Just as semiotics is the generic name for the study of semiosis, and anthroposemiotics the specific name for the study of anthroposemiosis allowing of many substudies, and zoösemiotics is the name for the study of zoösemiosis, (in both cases with or without the dieresis intended only to ensure correct pronunciation and to distinguish the specific study from the sub-study of captive animals as “zoo-semiotics”), and biosemiosis is the name for the study of semiosis among all living forms, so physiosemiotics is the name for the study of physiosemiosis. Living individuals as fundamental natural units are called, under Aristotle’s maxim that the world is either one (monism) or many (pluralism), but in order for there to be many there have to be ones, “substances”. The change from living to nonliving, or (at life’s evolutionary origin) nonliving to living, including thus “in the beginning” when a living substance first emerged from the physical interactions of (probably a planetary) environment, would involve but not reduce to semiosis. To call investigation into the origin of life “pansemiotics” is – given the etymology of the terms involved, and the historical dimension of the development of philosophical thinking (or cenoscopic science along with and surrounding idioscopy, or science in the modern sense of knowledge unacquirable without the use of instruments, experiementation, and mathematization of the results), not to mention consideration of what Peirce called the “ethics of terminology” – TOTALLY inappropriate historically (in a manner guaranteed to mislead in an unnecessary and useless manner any newcomers to semiotic studies) and BEKNIGHTED in the attempt to reduce or equate the question of substantial change to some manner of the action of signs.
From: Stanley N Salthe [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, September 13, 2014 15:30 To: [email protected] Subject: [biosemiotics:6789] Re: Physics & Semiosis: the Jonathan -- Replying to your question: Pansemiotics, as I understand it, refers to a disciplinary subdivision of semiotics, one that is interested in the possibility that there is some kind of ur-semiosis going on in the physicochemical world. 'PansemioSIS' is a faulty term for the subject of that study -- namely physiosemiosis. In my view its most important application would be to the outstanding problem of the origin of life. What was the precursor configuration in the prebiological world that became transformed to semiosis in the biological world? It would have been some arrangement of physiosemiosis. I have advanced the idea that context will be critical here, and contexts are indeed everywhere, even if semiosis is not. One can without hesitation put forward this view, strange as it may seem to some, because there is NO current understanding of the origin of life. Try anything! STAN On Sat, Sep 13, 2014 at 4:02 PM, Jonathan Griffin <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Edwina and Stan, Thanks for the encouraging comments. It's good to hear some feedback. I don't think my caveat was at least entirely a bow to Deely. I myself am resistant to the term mainly because (1) it invokes for me pantheism [implying conceptual analogy but with signs] and (2) because the ideas I've heard associated mostly with the term seem to reflect (1). Also, though, people here in Tartu are almost universally opposed to bringing in any kind of physiosemiosis as legitimate, and it seems like it's partly because there is a sense in which it is disguised pansemiotics (as a claim that only signs exist and nothing else). I can see the term maybe applying to all semiotic studies, but wouldn't that just be what the term 'semiotics' is for? If I'm missing something, could you help me understand how you're using the term 'pansemiotics'?
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