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.
Gasparyan D. (2020) Semiosis as Eigenform and Observation as Recursive Interpretation. Constructivist Foundations 15(3): 271–279. https://cepa.info/6608
Context: Recent decades have seen the development of new branches of semiotics, including biosemiotics, cognitive semiotics, and cybersemiotics. An important feature of these concepts is the question of the relationship between the linguistic and extralinguistic world: in particular, the constructivist question of the role of observation and the observer in semiosis. Problem: Our understanding of the observer’s role in the framework of second-order cybernetics is incomplete without understanding where in the observation the significant activity, semiosis, takes place. By describing this process, we will see that semiosis has the structure of an eigenform. I will concentrate on linguistic semiosis, and will illuminate the role of the sign and interpretation, emphasizing the scheme and logic of this process. Method: I use theoretical and conceptual methods of argumentation, such as logical (deductive) and philosophical (phenomenological) proofs and thought experiments. Results: My argumentation underlines the importance of including interpretation (via the observer) in the process of signification. It reveals the reciprocal connections among all three elements (sign, object and interpretant) and their cyclic nature. I show that semiosis works according to the principle of an eigenform because of the cyclic and recursive nature of semiotic interpretation. Implications: My conclusions have productive implications for epistemic theories, linguistic theories, philosophy of language, theories of semiology, and semantics. They support the idea that we are unable to understand the world beyond language. Linguistic semiosis is an eigenform that creates the world in itself and through itself. The sign and the object are mutually and referentially related to each other. Constructivist content: Using the concept of eigenform helps to clarify how linguistic semiosis allows people to exist in language, bring forth objects and meaning potentials and construct reality. In this process, human beings self-fabricate as observers and, using aspects of “language,” become interpreters.
Glasersfeld E. von (1962) Towards the mechanical construction of correlational nets. CETIS Report No 42. European Atomic Energy Community - EURATOM, Brussels.
Glasersfeld E. von, Perschke S. & Samet E. (1962) Human translation and translation by machine. In: International conference on machine translation of languages and applied language analysis, 1961, Volume II. H. M. Stationery Office, London: 507–530. https://cepa.info/1292
A view of the sources of mathematical knowledge is sketched which emphasizes the close connections between mathematical and empirical knowledge. A platonistic interpretation of mathematical discourse is adopted throughout. Two skeptical views are discussed and rejected. One of these, due to Maturana, is supposed to be based on biological considerations. The other, due to Dummett, is derived from a Wittgensteinian position in the philosophy of language. The paper ends with an elaboration of Gödel’s analogy between the mathematician and the physicist.
Kravchenko A. (2022) Approaching linguistic semiosis biologically: Implications for human evolution. Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio 15(2): 139–158. https://cepa.info/7790
As a functional feature of our species, language, it is argued, cannot be understood outside the domain of biological organization. The established view of language as a tool used for communication has little to offer towards a better understanding of the nature and function of language, making it external to human biology and accounting for the language–mind dichotomy entrenched in philosophy of language and mainstream cognitive science. By contrast, biosemiotics, an interdisciplinary paradigm for the study of life as semiosis, attempts to overcome this epistemological inconsistency by positing the biological nature of signs. At the same time, the theoretical framework of biosemiotics is marked by a conceptual tension between the physicalist accounts of symbol often used in biosemiotics and the Peircean notion of symbol as a kind of sign in the semiotic hierarchy of iconic, indexical, and symbolic reference; this hierarchy is essential in understanding linguistic semiosis as a major evolutionary transition rather than a cultural invention. The firmly established belief that, evolutionarily, sapience precedes language impedes our understanding of language as human life in semiosis; such an understanding becomes possible with a systems approach to the study of our species. As situationally driven embodied interactional behavior, languaging is constitutive of the human organism-environment system as a unity. Linguistic semiosis – the development of the ability to orient others and self in their consensual domain to what is not perceptually present – is a biological adaptation that allows humans to be able to better live in their habitat and sets them apart from the rest of the living world as linguistic organisms capable of operating on first-order abstractions in co-ordinations of interactional behavior. It is hypothesized that the emergence of language was the pivoting point in the evolution of the human brain, laying the basis for abstract thought as neuronal processes that lead to the establishment of second-order consensuality and languaging as behavior in a second-order consensual domain: cognition as a biological function met language as a biological adaptation, and the ontogenesis of Homo sapiens began.
Mitterer J. (2011) Das Jenseits der Philosophie. Wider das dualistische Erkenntnisprinzip [The beyond of philosophy. Against the dualistic principle of knowledge]. With a new preface for this edition. Velbrück Wissenschaft, Weilerswist .
“Philosophy does not begin with problems. It begins with unproblematized presuppositions. These presuppositions are dichotomic distinctions: in epistemology and philosophy of language, for example, the dichotomies are between language and world, description and object, being and consciousness, subject and object.” – This book tries to explicate these presuppostions and their consequences within the framework of a nondualistic argumentation that neither presupposes nor creates a beyond as a means of regulating discourse.
Moser S. (2008) \Walking and Falling.\ Language as Media Embodiment. Constructivist Foundations 3(3): 260–268. https://constructivist.info/3/3/260
Purpose: This paper aims to mediate Josef Mitterer’s non-dualistic philosophy with the claim that speaking is a process of embodied experience. Approach: Key assumptions of enactive cognitive science, such as the crossmodal integration of speech and gesture and the perceptual grounding of linguistic concepts are illustrated through selected performance pieces of multimedia artist Laurie Anderson. Findings: The analysis of Anderson’s artistic work questions a number of dualisms that guide truth-oriented models of language. Her performance pieces demonstrate that language is both sensually enacted and conceptually reflected through the integration of iconic signing (e.g. sound play, dance) with symbolic communication. Moreover, Anderson’s artistic practice demonstrates that media such as voice, gesture and recording technologies realize different forms of embodied language. Benefits: Media aesthetics in the vein of embodied cognition can overcome a number of the dualisms that inform analytical philosophy of language, linguistics, and communication studies, such as perceptual/conceptual meaning, iconicity/symbolicity, emotion/cognition, body/technology and voice/script.
Purpose: Josef Mitterer’s essays are considered to be important philosophical advancements of radical constructivism. The main purposes of this paper are, on the one hand, to structure the RC landscape and, on the other hand, to investigate the relations of Mitterer’s work to radical constructivism in particular and to philosophy in general. Findings: In this short essay focusing on Mitterer’s Das Jenseits der Philosophie, I would like to stress two major points. First, Mitterer’s book should be considered as one of several contemporary variants of a radical critique of the semantic turn in the philosophy of science that has taken place since the mid-thirties with the works of Rudolf Carnap, Carl G. Hempel, Hilary Putnam, Alfred Tarski and others. Second, it is by no means clear how to determine the relevance of the new semantic critique for the present and future cognitive status of radical constructivism. The degree of relevance depends crucially on the use of the term “radical constructivism.” If radical constructivism, as I will argue, is seen as an umbrella term for a group of empirical research programs, then, by sheer necessity, the relevance can be marginal only. If, however, radical constructivism is viewed as a special form of philosophy of language and/or as a new epistemology, then the importance of Josef Mitterer’s approach must be judged within the context of available functional alternatives. Implications: An immediate consequence of this article lies in a renewed emphasis on advancing an empirical research agenda for radical constructivism and in an effective downsizing of radical constructivism as a philosophical perspective.
O’Neill S. P. (2021) Some Good Words about Curses, and a Few Damning Ones about Bowdlerization. Constructivist Foundations 17(1): 018–020. https://cepa.info/7395
Open peer commentary on the article “Euphemisms vs. Dysphemisms, or How we Construct Good and Bad Language” by Andrey S. Druzhinin. Abstract: Swearwords sometimes get a bad reputation in the academic literature on language, often getting expunged from the published records, based on their potentially offensive emotional character. Yet supposedly innocuous euphemisms often pass, without much notice, despite the darker references they sometimes mask. Such issues get right to the heart of the philosophy of language, in terms of reaching an audience in both emotional and intellectual terms.