Author: gnox

Yuri Lotman (1990, 123 ff.) referred to cultural meaning space as the ‘semiosphere.’

Humanity, immersed in its cultural space, always creates around itself an organized spatial sphere. This sphere includes both ideas and semiotic models and people’s recreative activity, since the world which people artificially create (agricultural, architectural and technological) correlates with their semiotic models. There is a two-way connection: on the one hand, architectural buildings copy the spatial image of the universe and, on the other hand, this image of the universe is constructed on an analogy with the world of cultural constructs which mankind creates.

— Lotman (1990, 203)

Jesper Hoffmeyer extended the term to show that human culture is only one level of semiosis, grounded in much broader biological phenomena. Hoffmeyer’s own note clarifies the concept of ‘semiosphere’:

I have defined the semiosphere as ‘a sphere like the atmosphere, hydrosphere, or biosphere that permeates these spheres from their innermost to outermost reaches and consists of communication: sound, scent, movement, colours, forms, electrical fields, various waves, chemical signals, touch, and so forth – in short, the signs of life’ (Hoffmeyer 1996:46). The concept was originally introduced by the Russian-Estonian semiotician Yuri Lotman, who explicitly used it in comparison to Vernadsky’s idea of the biosphere. For Lotman (2000 [1990]: 125), the semiosphere remained a cultural concept: ‘The unit of semiosis, the smallest functioning mechanism, is not the separate language but the whole semiotic space in question. This is the space we term the semiosphere. The semiosphere is the result and the condition for the development of culture; we justify our term by analogy with the biosphere, as Vernadsky defined it.’ For more details about the origin of these terms, see Sebeok (1999). John Deely accepts my use of the word semiosphere and suggests ‘signosphere as a term more appropriate for the narrower designation of semiosphere in Lotman’s sense, leaving the broader coinage and usage to Hoffmeyer’s credit’ (Deely 2001a: 629).

(Cobley 2010, 398)

A felt meaning, to use Eugene Gendlin’s term, is an attractor in a meaning space. The more significant it is felt to be, the more it will attract thought-signs that can carry its significance, and immediate objects to which it can be applied. A newly experienced meaning especially will tend to increase the breadth of whatever sign conveys it, i.e. the sign will be applied to as broad a range of objects as possible. This is most obvious in the case of a child learning a new word, as John Dewey observed:

A newly acquired meaning is forced upon everything that does not obviously resist its application, as a child uses a new word whenever he gets a chance or as he plays with a new toy. Meanings are self-moving to new cases. In the end, conditions force a chastening of this spontaneous tendency. The scope and limits of application are ascertained experimentally in the process of application. The history of science, to say nothing of popular beliefs, is sufficient indication of the difficulty found in submitting this irrational generalizing tendency to the discipline of experience. To call it a priori is to express a fact; but to impute the a priori character of the generalizing force of meanings to reason is to invert the facts. Rationality is acquired when the tendency becomes circumspect, based upon observation and tested by deliberate experiment.

— John Dewey, 1925 (ED2:59)

Rationality then is a symptom of semiotic self-control, the key to learning from experience.

Willard Quine (1961, 41, 42): ‘our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body …. The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science.’ Karl Popper disagrees with Quine’s ‘meaning holism’ because ‘though every one of our assumptions may be challenged, it is quite impracticable to challenge all of them at the same time’; and ‘almost all of the vast amount of background knowledge which we constantly use in any informal discussion will, for practical reasons, necessarily remain unquestioned’ (Popper 1968, 322-3). But when any assumption is explicitly challenged, changes in the others may be implicit, and take time to unfold. Popper’s objection may be overlooking the continuity between consciousness and meaning space, which Peirce explained by means of a metaphor:

Consciousness is rather like a bottomless lake in which ideas are suspended, at different depths. Percepts alone are uncovered by the medium. The meaning of this metaphor is that those which [are] deeper are discernible only by a greater effort, and controlled only by much greater effort. These ideas suspended in the medium of consciousness, or rather themselves parts of the fluid, are attracted to one another by associational habits and dispositions,— the former in association by contiguity, the latter in association by resemblance. An idea near the surface will attract an idea that is very deep only so slightly that the action must continue for some time before the latter is brought to a level of easy discernment. Meantime the former is sinking to dimmer consciousness. There seems to be a factor like momentum, so that the idea originally dimmer becomes more vivid than the one which brought it up. In addition, the mind has but a finite area at each level; so that the bringing of a mass of ideas up inevitably involves the carrying of other ideas down. Still another factor seems to be a certain degree of buoyancy or association with whatever idea may be vivid, which belongs to those ideas that we call purposes, by virtue of which they are particularly apt to be brought up and held up near the surface by the inflowing percepts and thus to hold up any ideas with which they may be associated. The control which we exercise over our thoughts in reasoning consists in our purpose holding certain thoughts up where they may be scrutinized. The levels of easily controlled ideas are those that are so near the surface as to be strongly affected by present purposes. The aptness of this metaphor is very great.

— CP 7.554 (undated)

Any symbol which is relevant in the current situation implies, in a sense, the whole of its native meaning space; but its relevance at the moment consists in its focusing on the few ‘ideas’ that matter, and its leaving the rest in the background, in the deeper reaches of the ‘lake.’ Of the infinite number of statements which could be made at the moment, the symbol in question leaves many unsaid because they are too obvious to be worth saying, and many others unsaid because they would distract attention from the dialogic argument. The viable path of discourse or dialog avoids both the obvious and the irrelevant. But then, the various participants in the dialog may differ in their judgments of obviousness and relevance, and no one who has ears to hear will consider his own implicit judgments infallible.

A niche in meaning space insists on being filled if possible, and determines the form of its occupant, but not the actual existence of that occupant. It can only select something more or less vaguely resembling that form and actually existing in the universe where the system can find it; the act of meaning, the triadic action of a sign, involves its existence, its secondness.

There are different kinds of existence. There is the existence of physical actions, there is the existence of psychical volitions, there is the existence of all time, there is the existence of the present, there is the existence of material things, there is the existence of the creations of one of Shakespeare’s plays, and, for aught we know, there may be another creation with a space and time of its own in which things may exist. Each kind of existence consists in having a place among the total collection of such a universe. It consists in being a second to any object in such universe taken as first. It is not time and space which produce this character. It is rather this character which for its realization calls for something like time and space.

— Peirce, CP 1.433 (c. 1896)

In this sense, Secondness as individual existence ‘calls for’ continuity as Thirdness, while on the other side of the coin of meaning, the niche in meaning space ‘calls for’ its inhabitation. Semiosic determination, like the ‘imprinting’ of a new hatchling on its parent, is a reciprocal realization.

We know that the newborn chick looking for its mom actually relies on at least two different neural systems, one for orienting toward stimuli that are good candidates for being mom, and another for taking whatever it can get, for storing a memory of anything that the chick might be exposed to. The first system will choose an adult chick (or even a stuffed duck) over a box as its go-to-caregiver, but if there’s nothing else around, the second system will lead the chick to settle for the box.

— Marcus (2004, 104)

The first system here would correspond to the top half of the meaning cycle, the second system to the bottom half. Likewise, a reader looking for guidance in a turning sign or “scripture” will ‘seek until he finds’ and then use whatever he finds to guide his practice (including any further seeking); the niche in meaning space that yearns for fulfillment will be filled regardless of which text the seeker ‘finds.’

Early in the 17th century, Wilhelm von Humboldt observed the discrete nature of what we now call phonemes – the “atoms” of speech, which speakers combine to make words, phrases and sentences. In order to read these utterances, we must be able to hear their phonemic elements in order to recognize their combined forms as verbal. Humans are adept at picking out speech sounds even under very noisy conditions – in other words, isolating sequences of them from the ambient noise, just as a neuron uses a myelin sheath to insulate its signals from the electrochemical storm going on all around – and virtually isolating each phoneme from its neighbors in the sequence, in order to recognize ordered parts of the sonic stream as particular words.

The discreteness and articulation of phonemes is crucial to the functioning of spoken language as a symbol system, and we humans must learn to hear discreteness (as ‘articulated sound’) even when the stream of sound is actually continuous. Recordings of normal spoken language, displayed on an oscilloscope or otherwise ‘objectively’ observed, do not contain gaps of silence between phonemes. This is why ‘motherese,’ the peculiar style of articulation that adults use in speaking to very young children, exaggerates the discreteness of phonemes (see Kuhl et al. in Damasio et al. 2001): in order to acquire language, children have to grasp this discreteness before they can begin to combine the elements of language into words and sentences and thus comprehend (or produce) them.

The discreteness of speech sounds does not contradict the continuity of sound. Likewise there is no contradiction between gradual development and “punctuated equilibrium,” between creation and evolution, or between “sudden” and “gradual” enlightenment.

oh bless the continuous stutter
of the word being made into flesh.

— Leonard Cohen, ‘The Window’ (1993, 299)

Why can’t you be “turned on” all the time, so that every moment is a “peak experience”? The simple answer is any special state of excitement can only emerge temporarily from the “ordinary” state, and then return to it for a longer resting period. This is part of the energy economy involved in semiosis.

This principle applies not only psychologically but also biologically, down to the cellular level. For instance, a neuron cannot ‘fire’ continuously; indeed it has to spend much of its time ‘resting’ in order to be ready to fire again. At the neural population scale, inhibition is as necessary as excitation for the propagation of the signal along a nerve. A similar cyclic pattern applies to complex chemical reactions and to the self-organization process in cellular slime molds.

The slime mold is not a real mold at all but a single-cell amoeba that feeds on bacteria. When there is a scarcity of food, the individuals aggregate, forming colonies of thousands of cells. These colonies can migrate as a unit over relatively large distances. Over time, the homogeneous assemblage of cells differentiates in such a way that part of it becomes a base rich in cellulose, while the other part becomes a “fruiting body” rich in polysaccharides. The fruiting body then bursts, scattering spores, which yield mobile cells when food is again available. The cycle thereupon starts over again with the individual amoeba.

— Depew and Weber 1995, 419

The gathering of individual amoebas into a multicellular organism is triggered by a chemical signal which spreads from cell to cell, each being stimulated by the chemical (cAMP) to release a burst of it.

But this is not enough to ensure an effective signal: it must also be destroyed, otherwise the whole dish of amoebas would become a sea of cAMP, and no signals would be visible. The amoebas secrete an enzyme, phosphodiesterase, which destroys cAMP. So the substance has a brief lifetime, and the diffusion profile of the signal from a stimulated amoeba has a steep gradient, generating an effective directional signal that allows other amoebas to use it for chemotaxis (directed movement in response to a chemical). However, there is a problem here: cAMP released from an amoeba diffuses symmetrically in all directions away from the source, so amoebas anywhere within the effective range of the signal could respond. This means that each stimulated amoeba could become the center of the propagating wave. The result would be total chaos. This does not happen … The reason is beautifully simple and natural: after an amoeba has released a burst of cAMP, it cannot immediately respond to another signal and release another burst. It goes into a refractory state during which it is unresponsive, recovering from the previous stimulus and returning to its ‘excitable’ condition. Therefore, the wave cannot travel backward, and the signal travels one way.

— Brian Goodwin (1994, 50)

This sort of thing ‘shows that spatial order arises with temporal order’ (Goodwin 1994, 76). Even at the microscopic level, meaning takes time and moves in cycles.

The life of a concept is its function in a system of thought, a guidance system.

Vygotsky (1934) realized that the conceptual structures which inhabit meaning spaces must form an organic system from the beginning:

Concepts do not lie in the child’s mind like peas in a bag, without any bonds between them. If that were the case, no intellectual operation requiring coordination of thoughts would be possible, nor any general conception of the world. Not even separate concepts as such could exist: their very nature presupposes a system.

— Vygotsky (1934, 110-11)

Popper (1968) confirms this with respect to science, which builds consensus by means of repeated observations: ‘for logical reasons, there must always be a point of view – such as a system of expectations, anticipations, assumptions, or interests – before there can be any repetition’ (59). Without such a system of anticipations, no act or observation could be recognized as ‘the same’. This ‘repetition-for-us’ is ‘the result of our propensity to expect regularities and to search for them’ (60).

This system of anticipations is inhabited by concepts, each of which can be regarded as an iconic map of the relationships among interconnected feelings and ideas.

A concept is not a mere jumble of particulars,— that is only its crudest species. A concept is the living influence upon us of a diagram, or icon, with whose several parts are connected in thought an equal number of feelings or ideas. The law of mind is that feelings and ideas attach themselves in thought so as to form systems. But the icon is not always clearly apprehended. We may not know at all what it is; or we may have learned it by the observation of nature.

— Peirce, CP 7.467 (1893)

We are often guided by these ‘diagrams’ without being conscious of them, and usually without visualizing them; they function implicitly. Semiotically, though, we can learn to contemplate them.

As the e-mail habit spread in the late 20th century, the user often found his or her ‘inbox’ deluged with unwanted, intrusive and inane messages, usually sent by automated systems. A name was needed for this suddenly common phenomenon: a niche opened up in verbal meaning space.

The niche was filled by the word spam, which Jesper Hoffmeyer (2008, 137-8) traces back to a song in a Monty Python sketch (because its ‘endlessly repetitive lyrics suggest an endless repetition of worthless text, similar to what is contained within the e-mail variety of spam’). The word had been coined much earlier as a ‘telescope word’ for canned spiced ham (a disagreeable dish for many), but it must have been a memory of the Monty Python routine that triggered the association that plugged the word firmly into the niche it came to occupy. Certainly the original inventors of the word ‘Spam’ had no idea what it would later come to mean.

Many of our linguistic habits have similarly creative (spontaneous, accidental) origins, and this accounts for some of the polyversity we find in language. But Hoffmeyer’s point is that the same sort of thing happens in the biological realm, when an opening suddenly appears for unused (or differently used) genetic material to be plugged into a new sequence which adds something significant to the genetic resources of the organism.

The decisive cause of the birth of a new functional gene would be a lucky conjunction of two events: 1) an already existing nonfunctional gene might acquire a new meaning through integration into a functional (transcribed) part of the genome, and 2) the gene product would hit an unfilled gap in the semiotic needs of the cell or the embryo. In this way, a new gene becomes a scaffolding mechanism, supporting a new kind of interaction imbuing some kind of semiotic advantage upon its bearer.

— Hoffmeyer (2008, 138)

The somatic interpretant of the new gene may turn out to be a structural or behavioral change that confers some kind of pragmatic advantage upon the organism, filling a niche in practical meaning space: genetic polyversity pays off.