FYI: The UK science magazine, New Scientist (www.newscientist.com) has an article this
week entitle "A Meaningful Meadow" by Liz Else, (pp28-31) on Biosemiotics, a
significant chunk of which is devoted to exponding Peirce's theory of
signs.
The application of semiotics to, say, inter-celluar
signalling suggests a resolution to the infinite regression of signs implied by
Peirce's theory. That is, the sequence is terminated where the interpretant sign
is directly used in some deductive mechanism in the interpreter - in the case of
chemical signalling, the sign-vehicle (the chemical) takes part in the chemical
reaction that "is significant to" the interpreting mechanism. I
believe this goes beyong the way Peirce would have interpretted his theory,
since I think he expected some sort of "mind" would be the interpretting agent -
although would Peirce have such a mechanistic view of mind that we have
today?
This rather fits in with my comment (seemingly
rarely understood) that the meaning of language is determined by the behaviour
of the systems that use the language.
Sean Barker, Bristol UK
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