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 non-disciplinary 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.

Key words: biosemiotics, enactivism, ecological psychology, distributed language, dialogism, biology of cognition, biology of meaning, semiotics, philosophy of language, pragmatics, ecolinguistics

Heteronomy informs parts of human sense-making including perceptual and linguistic activities. This article explores Berthoz’s (2012) notion of simplexity in relation to heteronomous aspects of human cognition while it criticises proponents of Active Externalism for presuming that cognitive activity is based in strong autonomy. Specifically, its negative target is the problematic aspects of Varelian Enactivism and Extended Cognitive Functionalism which are linked to the assumption that cognition is conditioned by the cogniser’s strong autonomy. Since active externalists presume that cognition has a clear agent-to-world directionality, they prove unable to account for cases where cognition is informed by novel sensuous inputs. The article presents a positive argument that acknowledges the embodied basis of human sense-making as well as the weak autonomy of the cogniser. It argues that biological simplexity not only enables human enacted perception, but also underlies the embodied habits that shape the perceptual horizon that grants us being-in-the-world. This horizon has a heteronomous dimension which allows us to set up habits, orient ourselves towards unknown parts of our surroundings and engage in conversations. In fact, we are able to communicate with others because linguistic activity originates in enacted perception and sense-saturated coordination.

Key words: phenomenology, languaging, embodiment, habits, heteronomy

This is nominally a book review of Hutto and Myin’s Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content (The MIT Press, 2013). But it is a narrowly focused and highly prejudicial review, which presents an analysis of a contradiction at the heart of the book. Radicalizing Enactivism is a powerful and original philosophical argument against representations in cognition, but it repeatedly endorses an old-fashioned representationalism about language. I show that this contradiction arises from the authors’ unexamined, reflexive adoption of traditional linguistic concepts and terminology, which presuppose a representational interpretation of linguistic capacities and phenomena. The key piece of evidence for this analyses is the separability of Hutto and Myin’s substantive remarks on the ontogeny of language-dependent cognitive capacities, which they explain in terms of scaffolding and decoupling, from the representational gloss on those remarks that they present as if it were simply identical with observed empirical matters of fact. They follow a model laid out in Hutto’s earlier work, in which everyday linguistic activity is understood as instantiating abstract public vehicles with representational content (i.e., sentences which express propositions). I argue that this model is susceptible both to pre-existing arguments against representational theories of language and to a variant of their own ‘Hard Problem of Content’. The take-away lesson from Radicalizing Enactivism is that anti-representationalist accounts of language remain unconvincing – even to radicals like Hutto and Myin – because they have no way of explaining the phenomenal experience of literate speakers, wherein words really do feel like instantiations of abstract forms with determinable semantics. I suggest that anti-representationalists can address this by focusing on the ways in which patterns of attention become stabilized and interpersonally regularized as we learn language.

Key words: Content, Representation, Languaging, Enactivism, Distributed language, Hutto and Myin

Against the background of the emerging holistic view of language based on physicalism (the embodiment of mind) and an understanding that language is a biological phenomenon rooted in semiosis as the experience of life, it is argued that a new philosophical framework for cognition and language is currently taking shape. This philosophy is best characterized as a synthesis of ideas developed in cognitive linguistics, semiotics and biology. These ideas bear directly on autopoiesis as the theory of the living which possesses a greater explanatory power as it assumes the experiential nature of language. Autopoiesis allows for deeper insights into the essence of language which is viewed as a kind of adaptive behavior of an organism involving a meaning system constituted by signs of signs, thus making unification of (humanistic) science an attainable goal.

Key words: cognition, semiotics, biology, experience, meaning, life.

Despite a strong tradition of viewing coded equivalence as the underlying principle of linguistic semiotics, it lacks the power needed to understand and explain language as an empirical phenomenon characterized by complex dynamics. Applying the biology of cognition to the nature of the human cognitive/linguistic capacity as rooted in the dynamics of reciprocal causality between an organism and the world, we can show language to be connotational rather than denotational. This leaves no room for the various ‘code-models’ of language exploited in traditional linguistics. Bio-cognitive analysis leads to deeper insights into the essence of language as a biologically based, cognitively motivated, circularly organized semiotic activity in a consensual domain of interactions aimed at adapting to, and, ultimately, gaining control of the environment. The understanding that cognition is grounded in the dynamics of biological self-organization fits both the integrational model of communication and distributed cognition. A short discussion of the key notions of representation, sign and signification, interpretation, intentionality, communication, and reciprocal causality is offered, showing that the notion of ‘code’ is only misleadingly applied to natural language.

Key words: language, communication, sign, representation, intentionality, reciprocal causality.

Maturana’s notion of languaging is deeply rooted in his “Biology of cognition” and in the epistemological orientation provided by the “autopoietic systems” theory developed with Varela. Within this framework, language is traced to its operational and interactional matrix. In this paper, I show how pursuing such a “bio-logically” grounded approach allows a shift from traditional conceptions of language, in particular with regards to its role in the achievement of communication and joint activities. In order to make explicit the constitutive conditions underlying linguistic activity, I address both languaging as embodied activity and the interindividual coordination within which such an embodied activity takes place. To this end, I focus on the relation between individual languaging behaviour and the domain of coordination, as two complementary aspects underlying all classes of phenomena in human communication. Some linguistic and cognitive implications of the framework will be subsequently discussed.

Key words: languaging, linguistic activity, bio-logical approach, recursive consensual coordination, conversation, dialogicity.

Enaction is the process whereby a living organism brings about its own Umwelt or lived-world of experience. The prototype example is the “the world of the tick” as described by von Uexküll. This is a nice case of simplexity – achieving an impressive result by apparently simple means. Thus, the modest tick, blind and deaf and only capable of crawling slowly, achieves the task of catching a mammal – thousands of times bigger and faster – and getting to suck its blood. The means in question involve chaining three perception- action cycles: sensing butyric acid (emitted by the sweat glands of mammals) which causes the tick to drop; crawling on a rough surface until finding a smooth surface (in context, the bare skin of the mammal); and sucking a liquid at 37 °C underneath the surface (in context, the blood of the mammal). The notion of simplexity is attractive, especially to those biologists who still retain «a feeling for the organism». However, the concept of simplexity has its limitations; it does not explain anything, it is essentially an appreciation which comes after the event Indeed one might even go so far as to say that simplexity is not so much a solution, but rather a problem which itself requires explanation. After commenting on each of the texts in this volume, I found no substantial indications that “simplexity” does actually explain anything. My conclusion is that “simplexity,” far from being an explanation, is rather an alert flag for situations which are certainly interesting, but which are in need of further study and explanation. In this sense, “simplexity” is indeed a useful heuristic – although perhaps not in quite the way that was originally intended.

Key words: enaction, simplexity, explanation, heuristic.