Phenomenological Semiotics

Copenhagian biosemiotics (e.g. Hoffmeyer, Emmeche, Stjernfelt, Brier) and Lundian cognitive semiotics (e.g. Sonesson and Zlatev) seem to share certain basic notions and attitudes. Both recognize hierarchial levels of meaning production processes and systems. Both understand meanings and signs as not reducible to strictly linguistic ones. Both consider at least higher animals and possibly other organisms too as capable of making distinctions meaningful for themselves. Both seem to have a critical attitude against behaviorism and nominalistic empiricism, instead, basic semiotic concepts are assumed to need a logical or phenomenological grounding.
The most striking difference is perhaps the attitude towards the concept of sign and its applicability. Copenhagians wish to generalize the concept of sign and semiosis so that it could establish a connction between all kind of life processes and the common sense understanding of human sign use. Following Sebeok’s (and Deely’s) ideology of general semiotic, Copenhagians have assumed that Peirce’s highly abstract and complex logical semiotics together with his evolutionary metaphysics would be applicable in this task. The strategy of Lundians, in turn, has been to reserve the concept of sign to refer to the features and structures specific to human sign use and thus distinguishing it from the less complex meaning making that both humans and non-human life forms share. Zlatev (2009: 171) suggests that semiotics should rather be defined as the study of meaning making than the study of signs. This is underlined in Sonesson’s Husserlian-Piagetian analysis of “minimal properties” of sign (sign as a subjectively differentiated double asymmetry between the expression and content) together with the description of cognitively less demanding levels with meanings that are not signs (Sonesson 2012: 225-6).
Both Sonesson (2008) and Zlatev (2009) have understandably criticized such widening of the scope of the concept of sign that has been common in biosemiotics. Such critique has not been absent in biosemiotic circles either – among some others, I have about 15 years demanded more specified use of semiotic terminology in biosemiotics (Vehkavaara 2002, 2003, 2006). The biosemiotic discourse has been too unspecified, vague, or metaphoric when applying the concept of sign and its assumed triadic structure. Especially the concept of the object of sign and the semiotic agent (mind or self) have not found satisfactory real correspondents in many cases. For instance, if a gene is a sign what would be its object and to whom it would be a sign? My provisional conclusion have so far been that Peirce’s logical concept of sign or semiosis cannot, after all, be consistently applied to the genes or even the processes like bacterial chemotaxis, without more or less dogmatically adopted metaphysical commitments. The genuine sign action presumes the possibility of such a self-control where some kind of consciousness is operative. This is also concluded by Peirce in the same paragraph, where he “heartily granted” that the acceptance of (false) hypothesis that consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon has nevertheless “done good service to science” (CP 5.493).  As a solution I have suggested that biosemiotics should, in addition, look for some other, differently defined and derived (non-logical) concepts of sign for the cases where Peirce’s logical concept is not applicable. But such a suggestion does not solve the dispute whether the use of the term “sign” should be limited to contexts that Lundians demand.
One way proceed is to look beyond the mere definitions to the perceptions or intuitions, from which the defined concept of sign is derived, how this derivation is executed, and what kind of ‘essential features’ it is supposed to preserve. Then we can see that biosemiotics and cognitive semiotics have somewhat different needs – biosemiotics certainly deals with cognitive processes of organisms (etc.) with internal meanings, but such meanings would remain epiphenomenal without an assumption that they are somehow also guiding the development and behavior of their carriers – i.e. biosemiotics must contain also a theory of action, a goal-directed or (self-)normative action. Thus, we get (at least) two starting point intuitions: 1. cognitive one, where sign mediated cognition is contrasted to direct perception (here Peircean logical sign may apply), and 2. the constructive or practical one, where composed sign is functioning as an anticipation, plan, or normative criterion of future action. The cognitive sign only represents its object and the goodness of the interpretation is dependent on the object. that functions as a normative criterion from which it conveys information to its interpreter. The constructive sign, instead, is used to create or realize its content and is thus non-representational in the sense that the reality of its content is dependent on the ‘interpretation’ of the sign (and not vice versa). So far I have found no better term as sign for such an internal element that guides the transformation of a semiotic system from a one state to some other, hopefully more satisfactory one.

Abstract This paper demonstrates that Edmund Husserl’s frequently overlooked 1890 manuscript, “On the Logic of Signs (Semiotic)”, when closely investigated, reveals itself to be the hermeneutical touchstone for his seminal 1891 Philosophy of Arithmetic. As the former comprises Husserl’s earliest attempt to account for all of the different kinds of signitive experience, his conclusions there can be directly applied to the latter, which is focused on one particular type of sign; namely, number signs. Husserl’s 1890 descriptions of motivating and replacing signs will be respectively employed to clarify his 1891 understanding of the authentic and inauthentic presentations of numbers via number signs. Moreover, his schematic classification of replacement-signs in Semiotic will illuminate the reasons why he believed the number system to be necessary for the operation of replacing number signs. (129 words).

This paper departs from the confrontation of a biological-semiotic concept of Umwelt with a psychological-phenomenological concept of Lebenswelt aiming at exhibiting their interpretations in selected investigative domains of the philosophy of nature and culture. The first part is devoted to the question of how the semiotic relationships of animals and humans to their subjective universes are discursively modeled in phenomenology as a study of individual experience that is consciously realized by senses from the first person perspective. Animals are admitted to have relations with actual things in the observable reality through an outward extension of their body, but they are stated to lack a direct access to the things in themselves and to their various forms of being because they cannot transcend the imprisonment of their surroundings. In the second part exposing the framework of existential semiotics, the existence modes of animal and human subjects are considered in terms of being in the world as immanence and being for the world as transcendence. Immanent subjects are explained as existing in their environments and transcendent subjects as being able to go beyond their life-world. Reassuming the similarities and differences between the research conclusions of philosophers and psychologists, the author puts forward investigative postulates addressed to anthropo-logical linguistics or linguistic anthropology substantiating the search for the defining characteristics of speech derivable from the contrast between the verbal and non-verbal means of communication used in the world of humans and animals.