Semiotic Scaffolding: A Biosemiotic Link Between Sema and Soma

While organic life is the product of myriads of biochemical processes, it usually escapes notice that the chemistry of life cannot be understood exclusively in terms of chemistry. What must be added is an understanding of the particular organized dynamics, which makes the integration of all these processes into real living creatures possible. This dynamics, however, itself is not a part of chemistry, but is evolutionarily tailored to suit a communicative or semiotic (= sign theoretical) logic (Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics. An examination into the signs of life and the life of signs, 2008a; A legacy for living systems: Gregory Bateson as precursor to biosemiotics, pp. 27–44, 2008b). Reframing our biological thinking in terms of semiotics, i.e., biosemiotics, deeply challenges basic ontological intuitions that for centuries have informed our thinking in philosophy as well as science. It is claimed that the taboo against final causation (in science) and the rejection of the possibility to know the “thing in itself” (in phenomenology) are interconnected errors reflecting a general failure to recognize the fundamentally semiotic nature of life and cognition. While Cartesian dualism has often enough been criticized, such criticism has rarely touched upon one of its core elements: the belief that our understanding of the world around us is based on sensory mechanics, a belief that is still widely held by scientists and thinkers of today. Replacing sensory mechanics with sensory semiotics opens hitherto not fully explored ways of integrating life and cognition. Human interaction is embedded in semiotic activity that easily penetrates to processes deep in the body and brain and back again. One of the main structuring and enabling principles in the semiotic dynamics across levels has been called semiotic scaffolding a concept that relates to psychological catalyses in interesting ways to be further explored.