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It is argued that the traditional philosophical/linguistic analysis of semiotic phenomena is based on the false epistemological assumption that linguistic and nonlinguistic entities possess different ontologies. An attempt is made to show where linguistics as the study of signs went wrong, and an unorthodox account of the nature of semiosis is proposed in the framework of autopoiesis as a new epistemology of the living. Key words: sign, semiosis, ontology, epistemology Epistemological foundations The concept of (mental) representation lies at the core of any theory of signs, but it is not a secret to anyone with an interest in semiotic issues (both philosophical and linguistic) that the concept of mental representation as used in contemporary literature is so fuzzy and elusive that its more or less consistent use unavoidably invokes one question that has to be answered prior to any productive discussion of the nature of cognition and cognitive capacities: What is a mental representation? In contemporary philosophical theory of knowledge representations are understood as certain mental structures including intentional categories (believe that p, wish that q) which constitute the content of linguistic (semantic) structures at the deep level. In psychology, representations are typically described as conceptual structures individuated by their contents (Margolis and Laurence 1999) and defined in accordance with the traditional methods of analytical philosophy, that is, by positing sets of necessary and sufficient conditions that have to be met. However, it has become obvious that despite a long history of discussion (Watson 1995), there is no way out of the philosophical dead-end within the framework of the old rationalist paradigm, since traditional analytical philosophy is incapable of providing a reasonably consistent and empirically sound unified theory of mental representations (Stich 1992). Attempts to re-evaluate the notion of representation without departing from the mainstream approach — for example, by introducing the “off-line” computational metaphor to describe representation as opposed to presentation which is accessed in the “on-line” mode as it is causally or informatively, unlike representation, linked to the target (Grush 1997) — have not been particularly fruitful or illuminating. It seems that the entire philosophical framework for the analysis of representation is conceptually misleading as it implicitly builds its construals on the assumption that representations, in virtue of being semiotic phenomena, have to do with codified equivalence and identity, thus overlooking the simple fact that conceptually, in order to be codified (in the usual linguistic sense of the word), a phenomenon must first be grasped by a cognitive structure which cannot be linguistic by definition. Attempts to resolve the representational problem on purely linguistic (that is, non-cognitive) grounds are bound to be fruitless (see an interesting discussion in Croft 1998 and Sandra 1998). A way out of this dilemma is suggested by autopoiesis as a new epistemology of the living. This new epistemology is founded on a biological concept of cognition and language (Maturana 1970; Maturana 1978; Maturana and Varela 1980; Kravchenko 2017a) which differs essentially from the conventional representational paradigms (whether cognitivist or connectionist or both). Whereas for the majority of researchers of the problem of mind the notion of cognition is tied to the idea of knowledge as processed information stored in mental structures accessible for identification and analysis via language as a representational (denotational) sign system (cf. Bickerton 1990; Dennett 1996), in autopoiesis cognition is not a means to acquire knowledge of an objective reality but serves an active organism in its adaptation to its experiential world. Information in this framework is understood as being constructed and codependent rather than instructional and referential (Murphy 1992), it is viewed as the capacity of certain physical entities for presenting alternative configurations and consequently of exerting different actions in regard to other components or the whole system (Moreno, Merelo and Etxeberria 1992). The clear and indisputable advantage of the biological approach to cognition and language is that it offers an escape from the vicious circle by proposing a mechanistic (and hence, intrinsically non-reductionist) explanation of an organism as a living system with a circular organization. Circularity is viewed as a specifying property of living systems which are described as autopoietic systems. Accordingly, language is defined as a domain of cognitive communicative activity (operations on signs) in the course of which signs are created that sustain this activity. The crucial difference between the traditional and autopoietic views of language is that the latter assumes its connotational rather than denotational nature. As Maturana (1978: 50) points out, “denotation is not a primitive operation, it requires agreement consensus for the specification of the denotant and the denoted. If denotation is not a primitive operation, it cannot be a primitive linguistic operation, either. Language must arise as a result of something else that does not require denotation for its establishment, but that gives rise to language with all its implications as a trivial necessary result. This fundamental process is ontogenetic structural coupling which results in the establishment of a consensual domain. [...] Linguistic behavior is behavior in a consensual domain.” Correspondingly, the key notion of representation proposed by Maturana is also radically different from the traditional one. Representations are relative neuronal activities characterizing the state of an organism’s nervous system as a structure-determined system; because of this, the sequence of changing relations of relative neuronal activity (description) that appears to the observer as determining a given behavior, is not determined by any functional or semantic value that the observer may ascribe to such a behavior but is necessarily determined by the structure of the nervous system at the moment at which the behavior is enacted. It follows that adequate behavior is, of necessity, only the result of a structural matching between an organism (dynamic system) and a medium. This conclusion gives the entire philosophical discussion about the nature of mental representations a genuinely scientific (naturalist) angle and is a giant step toward understanding consciousness and cognitive (mental) processes. The basic tenet of autopoiesis (Maturana 1987) is as follows: “Everything said is said by an observer to another observer who can be himself or herself.” In what follows, I will try to show where linguistics as the study of signs went wrong (we must not forget that “linguistics still remains a part of general semiotic as a science of sign systems” (Frumkina 1999: 31)), and propose an unorthodox account of the nature of semiosis in view of this autopoietic maxim. On the definitive property of linguistic signs If we consider an entity, such as a specifically organized sequence of sounds categorized as a word (e.g. smoke), there does not seem to be any ontological dependency between this entity and that entity of which the word smoke is believed to be a sign. Therefore, there is not any obvious relationship between the designator (manifest entity) and the designatum (non-manifest entity). It is this simple observation on which the arbitrarinessof-sign thesis (Saussure 1922) has rested and of which linguistic science is so reluctant to let go. However, and this is also something quite obvious, it is possible to infer that signs are arbitrary only when an important epistemic maxim is ignored, namely, the maxim of primacy of phenomenology in cognition. Consequently, this inference cannot be but essentially false. Any entity, whether linguistic or non-linguistic, is identified and categorized as such only in the course and as a result of an organism’s interactions with the environment. What we have become so much used to calling linguistic signs, opposing them to non-linguistic signs, for an observer are just another variety of constituents of the immediate environment (environmental niche) with which the observer may interact just like with any other entity. The structuralist tradition to treat language as an autonomous self-sufficient system could not but reflect on how linguistic entities (signs) are treated: they are believed to be a special kind of entities whose ontological properties are radically different from those of non-linguistic entities. Among these properties one is considered to be crucial for the definition of a sign, that is, the so-called “producibleness” of signs since they are, allegedly, the product of humans’ intentional creative activity aimed at making communication possible. Until recently, communication has been understood as exchange of coded information, and despite the development of inferential theories of communication (cf. Grice 1989; Akmajian et al. 1990), “when it comes to the study of language, the code model still has us in its grip” (Wilson 1997). Indeed, such exchange (if we subscribe to the traditional view) is possible not only and exclusively through the medium of language, but through a variety of other means, including different bodily functions such as non-linguistic acoustic phenomena, gestures, smells, etc. which can hardly be characterized as coded signs. When the function of language is identified as communication, the following relevant circumstance seems to be overlooked: communication as a domain of cognitive interactions of organisms constitutes a basis for linguistic behavior, but it is not limited to it. Although this fact has not generally been questioned. 网站原创范文除特殊说明外一切图文作品权归所有；未经官方授权谢绝任何用途转载或刊发于媒体。如发生侵犯作品权现象，英语毕业论文，保留一切法学追诉权。()，英语论文 |
