Signs Without Minds

Abstract

In a number of places, such as CP 2.274 (1897), Peirce argues that anything with the necessary triadic structure of sign, object and interpretant can be a proper sign, even if there is no mental representation involved, though he says in the same passage that signs usually, if not always, have a mental interpretant (Peirce, The philosophy of Peirce, selected writings, 1940, p. 100). He notes that the notion of interpretant does not logically require consciousness, but since we have no clear cases that do not, so we must at least fix our understanding of semiosis with these clear cases (Peirce, The philosophy of Peirce, selected writings, 1940, p. 282). The advent of biosemiotics has extended the notion of semiosis well into the non-mental sphere. In some cases in biosemiotics the signs are similar to human cognitive signs by involving perceptions and possibly even deliberate action, but many proposed cases within biosemiotics do not involve anything that might be considered to be mental, especially within endobiosemiotics, which involves at its lowest level chemical processes. If these extensions of Peircean semiotics are sound we need a clear idea of what it is to be a sign when minds are not involved. Peirce gives us some hints about how the notion of semiosis might be extended, and what the limits of its extension might be. These come from both his paradigmatically mental signs as well as what he says about non-mental signs, including signs in biological systems.