What is it about?
Semiosis (the use of signs for communication or other purposes), and particularly visual semiosis (the use of signs channeled through vision), is not exclusive to humans. All animal species, all living beings (including other forms of life outside the animal kingdom) have semiotic activity. But we can go even beyond that. It is possible to maintain that also in the world that is usually called “inanimate” or “inert” some kind of semiotic activity takes place. This paper proposes a view in which the elements and organisms in the natural environment, instead of being classified into separate categories are thought of as forming a continuous gradation from one to another, from lower to upper levels of complexity and semiotic behavior. From this, and from further arguments, it is possible to maintain that semiosis permeates the entire universe. A special point is made concerning the interaction of light stimuli with matter and living organisms, which in some cases has produced the systems of vision that many animals posses, and in some other cases produce reactions and changes that can be considered as a kind of protosemiotic activity.
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Why is it important?
The paper extends the concept of semiosis or semiotic activity (the use of signs for communication or other purposes), particularly in the domain of vision, to all orders of nature, includind the traditional categories of animals, plants, and minerals. Many people consider that semiosis is something exclusive to humans. The author of this article is aligned with other researchers who think that this activity occurs in all the kingdoms of nature.
Perspectives
This article can generate an interesting polemic, since it proposes (with concrete examples related to the processing of light in various orders of nature) an extension of the limited conception that a large part of the semioticians and the public in general have about semiosis (the use of signs for communication and other purposes). Instead of considering it as a process that only humans can perform, it is shown that semiosis extends to all levels of nature. One of the arguments to sustain this is that instead of establishing definite divisions between different orders of nature it is more appropriate to understand them in terms of gradual transformations, and therefore what is applied to certain levels (for example, to humans) can also be applied to others, simply with differences in degree.
Jose Caivano
Universidad de Buenos aires
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Cognition and semiotic processing of luminous stimuli in various orders of the natural world, Cognitive Semiotics, January 2015, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/cogsem-2015-0010.
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