Life and language: Is meaning biosemiotic?

Language Sciences 67 (2018) 46–58

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Life and language: Is meaning biosemiotic? Stephen J. Cowley Centre for Human Interactivity and the COMAC Cluster, University of Southern Denmark, Slagelse Campus, Denmark

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 9 August 2017 Received in revised form 5 February 2018 Accepted 3 April 2018

Since the multi-scalarity of life encompasses bodies, language and human experience, Timo Järvilehto’s (1998) ‘one-system’ view can be applied to acts of meaning, knowing and ethics. Here, I use Paul Cobley’s Cultural Implications of Biosemiotics (2016) to explore a semiotic construal of such a position. Interpretation, he argues, shows symbolic, indexical and iconic ‘layers’ of living. While lauding Cobley’s breadth of vision, as a linguist, I baulk at linking ‘knowing’ too closely with the ‘symbolic’ qua what can be said, diagrammed or signed. This is because, given first-order experience (which can be deemed indexical/ iconic), humans use observations (by others and self) to self-construct as embodied individuals. While symbolic semiosis matters, I trace it to, not languaging, but the rise of literacy, graphics and pictorial art. Unlike Chomsky and Deely, I find no epigenic break between the symbolic and the iconic/indexical. The difference leads one to ontology. I invite the reader to consider, if, as Cobley suggests, meaning depends on modelling systems (with ententional powers) and/or if, as Gibson prefers, we depend on encounters with whatever is out-there. Whereas Cobley identifies the semiotic with the known, for others, living beings actively apprehend what is observable (for them). Wherever the reader stands, I claim that all one-system views fall in line with Cobley’s ‘anti-humanist’ challenge. Ethics, he argues, can only arise from participating in the living. Knowing, and coming to know, use repression and selection that can only be captured by nondisciplinary views of meaning. As part of how life and language unfold, humans owe a duty of care to all of the living world: hence, action is needed now. Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Biosemiotics Enactivism Ecological psychology Distributed language Dialogism Biology of cognition Biology of meaning Semiotics Philosophy of language Pragmatics Ecolinguistics

1. Introduction Linguists say surprisingly little about either meaningful experience or acts of meaning. Where not focused on linguistic form or function, they turn to semantics, its pragmatic extensions and, perhaps, discourse, conversation or usage. They begin not with living beings, the verbal aspect of language. Indeed, verbal patterns are “what most people, including linguists, think of as language” (Thibault, 2011: 216). By contrast, once traced to living, languaging comes to be seen as partly constitutive of the human world. Alongside what linguists usually describe – form, function, semantics, pragmatics, discourse etc. – ‘firstorder’ language enables people to self-construct as they engage with each other and the world (Love, 2004; Thibault, 2011; Cowley, 2014a). A one-system view can replace perspectives that treat language as a theoretical object. As people happen during talk and interpretation, language unites the cultural and the natural. Life and language spread cognitive dynamics over space and time (see, Cowley, 2007). Far from ‘using’ a linguistic system, persons link body-based coordination (activity) to human hearing and nonce (never to be repeated) events that, for social actors, have a verbal aspect. In this sense, people draw on wordings

E-mail address: [email protected]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2018.04.004 0388-0001/Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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that derive from phonetic gestures, their silent surrogates, and inscriptions. By contrast, in linguistics the focus falls on tracing repeatable patterns to ‘knowledge’ of a language system (e.g. a language, competence or the output of a function like Merge). Language is taken to link phonology to grammar/vocabulary in a play of pattern which is distinct from ‘non-language’. Linguists focus on utterances (or discourse) that can be described in terms of form and function (i.e. as what Love (2004) calls second-order constructs). Language is thus separable from interactional, social, bodily and material constraints. By contrast, a one-system view treats human activity, action and coordination as drawing on nonce events or wordings. Like cognition, far from being object like, language is distributed socially, across artifacts and through many different temporal scales (Cowley, 2011; Hutchins, 2014). While increasingly popular, those taking distributed views have rarely asked how meaning permeates how people concert their actions/activity. In pursuing Paul Cobley’s (2016) Cultural Implications of Biosemiotics (CIB), the paper pursues parallels and contrasts between a semiotic and an ecological-enactive view of languaging.1 2. Outline In CIB semiosis is the necessary basis for human life and culture. En-natured culture, living human souls, depend on their own encultured nature. For Cobley, this grounds an anti-humanist ethics, work on the importance of semiotic repression and a reaffirmation of the humanities. I urge that his arguments be considered by all who trace what is human to a history of interacting with what is ‘out-there’. Yet, I critique Cobley’s commitment to how human ‘modelling systems’ enable people to withdraw from the lived present. Rather than adopt a picture of language as having symbolic, indexical and iconic layers, I favour an enactive-ecological view (see, Gibson, 1979; Chemero, 2011). On this one-system view, first-order languaging enables infants to tap into a history of repetition and description, orient to others in a common world, and use re-voicing to self-construct as persons. While organisms indeed bring forth life worlds, I am sceptical about Cobley’s view of human uniqueness. Whereas he posits a symbolic ‘layer’ that adds to iconic and indexical signhood, I allow human languaging to ground what is characteristic of human agency. This opens debate: are organisms subjects pertaining to a species or does humanity arise in coordinating between subjects who are also hypersocial organisms? Our answer will pivot on whether brains and/or interaction ground linguistic life, and, thus, in what sense, if any, meaning is biosemiotic. 3. Not just linguistic meaning Despite its descriptive power, form-based linguistics tells us little about life, society or human living. Appeal to ‘linguistic meaning’ invokes second-order constructs (forms and functions) with highly abstract semantic correlates.2 Seen as form-incontext, language indexes a hypothetical world that, for many, is delimited by true propositions. If linguistic meaning mirrors grammar/vocabulary, human language is, thus, akin to what is described in manuals of second language teaching (i.e. as consisting in grammar/vocabulary and phonology) or, perhaps, computational “languages”. By contrast, in abolishing any language/non-language divide, a distributed perspective rejects computationalism and other code views. As intrinsic to human living, language arises in meshing culture, action and bodily movement in an extended human ecology (Steffensen, 2011). Given en-natured culture, language has come to transform the earth’s ecosystems. The human capacity to sustain and destroy life links emotion, action and language with both social institutions and their technical/technological extensions. Rejecting linguistics and its objects, cognitive ecolinguists (see, Steffensen and Fill, 2014) treat language and humans as part of the living or, as proposed elsewhere, the bio-ecology.3 Thus turning from abstracta and ‘content’, a radical ecolinguistic view traces meaning to first-order activity by living beings (and, in humans, languaging).4 Radical ecolinguists build on the inseparability of the knower from the known. This distinction fell when, in micro-physics, the observed was shown to co-vary with observation. The finding overthrows an epistemic conception of mind (ECM) common to, among others, Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Descartes, Kant and Hegel. In a global context, the ECM seems rather parochial.5 In the

1 A reviewer asks if the distributed perspective is a subset of a wide (i.e. non Peircean) biosemiotics. I can only say, “perhaps”. Such a wide view would be distinguished, on the one hand, from ‘biology’ and, on the other, clarify how phenomena evolve as a result of human immersion in language, culture and nature (e.g. control of the vocal tract, agriculture and fear). Importantly, it would also clarify how human culture and embodiment have transformed semiotic description (and, by extension, process). 2 In John Lyons’s classic exposition, linguistic meaning is sub-divided into the descriptive (or propositional), the social and the expressive (1977: 51). He carefully places this against influential classifications by Buhler (1934) and Jakobson (1960). Each of these views treats ‘language’ as (somehow) distinct from non-language and thus living human beings (as having so-called ‘duality of patterning’). 3 In an important volume, Clements and Shelford (1939) applied the term ‘bio-ecology’ to a microscale of “plant animal formations”. In this context, the term is extended to how archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes are affected by geo-physical and other factors associated with culture and technology (Cowley, 2014b; Cowley and Zhao, 2017). Rather than treat ‘ecology’ as an object of 3rd person description, a turn to the bio-ecology makes development/evolution part of a tangle of cyclic dynamical systems. In picking up on Clements and Shelford’s (1939) aspirations to extend field to the human domain, I stress that, in the Anthropocene, cultural and sociotechnical operations have transformed evolution as living systems adapt (or fail to adapt) to human influence. Our impact on life reaches far beyond the ‘ecology’. Finally, rather than invoke a metaphorical ‘sphere’ (biosphere, semiosphere), the bio-ecology suggests neither closure, a privileged 3rd person perspective nor dynamics can be modelled from a single perspective such as those of biology or semiotics. 4 I describe Steffensen and Fill’s (2014) call ‘cognitive’ ecolinguistics as radical: it looks beyond ecological psychology by stressing the activity of organism-environment systems (or, in Cobley’s terms, biosemiotics). 5 The ‘epistemic conception of mind’ was coined in challenging traditions that build on either the work of Descartes and/or that of Hume – a focus on knowing and coming to know that separates ‘cognition’ from action – (Spurrett and Cowley, 2004). A well-known version of the view is Susan Hurley’s (2001) challenge to models that use an input–output sandwich.

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Nguni societies of Southern Africa, for example, knowing is part of the known or, in isiZulu terms, humanity brings forth humanity (through Ubuntu). Knowing builds on Imbumba, a term translated as ‘working together’ or making use of social activity qua labour.6 In the East, there is no ECM in Lao Tse, Confucius or Buddhism. The harmony of heaven and earth changes with a dynamic of nature and culture: nothing divides the knowing from the known. In the last century, the ECM came under attack in Europe and America too as emphasis on observing shaped, for example cybernetics and radical constructivism. This links with the work of Charles Darwin and Jakob von Uexküll who, in spite of differences, concur that living beings bring forth worlds (species and Umwelten respectively). For Gregory Bateson (1979), there is unity of mind and nature: humanity draws on humanity as coordinative contingencies come to embody a (partly) common world. Turning from the origin of species, Campbell (1965) opened up ‘dual heritage’ views of gene/culture co-evolution (see, Richerson and Boyd, 2005). Culture became part of nature. Today, many think that neo-Darwinists not only overplayed the role of DNA in self-maintenance and replication7 but, in so doing, they lost sight of development and the meaning saturated domain of living bodies. In turning to organisms-withenvironments, Järvilehto (1998) built on ecological psychology, Soviet functional systems theory and Nikolay Bernstein’s work on neural synergies. Independently, Humberto Maturana brought observing to the fore in an abstract model of biology. He traced the said (observations made) to languaging or recursive structural coupling in a consensual domain where persons become observer-actors within a social order (see Raimondi, 2014). Positing the organism’s operational/organizational closure, Francisco Varela proposed that ‘sense making’ grounds all cognitive powers. Others begin with sensorimotor activity and, thus, how people do conscious experience (Noë, 2009). Finally, horizons widen once heteronomy and social forces are seen as partly constitutive of human life-worlds (Steiner and Stewart, 2009; Gahrn-Andersen, 2018). Radical ecolinguistics stresses bidirectional relations between language, languaging beings and other living systems. Humanity manipulates the matter and energy that sustains life’s domains – bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes (including plants, fungi, animals etc.). In this bio-ecology (see, Cowley, 2014b), humans now wield enormous power. To shoulder responsibility in the Anthropocene, we need to develop bioecological awareness that traces human knowing to values. Making such a move, Finke (2014) rejects scientific paradigms and, under Chinese influence, radical ecolinguists connect their work with aspirations for harmony (Zhou, 2017). One-system theories link linguistics to philosophy, psychology, cognitive science and biology. Of all such views, the broadest is biosemiotics (see, Barbieri, 2007). The community build on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, Jakob von Uexküll, Juri Lotman, Gregory Bateson and John Deely. A shifting unity arose under Tom Sebeok’s influence and, since 2001, the community has held annual gatherings and published Biosemiotics, an academic journal. Like all one-system views, biosemiotics challenges gene-centric reduction of life to mechanics. The community sustains two learned societies: Code Biologists pursue how organic codes bring absolute novelties to nature (including their artificial counterparts).8 Others use interpretation to explore evolution and its outcomes. Thus, a Theoretical Biology group based in Prague use subcellular and bacterial systems to pursue how fitness emerges in living communities which use likenesses to bring forth lineages.9 In Tartu, work on animal and plant communication grounds a semiotic view of evolution.10 Finally, the Copenhagen group links science, Peirce’s philosophy, Sebeok’s semiotics and Jesper Hoffmeyer’s (1997) vision of the semiosphere. Emphasis falls on how human culture – and the ‘symbolic’ – arises as living systems use ‘Firstness’ or, as discussed below, what some call quality. While other links also matter,11 CIB links the Peirce-Sebeok-Hoffmeyer tradition to a hypothetical discontinuity that is said to take Homo sapiens “beyond the limitations of biological heredity” (Deely, 2009: 48). In this view, symbolic semiosis builds human understanding around what a monumental discontinuity or ‘epigenic’ break (Deely, 2009).12

6 The term is said to derive from how women collectively worked together to mash dried peas and, as they did so, talked and sang (see, Cowley, 2011). It reflects a pre-modern world where work is social activity. 7 See Shapiro (2011). 8 See Barbieri (2015). 9 See Markos et al. (2013). 10 See Kull et al. (2003). 11 The most important are probably Brier (2008) and Deacon (1997, 2011). 12 In a draft of the paper, I echoed Cowley’s (2002) challenge to Deacon’s view of ‘symbolic reference’. When first published, I met the rebuke that I had misunderstood Peirce (see, De Villiers, 2007; Pietarinen, 2012). While, in 2002, I had not read Peirce, I have since come to see him as taking a distributed perspective (before the name) because, above all, he traces virtual (and cultural) resources to, not brains, but living beings My challenge to Deacon. However, is precisely appeal to neural ‘tokens’ or as De Villiers (2007) suggests neural interpretants. Challenging what, sadly, I called Deacon’s ‘token realism’ – I deny that brains ‘internalise’ words’ or generate ‘symbolic’ interpretants: even without having read Peirce, I argued that Deacon does not need a neural focus. Indeed, for Peirce, symbolic semiosis is public and, thus brain enabled (not brain determined). In striving to modernize Peirce, Deacon thus underplays both the proto-phenomenological feeling of being and the normative (including language) by turning to symbolic interpretants or ‘tokens’ in the brain. Since Cobley avoids neurocentrism, in this paper, I refer to symbolic semiosis (including ‘symbolic reference’ in Peirce’s sense). Nonetheless, we disagree fundamentally. In short, while Cobley attributes a symbolic ‘layer’ to all speaking-while-hearing (primary forms of languaging), I regard most acts of utterance as nonce events that, in Peircean terms, are wholly iconic/indexical (although by appeal to inscriptions, as Kravchenko (2009) notes, they can be pictured as ‘symbolizations’). Literacy uses perduring marks (e.g. alphanumeric symbols-for-use) that structuralist/generativist linguists project onto languaging (i.e. as ‘form’ or Thibault’s (2011) ‘what linguists usually describe’). It is hard to avoid this notorious written language bias (see, Linell, 2004). Not only does it fit lay views but, in academic language games, symbolisations are routinely projected into speech and imagination. In undertaking a calculation, for example, speaking aloud or imagining the operations is willful activity where nonce events perform symbolic function. Nonetheless, ‘symbolic’ practices do not occur in pre-literate communities such as that of the Pirahã (who resiss the use of numbers (Everett, 2012)). I ascribe the rise of symbolization to, not co-evolution qua neural change, but practices based on criteria such as following (potentially) explicit rules, echoing a prophet’s voice or speaking-acting in ways that have objective validity (as in science and engineering). In Deacon’s terms, these sculpt a brain that depends on a principle of re-use (Anderson, 2010) that obviates the brain’s need for ‘symbolic’ interpretatants.

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4. Semiotics, models and endosemiosis Paul Cobley views texts as a ‘fabric of devices’ based on design (2016: 4). In his view, semiotics offers the insight that the same concepts apply beyond ‘high’ culture and, thus, beyond language in its verbal aspect. In CIB, the devices are called signs and semiotics becomes the study of how people know about signs that they ‘possess’. In focussing on signs qua devices known to persons, Cobley uses Peirce. Just as sign possession shapes who a person is – within a cultural heritage – semiotic devices transform who s/he becomes. Whatever the non-semiotic may be, organism-environment relations are ‘enacted and emergent semiotic process’ (2016: 34). This contrasts with both linguistic tradition and mechanistic views of how preexistent signs ar reproduced. By taking text as a model of living language, many semiologists, linguists and others treat ‘signs’ as akin to ‘written words’ (i.e. alphanumeric kinds of symbolization). In challenging such post-modern tendencies, like Harris (1981), Cobley denies that languages are fixed codes or that communication depends on message sending. Yet, rather than turn to contextualization (see, Harris, 1998), Cobley’s inspiration comes from how text-interpreters experience meaning. While human culture draws on the symbolic, experience links semiosis to living nature. For Peirce, a sign carries a meaning for someone. In Signs and meaning in the universe, Hoffmeyer (1997) spells out the logic for living nature. Life-forms link sign processes beyond the body (the exosemiotic) with those within (the endosemiotic) to produce a semiotic domain or semiosphere. With expansion of the exosemiotic, Hoffmeyer argues, semiotic freedom gave increasing independence from the ‘inner code of organic evolution’ (Hoffmeyer, 2010: 31, cited, 2016: 53). Using this big canvas, CIB escapes the dead hand of text by tracing interpretation to endosemiosis or creative sign activity. Although contextualizations are unique (c.f. Harris, 1998), where verbal pattern is used, its social origins (2016: 4) open common human worlds, practices and, above all, co-experience. Thus, as for Järvilehto (1998), Bateson (1979), Maturana and Varela (1980), von Uexküll (1992) and Chemero (2011), organism/environment relations make mind part of nature. While akin to Love’s (2004) first/second-order distinction or how persons use languaging to orient to wordings (at times), Cobley proposes a dual heritage where semiosis is symbolic and iconic/indexical.13 Since semiosis uses a fabric of devices, it is fundamentally relational. Though anchored in materiality (which can have perduring aspects), the real enacts directed change and continuity or synechism.14 Like Deely, therefore, Cobley rejects all forms of ‘nominalism’ to focus on abstract relations or how semiosis sustains how life creates what can be discriminated. This arises because, as Deely argues, we are the only animals capable of recognizing the ‘reality’ of signs (Deely, 2005). In its flow, language thus extends the moorings of ‘primary modelling’ (Sebeok, 1988). A combination of modelling systems shared with other species and their secondary counterparts grants humans a semiotic consciousness that can be used to unpeel nature’s order. Modelling is neither computation nor representation but, rather, enables a degree of subjective experience to fit an animal (cell or organ) together with its world. Taken together, the semiosphere consists of Umwelten that include language and living human beings. Before pursuing the concept of Umwelten, central to CIB, I ask how humans use the verbal to interpret signs, make texts and undertake cultural activity. For Cobley symbolic semiosis enables humans to identify regularities beyond experience. Thirdness, as Peirce calls it, reveals a world of regularity and law or, in other terms, a domain of Secondness. Symbols, habit taking and, above all, experience can thus uncover regularities in, say, physics or chemistry: experience incorporates what is measured or modelled. However, we know much more than this: for Peirce, therefore, the same logic suggests that Secondness builds on something called Firstness. In this view, all living beings have some subjectivity or, as Hoffmeyer (2008) puts it, every sign necessitates a responding something. In spite of nature’s contingency, change is gradual and nature shows little messiness. Further, given symbolic semiosis, humans can know by using signification “in remote fashion” as we remember or imagine “other places/ times, fictions, places ethics” (2016: 32). For Cobley, the capacity is not embodied but, rather, derives from a design feature of linguistic displacement.15 The subjective unites with the symbolic in that the latter is ‘about’ something. Semiotic consciousness thus drives a history of making and interpreting signs that is (at least) as old as life itself. Recently, Joanna Ra˛ czaszek-Leonardi too traces linguistic symbols to how, as Pattee’s first argued, living systems make and record measures that come to constrain their own dynamics (see, Ra˛ czaszek-Leonardi, 2012; Pattee and Ra˛ czaszek-Leonardi, 2012). The same trick, it is suggested, serves all living systems in building constraints on future dynamics. For Deacon, like brains, bacteria use constraints as “progenitors of possibilities” (Deacon, 2011: 5; cited, 2016: 53). As a result without recognizing signs, bacteria/ brains exhibit interpretance or, in his terms, enjoy ententional engagement with a world. Far from needing covariance or content (as in cognitivist models), self-organised change is traced to re-evoking the absent in ‘goal directed’ ways.16 Ententional modelling is, in Peirce’s terms, a matter of using habit-taking based in identifying and interpreting iconic and/ or indexical signs.17

13 Rather than look beyond the brain, like Deacon (1997), he evokes signhood. Others prefer affordances (Gibson, 1979) structural coupling/coordination (Maturana, 1978; Bickhard, 2009), participatory sense-making (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007), interactivity (Kirsh, 1997; Steffensen, 2013), linguistic embodiment (Cowley, 2014a), synergy (Fusaroli et al., 2014), enkinaesthesia (Stuart and Thibault, 2015) and other related terms. 14 Continuity also uses chance or what Peirce calls tychism. 15 As Deely saw, Hockett’s (1959) view parallels Poinsot’s; for Cobley, the symbolic is indigenous to the mind-dependent. 16 By contrast, on a distributed view the non-local assumes familiarity with cognitive ecosystems (see, Hutchins, 2014). 17 On a Peircean logic, the iconic and the indexical are separate ‘layers’ (drawing on Secondness and Firstness); conversely, if one rejects the logic, the distinction ceases to be clearly motivated.

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Even if one can challenge its extension to symbolic semiosis, the move is liberatory because, it seems, humans alone come to recognize that there is signhood. Not only can activity be described (and policed) verbally18 but endosemiosis can ground action, perception and interpretation. Given symbolic semiosis (which, for Cobley, includes all speaking/hearing), the insight reaches far into the semiosphere. Indeed, the same logic applies to biosemiotic devices that constitute organisms, animals, and (encultured) humans. Language unites symbols with endosemiosis and, thus, with what Sebeok calls averbal art. Since this indexical/iconic (averbal) domain grounds the subjective, interpretative powers draw on ancient modelling capacities. Averbal ways of interpreting the world enable people to use experience of the symbolic to expand their modelling (or Umwelten). The dual heritage (2016: 44), leads Deely to an “almost inescapable conclusion”. By hypothesis humans – and humans alone – possess the second order modelling systems or symbolic languages (plural): with these, “the first man entered the movement of biological evolution with a single step” (1966: see Cobley, 2009:46).19 Like computation, modelling grants semiotic freedom to the possessor of mind/brain. As in the Chomskyan project (and his defence of free will) a person can discriminate between distinctions that, in principle, are observable (or, in Chomsky’s case, part of an objective world). Indeed, this resonates with comparing axiomatic science and transformational grammars (Lees, 1957).20 On this misreading of Chomsky, as for Sebeok, memory suffuses ‘meaning’ into models (‘competence’) that allow one to identify and comment on parts of what is out-there. In Sebeok’s terms, a symbolic secondary modelling system reveals distinctions and thus also things/objects. Thus, whereas Chomsky posits an objective domain (a Ding an Sich), Sebeok invokes an Umwelt: people use not rewrite mechanisms but habit-taking that links symbolic semiosis to communicating, coordinating and acting. Modelling uses lawful processes that, remarkably, have parallels in cellular production. Cobley concurs that ‘organic coding’ (Barbieri, 2003) is a remarkable discovery and, yet, shows confidence that interpretation cannot be grounded in such bio-mechanisms. Why so? The answer is ontological; for Barbieri, organic codes are modes of organisation that arose with the origin of life.21 For Cobley, such a move in unnecessary: organic coding is Secondness that, by hypothesis, depends on Firstness. To overplay detail with molecules (or language) is to be distracted by “chatter” (2016: 30): the key lies in allowing signhood to permeate nature and thus make humans denizens of the semiosphere. 5. Implications for culture CIB is a powerful introduction to a major biosemiotic tradition. Many insights arise from using the discipline of Communications to start with, not mind or language, but Umwelten. Rather than build on Peirce alone, CIB asks what semiosis suggests about networks, persons and living collectives. Semiotic unity brings forth a world perceived where human subjects enact cultural life. Below, the idea will be developed around three claims.22 First, Cobley argues that contemporary concern (or obsession) with ethics is limited, political and dangerous. Not only is its individualism unwarranted but, in his view, related utilitarian models have a large part in the massive contemporary destruction of life and ecosystems. Second, since semiotic freedom draws on constraints, collectives and individuals make and use models in modes of repression that are plainly semiotic. Third, defending the humanities, he argues that only interpretative skills can preserve textual invariances and, thus, memory of the unfolding human cultural trajectory. Without en-natured culture, there could be no self, no aesthetics and no ethics. For Cobley, primary modelling systems (that combine the averbal and verbal) enable the relevant powers to be sustained by symbolic semiosis. They allow people to take a distance, use language and, thus, manage expectations, exert self-control and stake out hopes and plans. Cobley traces the idea to pre-modern Latin scholarship and, above all, John Poinsot’s (2013) contrast between ‘mind dependent’ (or ens rationis) and ‘mind independent’ (or ens reale) powers. Long before Peirce (or Locke), Poinsot proposed that symbolic powers enable recognition of natural signs in the world-as-experienced. While united in a grander scale (at least for Deely), ens reale limits the knowable. For Cobley, the ‘dual heritage’ uses the epigenic break between ‘true man’ and his forebears. In modern sociology, a similar dichotomy is associated with the macro-micro gap: Those focused on the macro trace mediated (or mind independent) meaning to a social domain and treat living beings as, say, actants or a matter of habitus. Human identity is thus largely mind independent.23 By contrast, the micro domain pertains to autonomous agents in embodied interaction. Alva Noë

18 For Love (2004) the activity grounds both linguistic reflexivity (e.g. asking what someone means) and analysis (e.g. grammatical and semantic description): it permits the historical emergence of second-order constructs. 19 The hypothetical modelling systems differ from what the folk call languages. However, like Peirce, Deely relies on a ‘symbol first’ logic. Others build on observables to put dynamics first (see, Ra˛ czaszek-Leonardi, 2011; Cowley, 2011). 20 In a famous review, Lees (1957) wrote “Chomsky’s book on syntactic structures is one of the first serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction a comprehensive theory of language which may be understood in the same sense that a chemical, biological theory is ordinarily understood by experts in those fields”. This would be true if, and only if, the ‘intuitions’ of Chomsky’s early work functioned like chemical or biochemical processes. Ironically, for some biosemioticians, this is how primary modelling works even if, for Chomsky, the analogy is purely formal. 21 While Barbieri (2003) offers a version of the RNA world theory, for Maturana autopoietic organization is necessary and sufficient for organism/world systems to control interaction and thus stabilize the co-variant relations of a domain (see, Raimondi, 2014). In recent work, Lane (2015) suggests that hydrothermal vents enabled energy to regulate and stabilise law-like replication of proteins. 22 To focus on the one-system connection, Cobley’s views on self/identity and aesthetics are left aside. Yet his most radical move may be to trace the aesthetic to a survival mechanism for selection that is ‘about’ the world but, yet, not referential (cf. Sebeok, 1979). 23 Whereas Latour (2005) invokes ‘actants’, Bourdieu (1991) and Luhmann (1995) separate social ‘actors’ from biosystemic events, contingencies and lineages.

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(2009) for example, echoes Merleau-Ponty (1996) in tracing consciousness to habits based in sensorimotor experience (that grant individual knowledge). A similar contrast appears in Hutto and Myin’s (2012) contrast between basic minds and how, they posit, mind independent ‘content’ sustains human use of sentence-types. Clearly, these are coarse-grained views of our ‘dual heritage’. In empirically focused work, Cowley and Vallée-Tourangeau (2017) offer an alternative approach to how the ‘real’ (or mind independent) is separated from the imagined (or mind dependent). They propose that lived experience draws on a principle of cognitive separation.24 While not the place to defend this view, it replaces Deely’s epigenic break with a developmental process that, in the second year of life, enables infants to perceive bursts of speech (or signing) as wordings (to ‘recognise signs’). Although having more semiotic freedom than other mammals, human groups also live in and through signs. Since nature limits action/perception, we cannot begin with universals. Modelling systems can be used to explore the limits of constraintbased freedom and, in humans, the use of social products or regularised signs. In Badiou’s (2011) terms, events arise as people are seized by what happens. If this is correct, ethics cannot be based in what ought to be done. The view challenges appeal to voluntarism and the hegemony of human will. Frighteningly, liberal ideologies limit freedom to speech (not action) and highlight individual ‘choice’. Writing cautiously, Cobley finds approved ways of speaking to be limited, dangerous and politically charged. Rejecting political correctness, he traces nature’s well-being to balance across the semiosphere: “for the natural subject, living wholly (nonhuman animals) or partly (human animals) in a world of objects, the other is both everything and oneself.” To care for ourselves, we are bound to care for all kinds of others because, in a world of objects, we and they are one. By recognizing ourselves as denizens of a semiosphere, we experience openness to others (which also affect us). Turning to the living thus challenges both reason and romantic views of man. Even if we hold humanist values, ethics cannot reduce to judgements that “allow us to fulminate without action” (Cobley, 2016: 70). His sense of biocentric responsibility expounds, not growth, not human values, but the semiosphere’s well-being. For Cobley, this grounds a much needed anti-humanist ethics. Semiotic freedom gave rise to symbolic semiosis which, in turn, gives humans wriggle room that other species lack. In terms of historically derived constraints, Cobley argues, these functions are repressive. Indeed, symbolic semiosis demands selection from endosemiotic promptings. In saying anything, much is left unsaid (and much rendered unsayable). Once mass alphabetic literacy emerges, institutions come to systematically repress averbal understanding and modes of action. In helping children attune to the ‘scaffolds of the word’, they are inoculated to the charms of discourse by a focus on what is to be said. This assault on ententional processes devalues the not-present. Children are socialised into, not close reading, but using texts in line with procedures for dealing with resources. Post-academic education relies on rhetoric of innovation, growth and market driven consumer choice. In overlooking natural intelligence – human primary modelling – the humanities are challenged. In liberalism, nature is sacrificed in the name of individuals, corporations and universal values. In response to such repressive apparatuses, Cobley argues, one needs to reject rhetoric about relevance to a ‘real’ world. CIB endorses Collini’s (2012) view that the ‘real’ world is a fictive place where hard-faced robot like people are devoted to careers, work and making money (Cobley, 2016: 109).25 Emphasising the actual, CIB stresses abduction and thus interpretative powers. Accordingly, Cobley invites collective action that expands how sensata draw on brute reality. Biosemiosis can connect close reading of texts, semiotics and self-directed exploration of nature. CIB thus challenges liberal, socialist and conservative views of knowledge. While striving to identify the limits of human agency, the humanities also need to pursue “continuity with the agency of other organisms on this planet” (2016: 123). Since the field is non-disciplinary, the rhetoric of two cultures can be replaced by attention to what is repressed and/or suppressed. Indeed, for good and for ill, science is limited to what is measured and modelled: semiosis, by contrast, opens up how contingencies shape nature’s paths. As living systems, humans too command rich understanding. One must therefore scrupulously avoid overplaying universalist principles that link the humanities to either tradition or ideal models of man. Rather, as an endosemiotic product, social-semiotic agency forces rethinking of ethics, aesthetics, self and our responsibility for fellow species. It matters, therefore, that what is modelled by using scientific measurement and control is a tiny part of the semiosphere. Meaning in an Umwelt arises from and adheres not to the mastery of material, but how living beings relate to their worlds.

6. Sensata, interpretation and brute reality As in deep ecology (Næss, 1989), biosemiotics demands a refocus on the living. It shifts reason from its seat in the brain (or mind) by appeal to, not just natural selection, semiosis or what Wittgenstein (1957) calls natural history. Leaving behind Næss’s ‘ecological self’, knowing connects the certainties (and gaps) of collective and communalist values with lived experience. In such a context, using anti-humanist views as an antidote to liberal (and neo-liberal) values is increasingly common. It fits, say, Bateson’s (1979) necessary unity of mind and nature, and how ecolinguists focus on how language affects actual ecosystems

24 Given first-order language (or languaging), organism-environment coupling, not modelling, grounds coming act more or less willfully or use the resources of reason (see, Neumann and Cowley, 2017). Children orient to signs of culture at 3 months (Cowley et al., 2004), engage in triadic behaviour by the end of the first year (Trevarthen and Hubley, 1978; Tomasello, 2009) and, later, become skill-using ‘sayers’ and ‘players’ (Perinat and Sadurni, 1999; GahrnAndersen and Cowley, 2017). 25 In correspondence, Cobley adds that he finds Collini’s conclusions ‘complacent’: I concur.

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(see, Steffensen and Fill, 2014) to promote bio-ecological awareness. Nature encompasses and permeates humanity by imposing a duty of care, granting semiotic freedom and repression and enabling science, the arts and non-disciplinary knowing. By tracing knowledge to living, one challenges epistemic theories of mind and, above all, neuro-centrism. Equally, recognition of the semiotic web denies function to genetic sequences or computationalism’s empty appeal to ‘content’. By seeing humanity as part of living nature, one ceases to treat knowledge as language-based and descriptive. In this challenge to fixed codes, Cobley turns to, not first-order language or languaging, but, interpretation. In part, no doubt, this is because the humanities traditionally focus on texts; however, it also draws on Poinsot’s recognition that reference is narrower than interpretation. While texts (and diagrams) ground logic, they are also signs for a someone. Further, since any perduring sign (or object) can take on many values, interpretation can never be mechanical. For the same reason, signs can co-exist with an aggregate of marks that is, at once, a material ensemble and an exemplar of symbolic, indexical and iconic semiosis. Consider the following:26

THaT Both aggregates of marks can be interpreted in relation to intentions (as here!) which emerge as, at a now, a person makes/interprets the perceived. To say that THaT translates as QUEllO’ or, as in Wikipedia, that the hieroglyphic means “nubile young woman” tells us little – not nothing. Although totally uninformative about mark making/interpreting, it is beyond dispute that semiotic description can identify symbolic properties. Our concern, however, is with how symbolic semiosis reaches beyond written marks. On analogy with THaT and the hieroglyphic, one can argue that what applies to the symbolic also applies to the indexical and the iconic. This is readily justified. Humans can record and describe indexical/ iconic response to all observable objects/events. Thus, in what Barbieri (2003) calls organic coding, signhood applies to a DNA-RNA ‘artifact making’ and, in a closely related view, to function in the nucleosome (see, Markos et al., 2013). Because physical entities function as signs, organised DNA-material can influence a cell’s replication, repair and indeed the translation used in metabolism. In the nucleosome, for example, about 147 DNA “characters” wrap around 8 proteins that stabilize the strand of DNA while enabling/denying proteins access to genetic material (Markos et al., 2013). Proteins in a living cell are, at once, for a lineage, for an individual and (in a multicellular system) for parts of a larger whole. The question is what stands in for the person who interprets THaT or the hieroglyphic? Beyond that, there are striking parallels: the physical DNA material uses absent or historically-derived structure. Outcomes are, on each occasion, unique: its ‘objects’ are partly non-local and escape from Whitehead’s (1967) ‘fallacy of simple location’.27 One can ask: (1) What, if anything, is gained by following Hoffmeyer in treating these signs as being for someone? (2) Does what applies to the indexical/iconic also apply to human use of symbolic aggregates? And (3) Are we to extend the human ability to treat perduring entities as symbolic to the domain of face-to-face languaging? In its classic sense, these are ontological questions. For Cobley, since molecular material (or THaT), can be described symbolically, it has semiotic ‘reality’. Further THaT is as symbolic as, say, an striking way of rubbing ones’ hands or, indeed, mimicry of the gesture. Perceivable reality links what is recognized as a sign with what, without recognition, functions that way. Ontologically, therefore, the symbolic (whatever its scope) can build on a logic of indexicality. In Peircean terms Thirdness presupposes Secondness. It follows, then, that an aggregate of marks or gesture can be re-voiced in something the ‘same’ way as a protein contributes to metabolism. Peirce extends the logic: a similar relation connects Secondness – the indexical –to what, he thinks, is fundamental (Firstness). Thus, reality has a foundational category.28 Cobley puts it thus: The realm of firstness is difficult to conceive but it is usually understood in terms of ‘feeling’; firstness has no relations, it is not to be thought of in opposition to another thing and is merely a ‘possibility’. It is like a musical note, or a vague sense of taste or a colour (2016:11). In saying, it is like a ‘feeling’, the claim’s logic demands a ‘someone’. Thus, if an indexical is an interpretant or a musical note, vague taste, or colour it is also a sign relation. While usually un-noticed, if perceived, Firstness engenders change. In Hoffmeyer’s sense, a ‘someone’ uses a historically derived possibility. With more caution, Gregory Bateson would say that, in given circumstances, a difference makes a difference. The contrast matters because, if Hoffmeyer makes a someone intrinsic to detecting a difference making difference, for Bateson, the system is part of observing – it emerges from an observer’s

26 In this context each token of THaT exemplifies a ‘sign’ in that it is, at once, a material ensemble and, as such, can evoke what can be described as symbolic, indexical and iconic values. Given that the parts, but not the whole, are ‘conventional’, a reader construal has a considerable semiotic freedom in its construal. 27 My point is twofold: what unites code biology and biosemiotics is that their proponents accept that perduring and replicating marks/entities can fulfil biological functions that are not conventional. Second, where signs perdure as aggregates, they can take on conventional values that, in certain language games are back-projected into speech and imagination. On this view, the ‘symbolic’ (but not the iconic/indexical) always depends on the activity of an observer or, as Roy Harris would have said, a ‘sign-maker’. 28 Like Deely, Cobley allows for a brute reality and, like Barbieri, he acknowledges organic coding. However, rather than see it as a mechanism, Cobley regards it as a model (drawing on Firstness and a human capacity for symbolic reference).

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history. For Cobley (and Hoffmeyer), the perceiver is observer-independent or a ‘mind’; for Bateson (1979), the observer is intrinsic to the system observed. While much more could be said, as Poinsot thought, Cobley’s knowing excludes brute reality (it combines ens reale and ens rationis).29 Such a realism is built on appeal to Firstness (not brute reality). Of course, in the biosemiotic community, while some accept this ontology, others do not. The reader will make up her or his mind about the issue and its (lack of) importance. The next step is less contentious. Whatever we make of Hoffmeyer’s ‘someone’, distinctions can be made and valued (as differences that make a difference) if – and when – they are retained. In dynamical systems terms, habits can be reconceived as constraints. Thus, as a system adopts a constraint, future conditions may alter the system’s activity. For example, what begins as a response to contingency may, at a later time, grant functional value to acting/perceiving in that way. Interactional history enables constraints to shape teleological function. If symbols pick out how sensata have already been used, interpretations become possible. For Hoffmeyer, a someone senses the iconic (and if brute reality exists, it is unknowable). For Bateson, sensata are (non-semiotic) aspects of brute reality noted by a system that includes a human observer.30 The latter view thus deflates mental and subjective views of ‘semiosis’: Bateson’s one-system view is closer to enactive-ecological tradition.

7. Biosemiotics as a theory The Copenhagen group treats biosemiotics as a theory of life.31 If Firstness is foundational, it is perceived by a subject and thus a necessary basis for human ‘possession’ of language. This weak mentalism traces grammar and powers of displacement (2016: 121) to a mind or brain. Possessors of language are closed systems that use what Brier calls “inner worlds of qualia” (cited, 2016: 41). In this view, Firstness uses myriads of networks of constraints (Poinsot’s ens rationis) in all interpretation. Texts co-exist as devices of rule-following structures that come to be “designed through habitual sign use to reach a particular audience”. While dependent on “habitual sign use”, ‘someone’ enables text making and interpretation. In terms of modelling systems, averbal promptings co-function with the habit-driven use of semiotic devices. On such a view, much more than Secondness makes interpretation neither mechanistic nor ‘mind independent’.32 Weak mentalism traces symbolic semiosis to mind dependent action. Unlike a functionalist’s original intentionality (or content), Firstness ensures that, for a someone, interpretation/activity can be conventional (relatively ‘neutral’) and regular (sensitive to indexical factors). This is knowable because – and only because – humans discriminate between real (or imaginary) objects. In Poinsot’s terms, we discover ens reale or, for Sebeok, a living being ‘differentiates an Umwelt’ (2016: 36). While far from individualistic, semiotic experience underpins the real (2016: 21). Human semiotic experience uses indices that link ‘feeling’ with qualia. By linking social semiosis with endosemiosis, habitual sign use allows interpretation to reveal what signhood is (including ens rationis). Given that the averbal arts shape habits (or set constraints), one can even learn to use texts neutrally. The same applies to inscriptions (or signs of writing) and the logics of induction/deduction. Cobley’s view is not Peirce’s: given his concern with the ethical and the aesthetic, he stresses how averbal art grounds context sensitivity. The balancing of the neutral with the human ability to use circumstances is, for Cobley, a matter of connecting the known with ‘feeling’. Whereas von Uexküll’s Innenwelt is inner, explicit interpretations also use what Chomsky called ‘intuitions’. For Sebeok, coming to possess a (symbolic) language transforms primary modelling (2016: 121)33 such that, for Jakobson even a psychoacoustic sign can be perceived as ‘real’. Indeed, a capacity to identify distinctive features grounds knowledge of (some kind of) code and, thus, overcome ‘isolation in space and time’ (Jakobson, 1985: 101). Here Jakobson echoes what he himself calls Saussure’s ‘genius’: one comes to see a tree as a tree or, in Italy, as un’ albero. At one time a church can demand silence and, in another, be a place for taking selfies. In such cases, symbolic semiosis does more than link particulars to generals (‘categorization’): rather than invoke certainty (Wittgenstein, 1980), language games and agreement in judgement (Wittgenstein, 1957), taking a distance is attributed to a 'someone’ who uses linguistic displacement. Thus, as Sebeok also insists, nonhuman animals cannot master symbols.34 Endosemiosis applies when, for example, a frog catches a fly or, indeed, a dog

29 In correspondence, Cobley asks if this should be qualified as ‘human’ knowing. I am not sure. Although this was Poinsot’s (2013) view, placing nonhumans outside ens rationalis seems to imply the autonomy of linguistic reference. 30 By challenging mentalism, the sensata can be seen as bound up with observing: for Maturana, ‘representations’ derive from a scientist’s world view. Hoffmeyer’s ‘someone’ may also be a theoretical construct. 31 There is a parallel with the iconic Escherichia coli bacterium that uses its flagellae to climb a sugar gradient. For those who invoke sense-making (see, Varela et al. (1991)) life draws on the ‘autonomy’ of the living. They use Kant to build an epistemological argument with an ontological conclusion. As Raimondi (2014) notes, Maturana’s bio-logic avoids this by contrasting kinds of description. 32 One could contrast Firstness with, say, Varela’s sense-making or tracing language to first-order activity. The former treats autonomy as a priori and, in the latter view, first-order language grants humans the skills used in interpreting written marks as symbolisations. 33 Sebeok studied under Roman Jakoboson and his career flowered as American Descriptivism was overtaken by a ‘generative enterprise’ where formbased description linked a theory of acquisition to one of universal grammar (Chomsky, 1965). Opposing such code models, Sebeok took a nonmechanistic, view minds that come to possess and use the features of languages. Their symbolic aspect (not Universal grammar) was taken to set humans apart from non-human animals. 34 Cobley claims that Sebeok surrendered this view and that a ‘symbolic language’ is unlike what linguists see as a language. However, this is not clarified. Today, domesticated bonobos act in ways that are symbolic (whether or not they (or we) ‘possess symbols’). Sebeok, of course, was countering the view that nonhuman animals ‘lack’ Universal Grammar. While such a debate makes sense within cognitive internalism (and the computational model of mind), it now seems as outdated as discussion about whether the study of the brain had any relevance to cognition (assumed NOT to be the case by early forms of functionalism).

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waits for his master to come home. However, animal learning and adaptation draws on the same primary modelling that enables human to use circumstances to adjust behaviour, attention and perception. Symbolic semiosis links habitual use of particulars that ‘nest’ in primary modelling: people rely on sensata and ‘feelings’ or, in Brier’s (2008) view, qualia. Interpretation has an averbal basis that brings sensitivity to reading or, indeed, circumstances that demand action. What a language adds is a modelling system controlled by a ‘someone’s’ habits and mastery of, it is assumed, knowledge of reference and grammatical structure. 8. The modelling and the modeller CIB’s one-system view places humans in a semiosphere that includes language. So how can a mere individual praise nondisciplinary work, challenge an ethics of ‘the ought’, and, with urgency, warn us about semiotic repression? As we have seen, Cobley invokes the co-function of two modelling systems. To the extent that a someone exerts semiotic freedom, habits link primary and secondary modelling through a network of mediating devices (for a someone). Linguistic displacement can thus be used to arrange what is perceived as a symbolic fabric. Once devices are selected, layering occurs: text evokes symbolic reference, rule-like structures and metaphors/realities of feeling and Firstness. In that this depends on interpretation it is mind dependent: in time, of course, experience sensitises writers/readers to textual fabric. In authoring a book, interpreting is supplemented by modelling systems that grant devices coherence by referring to an audience. Symbolic functionality thus coexists with structure and a sensing of quality: the modeller is known as Paul Cobley but modelling depends on tandem like mental systems. Like a text, mind unites symbolic, indexical and iconic kinds of devices (and images) that mirror reality (an Umwelt). To begin with interpretation of texts is thus highly compatible with a model of endosemiosis. Those less attracted to unifying theories will baulk at separating the modeller from modelling system(s). They will also worry that, if the symbolic emerges in the cell, it is hard to see why that aspect of languaging deserves such weight. For a sceptic, it is odd that, while rejecting post-Saussurian tradition, CIB depends on weak mentalism and the assertion that humans know that they possess signs. Let us reconsider the aggregates used above.

THaT As perduring signs, the marks have a remarkable autonomy. Writing extends the indexical and, in so doing, can readily be classified as symbolic semiosis. Thus, a careful reader ‘knows’ that THaT is not just a word and that the hieroglyph indexes virginity. Equally, she knows that the tree contrasts with tree in adding what the ancients’ ‘grammatical meaning’ to indexical structure. But does a molecular process ‘know’ that it is dependent on a someone? It is easy to be sceptical. Simply, one can posit that human subjects learn to ascribe a symbolic status to what is out-there (especially when marks perdure). For the Peircean, however, this is a mistake. Making an ontological claim, the symbolic is taken to be intrinsic to – not perduring material entities – but semiosis. Like the indexical, it is a layer of ens reale. Further, is a third layer is inferred: in being moved to say ‘the tree’, a ‘something’ drives the selection (and ‘it’ must differ from the something that generates tree). This Firstness is a perceived ‘possibility’ with ‘no relations’ (a difference that makes a difference for someone). For Cobley, this pinpoints both modelling and, crucially, how we too need a ‘someone’ like those that populate the semiosphere.35 For the sceptic, however, this model overdoes appeal to semiotic ‘layers’. In the first place, the symbolic may pertain, above all, to literate groups (and Donald’s (1991) theoretical culture). Second, like indexicality, iconicity may be intrinsic to a modeller (or observer)-usually there is no ‘someone’. Indeed, since the symbolic and indexical are ill defined (e.g. applying to cells, acts of utterance and aggregates of marks) the sceptic rejects Peircean ontology. Distinctions between semiotic layers arise, it seems, from reifying descriptions of (non-semiotic) process.

9. The one-system context Where modelling systems are separable from the modeller, the averbal gains priority over behaviour and habits-taken over events. Seemingly, the evolution of brains and minds uses, not action/perception, but feelings and habit taking. On similar grounds, Deacon suggests that no simple languages exist because, mind-dependent behaviour uses brain-based ‘symbolic reference’.36 For Deacon, (symbolic) languages have primacy over languaging and their evolution depends on

35 Aristotle offers a hylomorphic view based on the duality of description. This can be applied to language (see, Lassiter, 2016): matter and form can appear in the functionality of a perceived object (for someone), written sign or, indeed, vocal/manual/facial gesture. 36 As in footnote 11, I endorse Cowley (2002) in rejecting Deacon’s view of symbolic reference. This arises, I believe from combining written language bias with the neurocentric views of the turn of the century. In fact, as with aggregates of marks, symbolic status is distributed between the interpreter’s brain, body and ability to see certain patterns.

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how brains co-evolved.37 Not only is prioritizing a language over languaging akin to a code view (see, Love, 2004; Kravchenko, 2007) but it echoes many of the 101 kinds of written language bias that Linell (2004) finds in linguistics. For the sceptic, therefore, the real is ascribed to neither brains nor Firstness. Rather, such categories are logical back-projections based on how a person, or living soul, describes experience (and the ‘concept of mind’). In fact, bio-systems build constraints that grant them powers: when swifts fly around buildings, for example, the pitch of their screeching co-varies with the quality of sound. This may well be have affordance or indexical value for the swifts. Hearing it as a Doppler effect attests to, not Firstness (and ens reale), but a human observer’s (partial) grasp of terminology. Experience of languaging, and languages, reveals aspects of brute reality. How we hear swifts, Wittgenstein (1957) would say, depends on human forms of life. It is a myth that language consists in items that correspond to written words and rules of composition (Harris, 1981). While endorsing this critique, Cobley nonetheless traces language to symbolic semiosis. The difference, whatever it is, is not specified. Nonetheless, Cobley is aware of the tensions and dedicates pages of CIB to why Sebeok never wholly abandoned the view that, in some sense, languages are codes. Yet, like Hoffmeyer, CIB takes a ‘wide’ view of the symbolic (i.e. as including what the folk call the linguistic). One likely reason is that Peirce was concerned with logic and, in this field, true propositions a taken to show that language unites verbal units and syntactic/semantic relations (in the philosophy of language, related views are entirely standard). Second, in an ad hoc way, one can take the view that textual interpretation depends on being able to return to unchanging aggregates of marks: given their perduration, linguistic multi-scalarity is redescribed as ‘symbolic’. Of course, such views cannot be refuted: all utterances could be based in symbolic semiosis. Just as with appeal to universal mental grammars, one cannot ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’ human possession of symbols. In the first place a sceptic can insist that, just as with the generativist’s I-language, the model builds merely assumes that there are ‘real’ entities that correspond to, say, THaT or the hieroglyphic. In that the reality cannot be specified, it remains metaphysical. A counter view is also possible. Language can be traced to speech gesture (or signing) and how sensorimotor experience (of vocal and other expression) set off enskillment that, eventually, grants literates the use of symbolisations. Its basis lies in, not Firstness, but what is called coordination, languaging, conversation and the like. Further evidence arises in that, in pre-literate communities, ritual seems more important than any kind of reference. By making such a move, the ‘feeling’, behaviour and voice/gesture of Hoffmeyer’s inner ‘someone’ are replaced by how a person shapes the flow of experience or, for Thibault (2018) ‘selving’. Whereas mentalism and Firstness treat languaging as chatter (2016: 30), evidence suggests that the sensorimotor – and the voice – shapes experience (see, Cowley, 2014a). One cannot just ignore interactional analysis, the power of dialogue and the microsocial dimension of human life and relationships: living bodies use coordination, affect and sensorimotor empathy in, for example, deciding what to say, what to repress and how to manage face. Indeed, ranging in time may use, not linguistic displacement, but the principle of cognitive separation. While treating (some) objects as ‘things’ appears in all tool using species, in human infants “develop a capacity to use objects” (Winnicott, 1969:712). They learn to act as selves: the view that human subjects use natural history has philosophical antecedants: Dasein needs just such a precursor and, for Wittgenstein (1980), certainty arises in a domain of language games (e.g. grasping “This is my right hand”). On such views, there is no ontological divide. By contrast, a semiotic ontology proposes a dual heritage of modelling. It thus echoes Chomsky’s dualism, Deely’s ‘epigenic’ break, Hoffmeyer and Emmeche’s (1991) code duality, and Sebeok’s strong view of the exclusively human nature of languages (qua symbolic domains). In spite of continuity across nature, CIB seems to accept Hoffmeyer’s aspiration for a theory of organisms as subjects that can be placed alongside appeal to natural selection and umwelt theory.38 Poinsot’s divide between ens reale and ens rationis has, we find, a surprisingly long reach.

10. Subjects as organisms For Cobley human organisms are subjects pertaining to a symbolic species. Others, by contrast, trace human subjectivity to how coordinating human experience enables infants to individuate in a social domain. The contrast opens debate – are human subjects organisms of a special kind and/or does languaging enable infants to become living subjects? The question invites empirical work: one can ask whether the second-order constructs of languages derive from face-to-face coordination or break nature’s continuity (as Chomsky, Sebeok and Deely claim). While once framed around innateness (whatever that means), today the emphasis falls on the locus of control. Is the mind/brain an interpreter and/or does understanding spread between bodies, brains and a lived world? CIB builds a view of language on symbolic semiosis. As applied to texts, the approach raises questions about life on earth. Decisions about the future of the bio-ecology. Cobley suggests, depends on the humanities as much as on technoscience. Indeed, if environmental catastrophe looms (does it?), this is reason to reject individualism, voluntarism and universalism.

37 The view chimes with Saussure’s emphasis on langue, Lotman’s (2005) modelling system, Chomsky’s (1965) ‘competence’ and Jakobson’s use of Husserl to defend the ‘reality’ of distinctive features. As in the pedagogical tradition associated with the Tripos (and its successor), language can be described in terms of strings or constructions that pertain to particular traditions and serve specific uses. 38 Given faith in ‘Firstness’, dualism vanishes; without faith, one rejects oppositions like verbal/averbal or digital/analogue. Here Pattee and Ra˛ czaszekLeonardi’s (2012) shift from signal/sign to how the not present (or memory) constrains dynamics (or semiosis) is crucial: organic coding uses, not DNA-material, but pattern that is ‘interpreted’ by the dynamics of protein systems.

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For Cobley, the values are as outdated as the socialist’s ‘new man’. These arguments can be separated from questions of ontology: what matters is how living things cooperate in the biosphere. CIB thus breaks the stifling optimism of selfcongratulating Western elites: in spite of semiotic freedom, it admits that institutional and technological apparatuses drive systematic repression. As Cobley notes, hegemonic and ‘universalist’ values limit, on the one hand, political debate, on the other, duty to the bio-ecology. If the semiosphere is not to be overwhelmed – if plants, animals, fungi, people etc. are to survive – we need to replace an ethics of ‘ought’ by striving to change the course of history. Finally, the optimist can hope that Cobley is right that the humanities can reconnect local concerns, the global setting and historical legacies. Nothing else can offer non-disciplinary understanding of life, texts (and, perhaps, language) that underpins what ancient Chinese wisdom calls harmony between heaven and earth. The weakness of CIB is also its basis in the humanities. Rather than supplement scientific ways of knowing, Cobley accepts Peircean realism. In short, one can reject an ontology based on Firstness on pragmatic grounds. If we do not, biosemiotics comes to be defined in opposition to what can be described by models and measures. For some, this is unfortunate. Perhaps more seriously, one can object, if everything builds on Firstness, is the concept not trivial? And, it can be added, why invoke a logic as opposed to, say, another kind of theory? Accordingly, I stress that the ethical arguments apply even if one emphasizes events at the nexus of brains, bodies and world. On such a view, activity in which wordings play a part, languaging, can ground descriptions that may be iconic, indexical, symbolic etc.: these can be used to transform extended human ecosystems by linking the ethical and the aesthetic to mechanistic science. For example, non-disciplinary work can pursue how dynamics and energy enable linguistic signalling to change the world. Given energetic and communicative resources, we may head off catastrophe. With Maturana, Gibson, ecological psychologists, enactivists, biosemioticians, ecolinguists and others, we can strive to raise human awareness of interdependence with the bio-ecology.

11. Is meaning biosemiotic? Texts have richness that defies linguistic analysis: meaning is irreducible to linguistic form and function. Thus, on different encounters, even THaT can be construed many ways (or not at all). In that sense, at least, linguistic meaning has a biosemiotic basis. On any a one-system view, meaning is bound to arises as living beings encounter what is ‘out-there’. In CIB, of course, this is construed ontologically: Biosemiosis enacts meaning (or ens reale). It is argued that, given symbolic semiosis, humans can reanimate Firstness and Secondness. In making his case Cobley places persons who live in language within the semiosphere. The human Umwelt draws on language and thus a history of living. Much is gained from putting this in plain sight: further, whatever we think of meaning as biosemiosis, Peircean realism and Hoffmeyer’s ‘someone’, experience and acts of meaning inform languaging and languages. Linguistic meaning (semantic, pragmatic and discursive) is secondary and derived. Cobley traces interpretation to how linguistic displacement co-functions with human modelling systems. But, if one deflates symbolic semiosis, simpler views are possible. Above all, it may use how culture draws on literacies. Poinsot’s dual heritage and Deely’s epigenic break can be replaced by appeal to the entanglement of brains, bodies and world. On such a view, first-order languaging enacts sense saturated dynamics as people coordinate both with and without the verbal aspect of language. Development draws on experience of meaning as human subjects (or Dasein) emerge as babies individuate and, gradually, learn to talk (i.e. speak and hear while drawing on wordings). Much depends on how circumstances can be reconceived as aspects of the world (real or imaginary). Given the principle of cognitive separation, first-order languaging can describe everything except first-order languaging.39 Meaning links subjective sensitivity to quality with a history of living with the manifold and messy nature of out-thereness. While rejecting Peircean ontology, meaning can nonetheless be described as biosemiotic. Regardless of theoretical differences, living is experience that, in humans, affords linguistic acts. As part of the bio-ecology, human subjects link material cultural with what is out-there. Regardless of whether the symbolic is separate or dependent on re-voicing, each one of us occupies a historical locus. Western theory went wrong in adopting an epistemic conception of mind. This divided knowing from the known, the true from the good and, worst of all, limited science to what can be measured and modelled. In this lens, language reduces to form-with-function. As Cobley sees, the results were dire: we repressed how living enacts meaning. Rather, overplaying ‘content’ and the verbal, we lost sight of how persons self-construct within the living world. The general was elevated over wisdom, history and the local. In fact, humans become human through others and, in so doing, cooperate in bringing about unpredictable change. By recognizing this, the humanities can refashion the sciences, bring the repressed into the open and emphasise our duty to the bio-ecology.

Appendix A. Supplementary data Supplementary data related to this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2018.04.004.

39 Whereas Cowley (2017) sees this as Love’s central achievement, the latter denies the view (Love, 2017). My point is that whatever it is that brings forth utterance acts or first-order language is bound to elude description: at best we have rough sketches of bursts of speech (even if we can measure spectrographs, model speech and ‘rationalise’ why we say what we say as we say it).

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