, the theory of semiotics and the
history of semiotics are of a piece, mutually self-constituting. Unlike a natural history,
say, of the continents of earth or of the Pterodactyl among the dinosaurs, the object of
semiotic history is not actually given until and unless the theory that makes it visible -
that is, the consciousness of the sign in its distinctive being - has already been achieved.

The history of semiotics is first of all an achievement of semiotic consciousness and

then the working out of the implications of that consciousness, so far as it is able to
sustain itself systematically, in every sphere of knowledge and experience. In this way,
it is a history that extends also into the future, and will never be completed while
thought itself continues to grow.

"Semiotic consciousness" is nothing more nor less than the explicit awareness of the
role of the sign as that role is played in a given respect. Since, however, it turns out that
the whole of experience, from its origins in sense to its highest achievements of
understanding, is constituted by signs, it follows that the history of semiotics will be
first of all a tracing of the lines which lead to that moment when this total or
comprehensive role of the sign in the constituting of experience and knowledge came to
be realized. After that, the history of semiotics will be the working out of the
implications of this realization both synchronically and diachronically.

But "diachrony", in this case, is not just a matter of retrospect, or of a sequence of

discrete synchronic sections arranged as prior and posterior. The diachrony of semiotic
consciousness is the formation of future thought as well as the transmission and
comparison of past thought. It involves an awareness of demands the future makes on
present thinking in order for present thought to be what it is as containing also what no
longer is or might never have been in relation to what could be. In a word, the axes of
diachrony and synchrony in semiotic consciousness mark the labile intersection ehere
the critical control of objectivity - criticism" in the broadest sense - is exercised through
the subjectivity of the individual linguistic animal.

Thus, when we speak of the "history" of semiotics, we are obliged to have in mind the
working out and rendering publicly accessible, from within the myriad subjectivities of
the knowers capable of raising semiosis to the semiotic level, of the implications of the
realization of the sign's comprehensive role in the constituting and development of
experience diachronically in both directions. It is for this reason that the future of
thought, as well as its past, will be different as a result of the achievement of a semiotic
consciousness, different, too, in unpredictable ways (because of the factor of chance
both in itself and as subjectively diffracted in social life).

In a word, the theory of semiotics in the basic sense will be the explanation of how the
whole of knowledge and experience depends on signs, or is a product of semiosis; the
history of semiotics in the basic sense will be the tracing of the lines that made such an
explanation possible and necessary, even though this history in another sense remains
open by virtue of thought in the present to an indefinite future as well.

B. HISTORY OF SEMIOTICS

Nonetheless, however incomplete it must be prospectively considered, on its

retrospective side such a history cannot remain indefinite. It will consist in answering
the question: Where was a consciousness of the role of the sign in the totality of human
experience thematically and systematically articulated?
Secondarily, such a history will consist in the record of the workings out of the
implications of such a consciousness. It will be enough, in keeping with the purpose of
the present work, to restrict ourselves to a preliminary answer in outline to the first
question: Where in fact was semiotic consciousness first achieved in its integrity?

The answer to that question, simply put, is that semiotic consciousness found its original
thematic statement and systematic formulation in the Latin world as it developed
indigenously (after the collapse of Rome, which remained dominated in its speculative
consciousness by the Greek philosophies and language) between Augustine thematically
(c.397AD) and Poinsot systematically (1632). Precisely this development received its
name unwittingly from an Englishman, John Locke, in 1690, who suggested in the form
of a hypothetical alternative to the perspective in which his own labors had mainly
developed a perspective whose development would destroy the speculative substance of
those earlier labors, along with the whole subsequent modern development in continuity
with them. Finally, in nominal continuity with Locke and speculative continuity with
the largely unknown Latin forebears, the range and complexity in detail of the issues
that need to be clarified in the perspective of semiotic was illustrated relentlessly in the
writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, from his discovery of the semiotic categories,
subsuming the concerns of realism and idealism through their common dependency on
experience, in 1867, to his death in 1914.

Having tried, for several chapters now, to examine directly the subject matter thus
uncovered, let us next try - as befits the self-consciousness the sign imposes through its
inescapable lesson of the historicity of thought - to look also historically at what has
been examined.

1. The Ancient World and Augustine

Augustine seems to have been the first thinker to have enunciated the idea of signum as
the universal instrument or means whereby communication of whatever sort and at
whatever level is effected. This is a surprising fact, to which too little attention has so
far been paid. There is nothing in the world either of ancient Greek philosophy or of the
Roman era dominated by this philosophy that corresponds to the notion of "sign" as we
have today come to take it for granted, as providing through its distinctive type of action
(semiosis) the unified subject matter or object of semiotic inquiry.

The "seme-" root of our term semiotics and its many congeners, of course, is
definitively Greek in extraction. But, in the Greek writings extant for us today, the
dominant feature in this regard is the split, verging on dichotomic, between
Semeion/Nature, on the one hand, and Symbolon/Culture, on the other hand. This is true
of Plato in the Cratylus (c.385BC), of Aristotle throughout his works (including notably
the woefully mistranslated Perihermenias [c.330BC: 16-20a; cf. Eco et al. 1986: 66-68],
whereby Boethius [esp. inter 511-513AD] unwittingly increased the impetus of
Augustine's suggestions for a unifieddoctrina signorum), and of Greek medicine, which
Sebeok (1985: 181) regards (after "linguistic affinities" and "the profoundest strata of
human wisdom" conventionally fossilized as philosophical analysis) as "the third,
admittedly uneven leg upon which semiotics rests". For, in medicine, it is definitely the
semeion/nature side that dominates prognostics (see Sebeok 1984c), despite the "sop to
Cerberus" all its own that medicine even today regularly proffers in the placebo - but
without by any means being the whole of the story (as is best seen today through the
work of Baer 1982, 1988).

Apart from these great icons of ancient Greece, there are also the Stoics, who, in their
debates with the Epicureans, unquestionably developed at greatest length the theory of
signs in the ancient world but who unfortunately have survived only in fragments
conveyed principally by their enemies, Sextus Empiricus (c.200) in particular. General
accounts of the Stoic sign theory, more or less comprehensive under the circumstances,
can be found in Savan 1986 and 1986a, Eco 1980, and Verbeke 1978. Like the apple of
Tantalus, the Stoic writings are there to be enjoyed, if only they could be reached -
which makes their allure all the greater. Perhaps this is why a leading expert today on
Stoic logic (Mates) routinely imposes upon his exposition of supposedly Stoic
conceptions terminology drawn from the framework of symbolic logic after Russell and
the early Wittgenstein, while the most fascinating author of abductions on Stoic
semiotics (Eco) has turned lately to novels. Clarke's "History of Semiotic" (1987: 12-
42) provides an excellent summary here where the evidence is scanty, but after
Augustine becomes a phantasmagoric montage constructed of secondary sources
standard in traditional philosophy, but based entirely on presemiotic research interests.

Augustine's role against the ancient Greek and Roman background has been nicely
captured in a recent descriptive summary jointly essayed by Eco, Lambertini, Marmo,
and Tabarroni (1986: 65-66):

It was Augustine who first proposed a 'general semiotics' - that is, a general 'science' or
'doctrine' of signs, where signs become the genus of which words (onomata) and natural
symptoms (sèmeî'a) are alike equally species.

Medieval semiotics knows at this point two lines of thinking as possibly unified, but
without having achieved their actual unification. ... Out of the tension of this opposition
- under the provocation, as it were, of Augustine - is born much of the distinctively
Latin development of semiotic consciousness.

Echoes of the tension persist to this day, as in Husserl's quintessentially modern and at
the same time contemporary attempt to deny the possible unity of a semiotic
consciousness (cf. Kruse 1986), or more generally throughout the academic world, as
evidenced in Eco (1982) and in the ongoing "nature/nurture" controversy in psychology
and anthropology.

2. The Latin World

If we measure the development of semiotic consciousness in terms of the resolution of
this tension in favor of the possible unity Augustine originally glimpsed, then the main
lines of this development occur after William of Ockham (i.1317-1328), paradoxically,
in the resistance of the logicians, first at Paris and later at Coimbra and Alcalá, to the
acceptance of Augustine's proffered definition of the sign. Although general far beyond
notions found in the ancient world, nonetheless, as in the ancient world, Augustine's
definition envisioned for every sign a necessary linkage of a sensible element or vehicle
with a possibly immaterial - that is, as such imperceptible - content signified.
The objection of the logicians concerned precisely what John Locke would shortly
(1690) see as the first task confronting the would-be semiotician, namely, the bringing
of outward signs such as words and gestures and the interior means of knowing such as
images and ideas under the common perspective afforded by the notion of sign.

The origins of this rebellion against the age-old linkage of signs with the sense-
perceptible are as yet obscure but seem definitely linked to the influence of Ockham at
Paris and his introduction of the notion of the concept as a "signum naturale". Clearly
afoot as early as Petrus d'Ailly (c. 1372) was the further designation of the interior
means of knowing as "signa formalia", contrasting with the outward "signa
instrumentalia" whereby the known or felt inwardly is shared publicly. Williams
(1985a: xxxiii) made the following summary of the historical situation in this regard:

A major strand of semiotic reflection and controversy, beginning from at least the
fourteenth century and developing especially in the Iberian university world of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but involving also a wide geographic area ... turned
precisely on this question of whether the sign as such involves a per se sensible half.
The increasingly consistent answer was made in the negative.

But what is of principal interest here is that, as it turns out, this point of historical
controversy is the central point theoretically for the accomplishment of the main task of
semiotic as Locke proposed it, to wit, the bringing of ideas as well as words into the
perspective of a doctrine of signs.

3. The Iberian Connection

The transition figure in establishing an Iberian connection for this revolutionary
underground of high medieval semiotics was Dominicus Soto. His early studies at Paris
led him to introduce into the Iberian milieu (1529, 1554) an ad hoc series of distinctions
effectively conveying the objection to the linkage of signs as such (that is, in their
essential being and consequent active function in experience) to the sensible vehicle as
sign. This had the effect of forcing the issues of the dependency of objectivity
throughout on sign functions, and therefore of a sign function that is presupposed to the
level of what can be observed and experienced directly as an object. I give first
Williams' summary of the central issues and then resume briefly the historical lines of
reaction to them (Williams 1985a: xxxi-xxxii):

What actually is common to all treatments of the sign, from ancient times to the present,
[is,] namely, the seeing of the sign as a 'mask of Janus', bi-facial, or 'relative to the
cognitive powers of some organism, on the one hand, and to the content signified on the
other'. If it is therefore this relativity that constitutes the being proper to signs, then
why . . . add the further condition that this relativity has to be grounded in an object of
sense as such?

It is precisely the inclusion as essential of this further condition which is not essential ...
which has inevitably confused the discussion of the nature or being proper to signs-'all
signs insofar as they are signs'. The crux of the problem concerns the 'difference
between a sign functioning as such from within the cognitive powers of an organism,
and a sign functioning as such by impacting on those powers from without'. This
difference [is] crucial to the functioning of signs ... insofar as the ground of
observability in the perceiver, or that which makes him or her be a perceiver, is not as
such itself susceptible of observation.

It follows ... that the taking into account of this distinction gives rise to 'the true ground
question' for a doctrine of signs: 'In what does the relativity essential to signifying
properly consist?' This question ... has never been resolved satisfactorily within
specifically realist or idealist paradigms of thought. ... The breakthrough resolution of
John Poinsot in his Treatise on Signs (1632a) was itself anomalous in terms of previous
traditions as well as in terms of what it anticipated. In contrast, pre-semiotic realist or
idealist paradigms of thought have failed, respectively, either to appreciate that
perception itself structures its object as relative, or to appreciate that ideas are
signs before becoming objects of our awareness, and, as signs, can give access to 'the
nature of things' (to nature, that is) only as revealed relatively through signs.

Two major reactions to these issues appeared at Coimbra. One favored, in effect,
restoring the ancient perspective (Fonseca 1564). The other promoted rather the
prospective unity heralded by Augustine (the Conimbricenses 1607), but without being
able to show finally how the being of signs provides a purchase for such an over-all
perspective.

The decisive development in this regard was the privileged achievement of John
Poinsot, a student with the Conimbricenses, and the successor, after a century, to Soto's
own teaching position at the University of Alcalá de Henares. With a single stroke of
genius resolving the controversies, since Boethius, over the interpretation of relative
being in the categorial scheme of Aristotle, Poinsot (1632a 117/28-118/18, esp. 118/14-
18, annotated in Deely 1985: 472-479) was able to provide semiotics with a unified
object conveying the action of signs both in nature virtually and in experience actually,
as at work at all three of the analytically distinguishable levels of conscious life
(sensation, perception, intellection). By this same stroke he was also able to reconcile in
the univocity of the object signified the profound difference between what is and what is
not either present in experience here and now or present in physical nature at all
(Poinsot 1632a: Book III).

Poinsot was able to reduce to systematic unity Soto's ad hoc series of distinctions, as he

put it in his first announcement of the work of his Treatise ("Lectori", 1631; p. 5 of the
Deely 1985 edition), and thereby to complete the gestation in Latin philosophy of the
first foundational treatise establishing the fundamental character of, and the ultimate
simplicity of the standpoint determining, the issues that govern the unity and scope of
the doctrine of signs. Unfortunately, because he so skillfully embedded his Tractatus de
Signis within a massive and traditional Aristotelian cursus philosophiae naturalis, he
unwittingly ensured its slippage into oblivion in the wake of Descartes' modern
revolution. Three hundred and six years would pass between the original publication of
Poinsot's Treatise on Signs and the first frail appearance of some of its leading ideas in
late modern culture (Maritain 1937-1938, discussed in Deely 1986d).
4. The Place of John Locke
Coincidentally, Poinsot achieved his Herculean labor of the centuries in the birth year of
the man whose privilege it would be, while knowing nothing of Poinsot's work, to give
the perspective so achieved what was to become its proper name. Thus, 1632 was both
the year John Locke was born and the year that Poinsot's treatise on signs was
published. The name-to-be for what both Locke and Poinsot and, later Peirce also,
called "the doctrine of signs" - an expression of pregnant import in its own right, as
Sebeok (1976a: ix) was first to notice (elaborated in Deely 1978a, 1982b, 1986b inter
alia) - was proposed publicly fifty-eight years later, in 1690, in the five closing
paragraphs (little more than the very last page) of Locke's Essay concerning Humane
Understanding.

The principal instigation that Locke himself wrote in reaction against, but along very
different lines from what he would end by proposing for "semiotic", was the Cartesian
attempt (1637, 1641) to claim for rational thought a complete separation from any
dependency on sensory experience.

The irony of the situation in this regard was that Locke's principal objections to
Descartes were not at all furthered by the speculative course he set at the beginning and
pursued through the body of his monumental Essay concerning Humane
Understanding of 1690. Instead, he furthered the Cartesian revolution in spite of
himself; deflected the brilliant suspicions of Berkeley (1732); fathered the cynical
skepticism of Hume (1748);47 and laid the seeds of overthrow of his own work in
concluding it with the suggestion that what is really needed is a complete
reconsideration of "Ideas and Words, as the great Instruments of Knowledge" in the
perspective that a doctrine of signs would make possible. The consideration of the
means of knowing and communicating within the perspective of signifying, he
presciently suggested, "would afford us another sort of Logick and Critick, than what
we have hitherto been acquainted with". It was for this possible development that he
proposed the name semiotic.

The antinomy between the actual point of view adopted at the beginning for the Essay
as a whole and the possible point of view proposed at its conclusion (Deely 1986a) is,
for semiotic historiography, an object worthy of consideration in its own right.

It remains that to Locke goes the privilege and power of the naming. If today we call the
doctrine of signs "semiotic" and not "semiology", it is to the brief concluding chapter
XX in the original edition of Locke's Essay that we must look for the reason - there, and
to the influence this chapter exercised on the young American thinker, Charles Sanders
Peirce, who read the Essay but made of its conclusion a substantial part of his
philosophy and lifework from 1867 onward.

5. Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles S. Peirce, and John Poinsot

Contemporaneously with Peirce, and independently both of him and of Locke,
Ferdinand de Saussure was also suggesting that the doctrine of signs was a development
whose time had come. For this development he proposed a name (i.1911-1916: 33):
We shall call it sem$icirc'ology (from the Greek semeion, 'sign'). It would teach us what
signs consist of and what laws govern them.

While recognizing that, inasmuch as "it does not yet exist, one cannot say what form it
will take", Saussure wished to insist that the prospective science in question is one that
"has a right to existence" and a place "marked out in advance". It will study "the life of
signs at the heart of social life" and be "a branch of social psychology". "The laws that
semiology will discover" are, accordingly, the laws governing "the totality of human
phenomena", or culture in its contrast with nature.

We see then that Saussure's intuition was fatally flawed in its original formulation. He
placed on his intuition of the need for a science of signs the fatal qualification of
viewing it as a subordinate (or "subaltern") rather than as an architectonic discipline
respecting the whole of human belief, knowledge, and experience, as we have seen its
internal requirements dictate. He further compromised his proposal for the enterprise by
making of linguistics "le patron générale de toute sémiologie", raising the "arbitrariness
of signs" into a principle of analysis for all expressive systems. Thereby he obscured the
much more fundamental interplay of the subjectivity of the physical environment and
the subjectivity of the cognizing organism in the constitution of objectivity
for Umwelten in general and the human Lebenswelt in particular, whereby, in the latter
case, even the linguistic sign in its public functioning becomes assimilated from the start
to a natural form, as far as its users are concerned.

The duality of signifiant and signifié, in a word, lacked the thirdness whereby the sign in
its foundation (and whether or not this foundation be essentially arbitrary or
"stipulated") undergoes transformation into first an object and then into other signs. The
dynamics of the process linking semiosis in culture with semiosis in nature, and making
one the extension of the other in an ongoing spiral of interactions, needs to be brought
in. But, for that, the framework needs to be radically reformulated. As far as the
contemporary establishment of semiotics goes, it was the privilege of Charles Sanders
Peirce to provide just such an alternative framework under the influence of Locke's
suggestion.

Let us look with some care at what Peirce did with Locke's suggestion, and see if we
can see with something of dispassion "Why", as Short put it (1988), "we prefer Peirce to
Saussure" today. We will see at the same time something of the doctrinal convergence
Peirce, working with contemporary and modern materials, achieves with the
foundational synthesis of a doctrine of signs distillated by Poinsot from the materials of
Greek antiquity and the Latin middle age.

Beginning with his "New List of Categories" in 1867, and continuing until his death in
1914, semiotic in this broadest sense of the study of semiosis surrounding, as well as
within, the human world provided the thrust underlying and the unity for a substantial
part, and perhaps even for the whole, of Peirce's philosophy.48

At the same time, even in the "New List of Categories" as originally drafted, it is fair to
say that Peirce labored overly under the influence of Kant as Master of the Moderns -
that is to say, between the horns of the dilemma set by the (false) dichotomy of the
realism versus idealism controversy. Since, as I think, semiotic in principle and by right
- the jus signi, let us say - begins by transcending the terms of this controversy, it is not
surprising that Peirce had such a time of it whenever he succumbed to the temptation to
try to classify his own work in realist-idealist terms. Assuming naturally the terms of the
controversy as it had developed over the course of modern thought, he only gradually
came to critical terms with the fact that semiotic as such is a form neither of realism nor
of idealism, but beyond both.

As a disciple of Kant in early life, Peirce labored at the impossible task of establishing
the complete autonomy of the ideal/mental from what is individually existent in nature.
In later life he concluded that this erroneous quest had vitiated modern philosophy
(1903: 1.19-21). Significant of this evolution of his thought is the fact that in Peirce's
later philosophy his supreme category of Thirdness changed from representation in
1867 to triadic relation as common to both representations and to laws existent in nature
(c.1899: 1.565).

By his Lowell Lectures of 1903, and even already in his c. 1890 "Guess at the Riddle",
it is clear that Peirce was well on the way to taking his categories of semiosis properly
in hand and was marking out a course of future development for philosophy (as
semiotic) that is nothing less than a new age, as different in its characteristics as is the
"realism" of Greek and Latin times from the idealism of modern times in the national
languages.

In his "Minute Logic" (c.1902a: 1.203-272) we have a lengthy analysis of what he calls
"ideal" or "final" causality. He assimilates these two terms as descriptions of the same
general type of causality (ibid.: 1.211, 227). But, in successive analyses (ibid.: 1.211,
214, 227, 231; and similarly in 1903: 1.26), it emerges that causality by ideas
constitutes the more general form of this sort of explanation, inasmuch as final
causality, being concerned with mind, purpose, or quasi-purpose, is restricted to
psychology and biology (c.1902a: 1.269), whereas ideal causality in its general type
requires as such neither purpose (1.211) nor mind nor soul (1.216: cf. the analysis of
Poinsot 1632a: 177/8-178/7).

Now Peirce identifies this ideal causality with his category of Thirdness, the central
element of his semiotic (1903: 1.26) and the locus for any account of narrative, or of
"lawfulness of any kind". Thirdness consists of triadic relations (c. 1899: 1.565). In
these triadic relations the foundations specify the several relations in different ways, so
that one relation is specified, for example, as "lover of", and another as "loved by"
(1897: 3.466).

Thanks to their specification, triadic relations have a certain generality (c.1902a: 2.92;
1903: 1.26). Signs constitute one general class of triadic relations, and the laws of
nature (which are expressed through signs) constitute the other general class (c. 1896:
1.480). Signs themselves are either genuine or degenerate. Genuine signs concern
existential relations between interacting bodies and need an interpretant to be fully
specified as signs (c.1902a: 2.92). For the genuine triadic sign relation is a mind-
dependent similarity relation between the object of the existential relation and the
existential relation itself as object for the interpretant (1904: 8.332). For example, words
need an interpretant to be fully specified as signs. Triadic sign relations that are
degenerate in the first degree concern existential relations between interacting bodies
but require no interpretant to make them fully specified as signs. For example, a rap on
the door means a visitor, with no explanation needed. Triadic sign relations that are
degenerate in the second degree concern mind-dependent relations specified by the
intrinsic possibility of the objects with which they are concerned, because these
relations cannot vary between truth and falsity whatever any human group may think, as
for example, in the case of mathematics, logic, ethics, esthetics, psychology, and poetry
(1903a: 5.125; 1908: 6.455; c.1909: 6.328).

It is clear that when either science or literature, or anything in between, is considered in

a semiotic framework as comprehensive as this, an exclusive treatment of its processes
from the standpoint of constructed signs simply will not do. We risk being lost in
crossword puzzles of great interest, maybe, but without validity as modes of
understanding the semiosis peculiar to humanity as it extends and links up again with
the semiosis that weaves together human beings with the rest of life and nature.

Thus, the work of Peirce is regarded justly as the greatest achievement of any American
philosopher, and at the same time the emergence of semiotic as the major tradition of
intellectual life today throws the lost work of Poinsot into relief for its original
contribution. Just as the writings of the American philosopher Charles Peirce first
illustrated something of the comprehensive scope and complexity in detail of issues that
need to be clarified and thought through anew in the perspective of semiotic, so did the
Iberian Tractatus de Signis of John Poinsot first express the fundamental character of
these issues in light of the ultimate simplicity of the standpoint determining the semiotic
point of view. The Dean of Peirce scholarship, Max H. Fisch, comments with emphasis
in this regard (1986) that, within its limits, Poinsot's work provides us with "the
most systematic treatise on signs that has ever been written".

Just as semiotics itself appears today as a completely unexpected development within

the traditionally established entrenchments of disciplinary specialization, so does it
require a thorough re-examination of the relation of modern thought in its mainstream
development to Latin times in general and to the Iberian Latin development in
particular. In renewing the history of thought and restoring unity to the ancient
enterprise of socalled philosophical understanding, Poinsot's work occupies a privileged
position in the mainstream of semiotic discourse as we see it developing today.
"Poinsot's thought", Sebeok points out (1982: x),

belongs decisively to that mainstream as the 'missing link' between the ancients and the
moderns in the history of semiotic, a pivot as well as a divide between two huge
intellective landscapes the ecology of neither of which could be fully appreciated prior
to this major publishing event.

For the fundamental reason pointed out by Williams (1987a: 480) in observing "that
historical narrative is the only logic capable of situating competing traditions and
incommensurate paradigms in a perspective that not only lends each a higher degree of
clarity on its own terms as well as in relation to the others, but also decides which
paradigms will emerge as victorious", the perspective of semiotic requires of anyone
seeking to adopt and develop it a cultivation also of a sense of how the transmissibility
of the past in anthroposemiosis is an essential constituent and not something at the
margins of present consciousness.
In this way, in particular, semiotics puts an end, long overdue, to the Cartesian
revolution (the collection edited by Chenu 1984 is very helpful in this regard) and to the
pretensions of scientific thought to transcend, through mathematical means, the human
condition. The model for semiotics is rather that of a community of inquirers, precisely
because "the human Umwelt presents us with a continuum of past, present, and future in
which continuity and change, convention and invention, commingle, and of which the
ultimate source of unity is time" (Williams 1985: 274). Thus, the work of Williams
(1982, 1983, 1984, 1985-1987, 1987a, 1988) and of Pencak (1987; Williams and
Pencak, forthcoming) in penetrating the traditional field of historiographical study from
an explicitly semiotic point of view, is one of the most essential advances in the
developing understanding of semiotics today.

Eventually, we will see that the doctrine of signs requires for its full possibilities a
treating of history as the laboratory within which semiosis, anthroposemiosis in
particular, achieves its results, and to which it must constantly recur when an impasse is
reached or new alternatives are required. Thirdness, after all, is what history is all about.

6. Jakob von Uexküll

So far, we have seen that the small number of pioneers - in particular, Poinsot, Peirce,
and, to a lesser extent, Saussure - who tried to explore and establish directly the
foundational concepts for a doctrine of signs found the way clogged with an underbrush
of conceptual difficulties rooted in the prevailing thought structures and obstructing the
access to the vantage point from which the full expanse of semiotic might be developed.
Peirce, for this reason (c. 1907a: 5.488), described the pioneer work "of clearing and
opening up" semiotic as the task rather of a backwoodsman.

Once the foundations have been secured, there remains the task of building the edifice
and the enterprise of semiotic understanding, by elucidating at all points the crucial
processes comprising the interface of nature and culture summed up in the
term semiosis. This task, too, is clogged by underbrush accruing from presemiotic
thought structures that must be cut away as semiotics reclaims from previous thought
contributions essential to its own enterprise of reflective understanding.

We have now to see how the history and theory of semiotics includes as well
background figures who, without explicitly understanding their work as semiotic, have
made useful and even decisive contributions toward the recognition of what appears in
its full propriety within the widening vista of semiotics. In the case of thinkers who did
not deal directly, in the sense of with set and conscious purpose, with the notion of
semiotic foundations, the wrestling in areas of semiosic functionings with conceptual
difficulties accruing from obstructive thought structures is made all the more difficult
for the want of an explicit entertainment of an alternative to the prevailing mindsets. In
such a case, the very obstructions risk being incorporated into the creative conceptions
themselves. When this happens, an inevitable degree of distortion results, to the extent
that the creative novelties become assimilated to paradigms exclusive of the
foundational clarity and expanse the perspective of semiotics could eventually provide.

There are thus three classes of what Rauch (1983) calls semiotists: there are the
semioticians, workers who begin from the vantage point and within the perspective of
the sign; there are the pioneers or founding figures of semiotics, the protosemioticians,
who struggled to establish the essential nature and fundamental varieties of possible
semiosis; and there are also, among the ranks of present and past workers of the mind,
cryptosemioticians, who need themselves to become aware of the perspective that
semiotic affords49 or whose work needs to be by others reclaimed and re-established
from within that perspective. 50 In particular, oppositions seemingly irreconcilable from
the standpoint of the customary juxtaposition of idealism to realism often admit of
subsumption within a higher synthesis from the vantage of semiotic. In such a way,
apparent contradictions within the history of semiotics need not always remain so at the
level of theory

Here, and by way of concluding our historical sketch, we will deal with the case of one
of the greatest cryptosemioticians of the century immediately following the publication
in 1867 of Peirce's "New List of Categories", Jakob von Uexküll. The Umwelt-
Forschung he pioneered (1899-1940) is probably the most important recent illustration
of a cryptosemiotic enterprise transcending, in the direction of semiotic, the limitations
it otherwise imposed upon itself by embracing too intimately the mindset and paradigm
immediately available in the milieu of the time and place.

When we talk of the Umwelt, as we have seen, we are talking about the central category
of zoösemiosis and anthroposemiosis alike. The objective world generated at only these
levels of semiosis finally constitutes, to borrow Toews's felicitous phrase (1987), "the
autonomy of meaning and the irreducibility of experience" to anything that might be
supposed to exist independently of it. This concept, belonging to the biological
foundations that "lie at the very epicenter of the study of both communication and
signification in the human animal" (Sebeok 1976a: x), we owe principally to the work
of Jakob von Uexküll. So it is not surprising that von Uexküll has begun to emerge
within contemporary semiotics as perhaps the single most important background thinker
for understanding the biological conditions of our experience of the world in the terms
required by semiotic.51

Having already shown synchronically how useful this concept is to semiotics, we will
now look at von Uexküll's work diachronically in terms of its "semiotic lag", the
phenomenon wherein the terms used in articulating a newer, developing paradigm
inevitably reflect the older ways of thinking in contrast to which the new development is
taking place, and hence constitute a kind of drag on the development, until a point is
reached whereat it becomes possible to coin effectively a fresh turn of phrase reflecting
precisely the new rather than the old. The new terminology has the simultaneous effect
of ceasing the drag and highlighting what in fact was developing all along (cf. Merrell
1987).

In the case of Jakob von Uexküll, the drag is a consequence of having rooted his
biological theories to an eventually counterproductive degree in the philosophy of
Immanuel Kant (1781, 1787). On the positive side, it was Kant who best focussed
thematic attention on the constructive regularities at work from the side of the subject in
establishing the objects of experience so far as they belong to the phenomenal realm of
the appearances of everyday life. Appreciation of the constructive role of the cognitive
powers of the knowing subject and of that subject's affective shaping of cognitive
content in the presentation through perception of what is known was, to be sure, an
essential advance of philosophical understanding in the matter of dealing theoretically
with the origins of knowledge and the nature of experience in the assessments of belief
and practices. The emphasis on these matters communicated from Kant to von Uexküll
was indispensable.

Dispensable was the Kantian failure to deal with the rationale according to which the
constructive elements contributed by the subject - socalled concepts or ideas - are
abductively arrived at as necessary postulates in the first place. This rationale was one
of the several threads in the discussions crucial for epistemology that developed over
the closing Latin centuries - particularly in Iberia - and were lost to the modern
development as it took place, after Descartes, through the Latin filter of
Suarez's Disputationes Metaphysicae of 1597.

In the German and Kantian context - even more, if possible, than in the modern context
generally - the opposition of the terms "subjective" and "objective" is a firmly
established dichotomy whose transparency is self-evident. Within this context, von
Uexküll himself, who, as his son notes (T. von Uexküll 1981: 148), did not think of his
work thematically under the rubric of semiotic, had little alternative to seeing the
Umwelt in opposition to the supposed and so-called objective, and as belonging to the
phenomenal realm in Kant's sense - on the side of the "subjective", that is,
dichotomically conceived in opposition to the supposed "objective".

The want of alternative for von Uexküll himself has resulted in considerable confusion
regarding his work in general (through misplaced associations with "vitalism") and,
specifically, in notorious difficulties in interpreting (or "translating") the key term,
"Umwelt".52 The difficulties are a clue to the real problem.53 As far as semiotics is
concerned, von Uexküll's work needs to be thought through afresh at the level of basic
terminology generally and specifically as regards the extent of reliance placed on the
Kantian scheme for philosophy of mind.

T. von Uexküll, for example, in explaining his father's work for the context of semiotics
today, unwittingly brings out the inconsistency that obtains between an orthodox
Kantian perspective and the perspective of semiotic. According to the son's account (I
choose an example where the inconsistency that runs throughout the account is
concisely illustrated within one short paragraph, T. von Uexküll 1981: 161): on the one
hand, "A schema is a strictly private program" for the formation of complex signs "in
our subjective universe"; and, on the other hand, "The schemata which we have formed
during our life are intersubjectively identical" at least "in the most general outlines".
But, of course, to speak of the intersubjective save as a pure appearance, in a Kantian
context, is as internally inconsistent as to speak of a grasping of the Ding-an-sich in that
same context (as Hegel best noted).

The conflict, thus, is between an idealist perspective in which the mind knows only
what it constructs and the semiotic perspective in which what the mind constructs and
what is partially prejacent to those constructions interweave objectively to constitute
indistinctly what is directly experienced and known.

Himself immersed in the Kantian philosophy - that is, the most classical of the classical
modern idealisms - Jakob von Uexküll yet was creating in spite of that immersion,
through a creative intuition of his own, a notion anticipating another context entirely, a
context which had yet to catalyze thematically and receive general acceptance under its
own proper name, to wit, the context of semiotic as the doctrine of signs. He was
inadvertently precipitating a paradigm shift. A formula I applied to Heidegger (1986:
56), mutatis mutandis (that is, substituting "biologist" for "philosopher" and "from
within" for "against") can be applied to Jakob von Uexküll: among modern biologists he
is the one who struggled most from within the coils of German idealism and in the
direction of a semiotic.

For, unlike Heidegger, who expressly wrestled with reaching an alternative to the
existing paradigms both realist and idealist, von Uexküll embraced a horn of the false
dilemma: he saw himself as merely extending the Kantian paradigm to biology. He did
not see that such an "adaptation" presupposed a capacity of human understanding
incompatible with the original claims Kant thought to establish for rational life by his
initiative. In other words, to apply Kant's paradigm as von Uexküll intended, it was
necessary in the application already to transcend the paradigm - an adaptation of the
original through mutation indeed.

The genuine adoption by a human observer of the point of view of another life form, on
which Umwelt research is predicated, is a-priori impossible in the original Kantian
scheme. Either Umweltensforschungis a form of transcendental illusion, or, if it is valid
- if, for example, von Frisch really did interpret with some correctness the bee's dance or
von Uexküll the toad's search image - then von Uexküll, in extending Kant's ideas to
biology, was also doing something more, something that the Kantian paradigm did not
allow for, namely, achieving objectively and grasping as such an intersubjective
correspondence between subjectivities attained through the sign relation.54

Once it is understood that the classical terms of the subject-object dichotomy are
rendered nugatory within the perspective of a doctrine of signs and that, within this
context, the term "objective" functions precisely to mean the prospectively
intersubjective, in opposition to both terms of the dichotomy classically understood,
new possibilities of understanding are opened up. These possibilities are more in line
with what is at the center of, the original to, von Uexküll's work than could be seen
through the filter of Kantian idealism, which provided at the time the only developed
language available to a scientist of philosophical bent. As "a consistently shared point of
view, having as its subject matter all systems of signs irrespective of their substance and
without regard to the species of the emitter or receiver involved" (Sebeok 1968: 64),
semiotics requires a theoretical foundation equally comprehensive. That foundation can
be provided only by an understanding of the being with its consequent causality and
action proper to signs in their universal role. With all the subdivisions, neither a
perspective of traditional idealism nor of traditional realism has the required expanse.

As semiotics comes of age, it must increasingly free itself from the drag of pre-existing
philosophical paradigms. Beginning with the sign - that is, from the function of signs
taken in their own right within our experience (semiosis) - it is the task of semiotics to
create a new paradigm - its ownand to review, criticize, and improve wherever possible
all previous accounts of experience, knowledge and belief in the terms of that paradigm.
It is thus that the history of semiotics and the theory of semiotics are only virtually
distinct, forming together the actual whole of human understanding as an achievement,
a prise de conscience, in process and in community.

The maxim for that process, accordingly, is the same as the maxim for semiotics
itself: Nil est in intellectum nec in sensum quod non prius habeatur in signum ("There is
nothing in thought or in sensation which is not first possessed in a sign"). 55 For if
the anthropos as semiotic animal is an interpretant of semiosis in nature and culture
alike, that can only be because the ideas of this animal, in their function as signs, are not
limited to either order, but have rather, as we explained above, the universe in its totality
- all that wider universe, embracing the universe of existents as a part" - as their object.

Content
Preface.....................................................................................................................................1
A. THE CONTENT OF EXPERIENCE.............................................................................40
B. SPECIES-SPECIFIC OBJECTIVE WORLDS..............................................................47
C. SPECIES-SPECIFICALLY HUMAN SEMIOSIS........................................................49
D. THE "CONVENTIONALITY" OF SIGNS IN ANTHROPOSEMIOSIS.....................51
E. CRITICISM AS THE EXPLORATION OF TEXTUALITY........................................54
F. A MATRIX FOR ALL THE SCIENCES......................................................................57
G. A MODEL FOR DISCOURSE AS SEMIOSIS............................................................59
H. SUMMATION..............................................................................................................63
A. THEORY OF SEMIOTICS.......................................................................................................77
B. HISTORY OF SEMIOTICS......................................................................................................80
1. The Ancient World and Augustine.................................................................................80
2. The Latin World.............................................................................................................82
3. The Iberian Connection..................................................................................................82
4. The Place of John Locke................................................................................................84
5. Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles S. Peirce, and John Poinsot..........................................85
6. Jakob von Uexküll..........................................................................................................88