Towards an Evolutionary Semiotics: The Emergence of New Sign-Functions in Organisms and Devices

Signs, symbols, and signals are basic to our existence on many organizational levels, from the biological to the psychological to the social. The ‘semiosphere’, the realm of symbolically-mediated processes, envelopes and incorporates us at every turn (see papers by Hoffmeyer, Umerez, Exteberria, and Joslyn in this volume; Hoffmeyer, 1997). Symbolic nucleotide sequences lie at the root of our biological organizations, neural pulse codes subserve the coherent functional organizations in our brains that permit us to think, while the symbol sequences of our languages afford the complex communications that make human society possible. Semiotic concepts, properly developed, are critical for a deep understanding of the organization of life, the functioning of the brain, and the functional organization of the observer.