Building a Scaffold: Semiosis in Nature and Culture

Abstract

The notion of “semiotic scaffolding”, introduced into the semiotic discussions by Jesper Hoffmeyer in December of 2000, is proving to be one of the single most important concepts for the development of semiotics as we seek to understand the full extent of semiosis and the dependence of evolution, particularly in the living world, thereon. I say “particularly in the living world”, because there has been from the first a stubborn resistance among semioticians to seeing how a semiosis prior to and/or independent of living beings is possible. Yet the universe began in a state not only lifeless but incapable of supporting life, and somehow “moved” from there in the direction of being able to sustain life and finally of actually doing so. Wherever dyadic interactions result indirectly in a new condition that either moves the universe closer to being able to sustain life, or moves life itself in the direction not merely of sustaining itself but opening the way to new forms of life, we encounter a “thirdness” in nature of exactly the sort that semiosic triadicity alone can explain. This is the process, both within and without the living world, that requires scaffolding. This essay argues that a fuller understanding of this concept shows why “semiosis” says clearly what “evolution” says obscurely.

A scaffold is a structure which sustains or upholds things while new levels or dimensions are added to what is already existing.¹ And that is just what semiosis does respecting the universe as a whole. The first one to draw this analogy was Jesper Hoffmeyer in December of 2000, where he presented a paper at Puebla University in Mexico entitled “Semiogenic Scaffolding in Nature”, which did not appear published in English until 2007, though in Danish in 2001. In an email dated 3 June 2014 hour 06:24, Jesper informed me that “already in 2002 I chose to simplify the expression [‘semiogenic scaffolding’] to just ‘semiotic scaffolding’ in my presentation at the Gatherings in Biosemiotics 2, in Tartu”.²

Now should I live long enough, which I am pretty sure will not be the case, I would like to write a book exploring the whole of Hoffmeyer’s writings on this point. For I have formed the opinion (some time ago) that Jesper’s “scaffolding” idea is to semiotics what Einstein’s E = mc² has been to modern physics.

Now Hoffmeyer himself has developed his idea mainly in the context of biosemiotics. But my opinion is that the idea applies to the full extent of semiosis, which—again in my opinion—is broader than the realm of biosemiotics. Thus, while biosemioticians like to repeat Sebeok’s maxim that semiosis is coextensive with life, they are resistant to seeing that life is not coextensive with semiosis, and in this paper I want to indicate why—or perhaps I should rather say how—a semiosis is presupposed not only for living things to exist, but for living things to have been able in the first place to come into existence!

So that is my aim: to show how and why Hoffmeyer’s notion of semiosis as providing the scaffolding for the development of life needs also and further to be understood as providing the scaffolding whereby the originally lifeless universe developed in such a way as eventually to become capable of life. Presupposed here is the prior demonstration first made by John Poinsot in 1632 (Tractatus de Signis, Book I, Question 3), then taken up independently by Charles Peirce, that semiosis or the action consequent upon the being proper to signs consists precisely in that “being” being an irreducibly triadic relation, suprasubjective, like all true relations, but necessarily involving three and not just two “terms” under that relation.

Establishing the Full Scope of Hoffmeyer’s Notion of ‘Semiotic Scaffold’

The key to the demonstration that semiosis occurs in nature’s purely physical dimension (and therefore prior to living things) is Charles Peirce’s notion of interpretant (in contrast to interpreter),³ for here is where Peirce opened the way to an understanding of semiosis at work beyond the realm of the animals by introducing the point that a relation need not be within animal awareness — whether the awareness of alloanimals or human animals — in order to be triadic virtually (while Poinsot had already made the point that “it suffices to be a sign virtually in order to signify in act”⁴). But while the thinkers of Poinsot’s day, including Poinsot, thought of the “third term” of the sign relation as the “potentia cognoscitiva” or “cognitive power” of some animal (thus interpreting the sign as representing this or that object within its — the animal’s — awareness), Peirce had the genius to recognize that it is not the fact of an interpreter being involved that is essential to the relation constitutive formally of the action of signs, but simply that there be a third term indirectly attained along with the direct relation of the sign vehicle or “representamen”⁵ to the object signified or “significate”.⁶ Hence Peirce correctly asserted that the “third term” attained in the triadic sign relation “need not be of a mental mode of being”,⁷ and hence that there need not be an interpreter in order for semiosis, i.e., the action of signs, to occur in the physical universe. But, furthermore, Peirce’s idea of “being in futuro” as sufficient for the notion of Interpretant opens the way to semiotic understanding even of the universe’s physical evolution prior to the advent of life: for when an Interpretant as a physical situation results indirectly from a direct dyadic interaction that changes the relation of the universe in the direction of being closer to being able to sustain life, that new situation must be regarded as a Thirdness in comparison with the presupposed Secondness.⁸

Accordingly, just as Peirce proposed “representamen” as a generic alternative to the specific term “sign” for naming the foreground element in a triadic relation standing for something other than itself as presented to or for some third, so also did he propose for the “third term” of the triadic sign relation formally constitutive of the sign materially considered as the foreground element (or “term) in a triadic relation standing for something other than itself as presented to or for some third, that we use not “interpreter”, which is what a “potentia cognoscitiva” is by its very nature, but rather the “neutral”, generic term interpretant which, then, emphatically, need not always (even though it can sometimes well be) mental, nor even — as we will see in our “Peircean epilogue” concluding this discussion — always be present actually “here and now” in the ongoing process.

That an interpretant need not be mental was, in effect, the point seized upon by Krampen in 1981 (commented in Deely 1982) with his publication under Sebeok’s editorship of the proposal for recognizing the existence of a semiosis at work in the world of plants, a semiosis both prior to as well as entangled with the zoösemiosis of animal life. In plant life there is indeed an environment sine qua non, but there is no Umwelt wherein objectivity is cathected to constitute a world of objects interpreted as desirable, undesirable, or “ignorable” (safely ignored). There are stimuli in the physical order construed by the plant as “positive” or “negative”, but there is no “zero” meaning “safe to ignore”. This third category of objects, not truly zero (i.e., simply unrecognized) within zoösemiosis, is truly zero, i.e., simply nonexistent, for phytosemiosis. Nor are the + and – stimuli within phytosemiosis actual objects, but (just as in physiosemiosis) merely virtual,⁹ objectifications; they are simply positive and negative assimilations to the plant of environmental factors affecting nourishment and flourishment.

This extension of semiosis to the world of plants was the step constitutive of, or (perhaps rather) foundational to, the establishment of biosemiotics, for this extension indeed made possible the thesis that semiosis is co-extensive with life: for life can neither flourish nor even survive apart from an action of signs whereby the living things manage their environmental relations in such a way that they are able to achieve the nourishment they need to grow and reproduce.

This dependency of life — plant, animal, human — upon semiosis is clear and constant. Nonetheless, life itself in the individual living thing is a form of substantial being that — while it provides through its individual characteristics (or “accidents”) the foundations without which there could be no relations (neither sign relations nor even the dyadic relations of “brute Secondness”, the relations consequent upon the physical interactions of individuals within a given environmental area) — is definitively more than,¹⁰ however dependent upon, the action of signs. The living thing, dependent upon relations secundum esse (ontologically), is nonetheless itself rather a relativum secundum dici (a finite subjectivity), a possible object of forensic science, as we will see in the course of the following pages. The contrast between secundum dici and secundum esse, thus, is a contrast between the subjectivity or subjective dimension of finite being, and the relations that can arise among finite beings whether independently of or dependently upon finite awareness, depending upon the ever changing circumstances of existence here and now. All relations as secundum esse are suprasubjective, but only some of those relations are intersubjective as well. Relativity secundum dici, by contrast, refers not to suprasubjectivity directly, but directly to subjectivity as able to provenate (Deely 2010a: xiii–xiv) or give rise to relations both independently of and also within awareness, according to the circumstances prevailing in the universe of finite beings at any given time.

So what Poinsot compels us to ask with his esse/dici distinction (1632: 117/20–24; cf. Deely 2004) is, quite simply, whether a sign as sign exists primarily as does relation in an irreducibly suprasubjective mode of being dependent upon subjectivity indirectly, or is a sign rather some subjective thing (“that stop sign ahead”) or characteristic of subjectivity (“that idea of camel that you have in your head”)?

And his answer is that a sign always requires entanglement with suprasubjectivity in order to be a sign, while the subjectivity thus entangled — what we call a sign in ordinary usage — is not the sign formally but rather the sign-vehicle, the subjectivity upon which the suprasubjectivity indirectly depends but does not reduce to for its existence.

Hence the action of signs through triadic suprasubjectivities is far from the whole of physical reality,¹¹ just as sign relations as irreducibly triadic are far from the whole of the relations obtaining in the physical universe. Indeed, in the physical universe, at the level of Secondness, relations as such are normally dyadic, in the sense the Latins identified as requisite to qualify for identification as a relatio praedicamentalis (Poinsot 1632: 88/1–99/42), a relation verifiable under το ὀν as “realis” — independent of the awareness of any animal.

The secret of the action of signs lies precisely in the fact that, unlike the subjective characteristics of individuals that contribute to identify them within their species, relations are only indirectly dependent for their existence upon subjectivity. Without the subjectivity of substance as “being in itself” combined with the subjectivity of accidents as “being in another” there could be no intersubjectivity as “being toward another”. But neither could “being toward another” be were it not for the suprasubjective character of relations as indifferent to the question of whether this suprasubjectivity is intersubjectively realized. Yet, in the order of το ὀν as φυσις, a relation not realized intersubjectively is not realized ontologically — secundum esse, according to its positive essence or being as over and above subjectivity — either. So the question of physiosemiosis, of an action or “influence” of signs in the order of φυσις, comes down to the question of whether an intersubjective relation, normally and typically dyadic in the physical order and resulting from “brute Secondness”, can achieve Thirdness — can realize triadicity — prior to (hence independent of) life.

The path to answering this question lies in a consideration of the nature of the influence proper to semiosis, the action of signs, particularly in overcoming Peirce’s mistake — widespread in the subsequent literature (see the discussion in Deely 2009a: 60 and passim) — to identify the causality of semiosis with a version of Aristotelian final causality. Once this mistake is remedied¹² in the recognition that so-called “extrinsic formal causality”, not final causality directly, is required to explain the influence of signs, the way is open to seeing at last how a semiosic action is at work in the physical universe from the first moment of the “big bang”. For signs are distinguished above all by being able virtually to represent an “other” which need not actually exist. The reason for this is precisely the fact that semiosis is above all and distinctively an influence of the future (“vis a prospecto”: see Hoffmeyer 2008a) changing the relevance of past occurrences to present circumstances. The anthroposemiosic phenomenon of lying, for example, is but a high-level and comparatively negative illustration of the positive fact that signs typically (and uniquely) exercise an influence on present events which, through chance interventions no less than deliberate actions, may be deflected as actually occurring, but never simply reduce to an influence of past events on present circumstances, as envisaged in the “vis a tergo” views of Dennett, Dawkins, et al., portraying evolution as wholly determined by chance occurrences wholly within the order of Secondness.

Jesper Hoffmeyer famously (2007, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014a, inter alia), in providing our subject matter for this present gathering of essays on his work, speaks of semiosis as erecting or building a scaffolding within the living world which provides the framework for biological evolution. Exactly in that way, I think, does semiosis in the physical universe effect a scaffolding preparatory for the advent of life, with the difference that physiosemiosis can be identified only momentarily, at the moment of establishment of the (physical) novelty which moves the universe from its initially lifeless-and-incapable-of-supporting-life state to a state still-lifeless-but-closer-to-being-able-to-support-life, and this time and again, making the universe draw closer and closer to being able to support life, till the final threshold is reached of being actually capable of supporting life, at which point the threshold is finally crossed and life itself becomes actual — at which moment also semiosis becomes constant rather than intermittent (actual rather than virtual, a flame rather than a flicker), as it was throughout the pre-life development of the universe from incapable to capable of supporting living things.

The Thirdness of the triadic relation is not so simple.¹³ If it were, sign relations could be reduced to combinations of dyadic relations. Semiosis is easy to represent as a triangle, but this ease is a misleading one, for the construction of a triangle as such can precisely be reduced to the simple intersecting of dyadic relations. In the triadic relation, while the relation from sign vehicle to object signified is indeed direct, that relation (say, the relation between clouds and rain) only becomes a sign relation when it is subsumed within a further and indirect relation to an interpretant, which may but need not be mental, as Peirce put it — and indeed, in the universe prior to life (as also in phytosemiosis wherever it occurs apart from entanglement with zoösemiosis), cannot be mental.

To find out what has happened, we need both indexical and iconic signs. But to find out what could happen, indexical signs are too closely tied to physical interactions precisely as Secondness to give the complete story. Thus Peirce (1903: CP 5.73) contrasts iconic sign vehicles to indexical sign vehicles in just this way: an icon fulfills its function “by virtue of a character which it possesses in itself, and would possess just the same though its object did not exist” — in our case, though its object does not yet exist; an index by contrast fulfills its function only “by virtue of a character which it could not have if its object did not exist, but which it will continue to have just the same whether it be interpreted as an index or not”.

I emphasize the case where the iconic object does not yet exist, for in physiosemiosis prior to life, what the semiosis does is anticipate (by providing the conditions for) a future outcome of physical interactions within the universe where suddenly the wholly lifeless universe is moved a step higher in the direction of being able to support life — in the words of my Lund colleague: “something more from nothing but” where the interactions within physical reality suddenly result in a condition which makes the universe originally incapable of supporting life less incapable than it was formerly, than it was originally. It is a momentary semiosis, not itself ongoing, like a struck match that in a moment goes out: but the universe in its physical condition of being is left changed from what it was, moved in the direction, the “upward” direction, of being able to support life after all, even though not yet actually supportive of it, since actual living things have not yet fully become possible.

This is a tissue of relations, imperceptible as such (for relations have no quantitative dimension whereby sense might directly apprehend them), dependent indeed upon the subjectivities interacting, and yet more than the simple offspring of physical interactions: they are the offspring of physical interactions only as resulting in erection of a scaffolding moving the lifeless universe in the direction of being able to support life.¹⁴ It is like a match struck which almost immediately goes out; yet the brief flame of this virtual semiosis does not simply “go out” and leave nothing; what it leaves behind is a furtherance of the physical scaffolding which, slow by slow, will result in the actual possibility and then the actuality itself of a universe with living beings present, beings which earlier — at a lower stage in the development of the physiosemiosic scaffolding — were not possible at all. Now, in the living world, semiosis becomes a flame that burns constantly in the maintenance of life; but without its intermittent prior sputterings, life would never have become possible in the first place.

The transition from “nothing but” to “something more” is precisely that “influence of the future” which distinguishes the action of signs as the only action where what does not exist plays a positive role in shaping (or reshaping) what does exist. Intermittent, like chance, which semiosis involves; but directional, resultant in “something more”, which chance of itself need not be. Chance and semiosis are both entangled with the teleonomy¹⁵ of physical substances interacting; but semiosis as physiosemiosis is directive of those interactions not randomly (not in the manner of pure chance) but decisively in an upward direction — the direction of life’s increasing possibility and final actuality. Just as zoösemiosis does not displace phytosemiosis yet goes beyond it, so too phytosemiosis goes beyond physiosemiosis without displacing it, and indeed while depending throughout upon the continuance of physiosemiosic results as having shaped the physical surroundings toward the possibility of life.

Thus, just as a virtual semiosis prior to cognitive acts underlies the forensicist’s ability to establish in present being past interactions of a substance, just so virtual semiosis is also at work in the ways that present interactions anticipate future conditions radically different from what presently obtains. Present effects are virtual signs not just retrospectively, but prospectively as well. They portend, and this in two ways. First of all, in any given interaction of bodies, over and above the resultant relations of cause and effect (acting and being acted upon), there is the fact that each of the bodies involved interprets and twists the action according to its own intrinsic nature (final causality). In this way, as Powell put it (1986: 300), “the extrinsic specification of causal relations always reveals indirectly the intrinsic species of the bodies which are their extrinsic specifying causes”. Thus dyadic interactions, as extrinsically specified by the bodies involved at the level of secondness, also project a virtual level of thirdness that anticipates changes in future states respecting the interactions occurring here and now. And the measure of these interactions as anticipative of future developments not reducible merely to consequences of Secondness as such occurs through precisely the same type of causality operative in the sign, whereby it achieves indifference to the being and non-being, presently considered, of what is signified.¹⁶

The virtuality of semiosis in the direction of future states is more complex than in the simple preservation of evidence of past interactions, for the reason that the direct deflection of the results of the interactions (combining chance and the finality of action as consequent upon the substantial identities and diversities of the interactants) itself can lead to changes in the immediate constitution of what does the interacting — as, for example, when one of the interactants is destroyed by the interaction, or when the interaction triggers a new phase in the development of one of the interactants, or when a specifically new type of being (such as a new atomic elementary formation) results from the interaction. Here, Peirce’s idea of scientific laws existing as habits in nature as a whole would seem to find, as it were, a semiotic grounding once the error of identifying semiotic causality with so-called final causality has been overcome.¹⁷ For, over and above the individual interactions of bodies, there is a macroformation of the universe that takes place directionally, as it were, toward the establishment of conditions under which the virtual semioses entangled in physical interactions move always closer to actuality as the universe itself moves closer to the birthing of life.

Out of cosmic dust, stellar systems form through subatomic, atomic, and molecular interactions. At various stages of the process, new elements not previously given precipitate from the interactions (even as now on earth we can in laboratories bring into being a few elements not yet existent in nature itself). These elements, in turn, prove essential to the formation in planetary systems of the conditions under which living beings become possible, and these beings, in turn, further modify the planetary conditions so that successive generations of living beings are incompatible with the original conditions of life.¹⁸

Through this entire series of intersecting and often conflicting processes resulting in cosmic evolution over-all, the specificity and identity of any given process at each step is guaranteed not by individual bodies but by systems of commonly specified real relations between bodies, that is, by specifically identifiable categorially determined systems of ontological relations. Within these systems individual bodies further determine their immediate interactions (only here does the teleonomy of so-called “final causality” enter in) according to their own intrinsic natures. In the case of organisms, where semiosis is no longer merely virtually but rather fully active, this determination in turn depends on a whole sub-system of interactions indisputably semiotic in nature, as Sebeok has pointed out (1977, 1988; 1989a). Yet it is the relational systems as a whole and the interactions within them that form throughout the cosmos a single web of semiosis virtual at the minimum, governed at each point by the objective causality of the sign virtually at work throughout the whole panoply of causal interactions at the level of Secondness. This causality corresponds to the “plan” in von Uexküll’s distinction (1934: 42–46) between goal and plan in nature and is, as Powell points out, “prior to the well-known Aristotelian four causes, the agent, the final, the formal, and the material cause” (Powell 1988: 180, 186):

It is precisely the function of extrinsic formal causality to displace the agent and final causes by a more elementary cause which is not committed to explaining how interaction could be understood. Thus the solar system is explained as a mechanism specified by extrinsic formal causes without needing any explanation by agent causes (let alone by final causes …). For Einstein’s general theory of relativity precisely eliminated gravitational forces from explanation of the solar system, by substituting the curvature of space-time for gravitational forces (Hawking 1988: 29–30). Now gravitational forces [as conceived in the framework of Newtonian physics were] agent causes, whereas the curved space-time that governs the path of the earth around the sun is an excellent example of extrinsic formal causality … because that path consists of specified temporal relations between the earth and the other bodies of the solar system … plain cases of extrinsic formal causality.

Thus, Peirce’s discouragement (cf. c.1909: 6.332) at establishing his broadest conception of semiosis proves unnecessary,¹⁹ once it is understood that the specification of categorial relations in the universe at large already puts into play the causality upon which the action of signs depends: already at the level of their fundaments, signs are virtually present and operative in the dyadic interactions of brute force, weaving together in a single fabric of virtual relations the future and the past of such interactions.

This is semiosis of the specific kind that I have called physiosemiosis, so as to bring out by the very name the fact that it is a question here of a process as broad as the physical universe itself. For this process is at work in all parts of the universe as the foundation of those higher, more distinctive levels of the same process (rooted in the singularity of relation) that come into existence as the conditions of physical being themselves make possible the successively higher levels first of life, and then of cognitive life. Thus, the definition of semiosis is not just coextensive with the definition of life — though it is that, it is also broader still.

And the transformation of physiosemiosis within specifically living interactions, even prior to any question of cognition as such, is dramatic, requiring a specifically identifying label. For physiosemiosis not only links in the present the intelligibility of past and future, it does so by looking to the future beyond interacting individuals only accidentally.²⁰ By contrast, the semiosis virtual to living matter is essentially oriented at once to the preservation as well as to the propagation of the units interacting, and is thereby essentially future-oriented.²¹

Thus orientation to the future, with differing intensity, is nonetheless operative in semiosis from the first. The distinction between physiosemiosis as depending mainly (though not exclusively) on chance events for achieving its future orientation, and the semiosis of living matter (biosemiosis) which essentially turns chance events toward the future in the teleonomic behavior of organisms absorptive of chance, draws very well the boundary line between physiosemiosis and phytosemiosis, the “semiotics of plant life”, as Krampen calls it, or biosemiosis as the semiosis of living matter in general.

No stars in the early universe. No planets without stars. No life without planets. So we see in at least rough, crude outline the scaffolding whereby the universe is moved upward from its primitive lifeless origins neither supportive of nor even capable of supporting life, to planets teeming with life. The scaffolding is brought about through physical interactions within the universe, yes; but as scaffolding it requires more than mere Secondness, more than brute force interactions, though it does need these. If something more did not result from nothing but, there would be no scaffolding, only endless chance occurrences going nowhere.

Wherever and to whatever extent “something more” results within the conflux of physical interactions and chance events, there we find the virtuality of Thirdness, of a semiosis at work to make life more and more possible. It is semiosis — semiosis from physiosemiosis through phytosemiosis and zoösemiosis through anthroposemiosis — that gives substance to the famous but to now rather ambiguous “anthropic principle”, especially in its stronger formulations; and it is semiosis that provides even a better name for, because it profoundly deepens our understanding of, what has heretofore been termed “evolution”. To the vis a tergo touted by the Dennett and Dawkins crowd, semiosis adds as well a vis a prospecto (an influence of the future), and precisely in that — an influence of the future changing the relevance of past to present — does the action of signs manifest itself most distinctly, arcing the whole course of the universe from an initial lifelessness to ourselves, changing profoundly our whole understanding of evolution, and perhaps even providing that process with its more proper name.

Thirdness in Nature: a Peircean Epilogue to Hoffmeyer’s Scaffold Notion

“I, a person of the strongest possible physicistic prejudices,” Peirce tells us (c.1909: CP 6.322), “as the result of 40 years of questioning,” — “since the beginning of the year 1867”, to be more precise²² — “have been brought to the deep conviction that there is some essentially and irreducibly other element in the universe than pure dynamism”, something more than the mere Secondness exhibited in “brute force”.

That was “on the one hand”. On the other hand, Peirce was convinced that this “essentially and irreducibly other” element in the universe could only consist in “a genuine triadic relation”²³ which, since it had to be an element that preceded both human life and every other biological form, could neither be “an intellectual relation” nor “a relation concerned with … phenomena of life” (i.e., life in the biological sense: Peirce c.1909: CP 6.322). Thus Peirce held the opinion that “the problem of how genuine triadic relationships first arose in the world is a better, because more definite, formulation of the problem of how life first came about.”

I suggest that key to solving this problem is Peirce’s proposition (c.1904: EP 2.322) that “nothing can be more futile than to attempt to form a conception of the universe which shall overlook the power of representations to cause real facts”. “The life of symbols” in Peirce’s sense,²⁴ rather than “the life of organisms” in the biological sense, provides us means to realize that semiosis involves an influence of the future (“vis a prospecto”, changing relevance of past circumstances to present situations) at work not only in the lifeworld but in the universe as a whole — including the physical dimension of the universe as “environment” both preceding and surrounding biological life.

Now Peirce was among the early figures to see unmistakably that the universe of human experience not only occurs within a much larger physical universe which is, as physical, indifferent to species-specific variations in the life-world of plants and animals (the sun emits its heat and light indifferent to the existence of bats or earthworms, corn or sunflowers, or anything else on or below earth’s surface), but to see also that this “larger physical universe” is an evolutionary universe which did not contain life at its beginning.

Irreducibly triadic relations are easy to verify in the living world, and more easily the higher we ascend the evolutionary ladder of life. They are, as Peirce recognized, the very essence of semiosis, i.e., of the action of signs upon which living beings have been proven to depend for “nourishment and flourishment”.

But a semiosis in nature prior to and independent of life, a “physiosemiosis”? How could that be?

The better question, perhaps, is: Once we have discovered the evolutionary nature of the universe as a whole, how could such a semiosis not be?

Consider. “Brute Secondness”, physical interaction, requires actual existence here and now of the interactants. Not so action of signs. Semiosis is the only form of action which does not presuppose the actual here-and-now existence of the “individuals” involved in the interaction. Peirce was of the opinion that it is “untenable doctrine” to say “that the future does not influence the present”.²⁵

Well, if this is so, then an “influence of the future” upon the present — a “vis a prospecto”, as Hoffmeyer called it (2008a: 939; cf. Broden 2008: xxiv; Deely 2009: lxxiii & lxxxi) — re-organizing relevance of past events to what is occurring now, may be said to be the most distinctive feature of the action of signs! In order to know “what has been”, we depend upon the action of signs. In order to know “what is going on now”, we depend upon the action of signs. In order to know “what will be”, we depend upon the action of signs. Indeed, precisely because the action of signs, unlike all other actions, does not depend upon the actual existence here and now of the participants in the action, our knowledge both of what has been and what will be (and even of what is now) turns out all too often to be wrong.

In Peirce’s notion of synechism, “reality” consists not only of what is but as well of what could be and what will be. The action of signs, in principle, is a process that goes on “ad infinitum”.²⁶ But in fact “brute secondness” and chance events often interrupt, so that the semiosis series is “broken off”. In such a case, Peirce notes (continuing c.1902: CP 2.92), the sign “falls short of the perfect significant character”, but that is not the same as to say it falls short of reality, for “it is not necessary that the Interpretant should actually exist. A being in futuro will suffice.”

So search for “genuine Thirdness”²⁷ in nature prior to advent of life seems to me to require that we be guided by this notion of “being in futuro” as momentarily realized each time the physical interactions of finite beings (‘brute Secondness’) result in an indirect consequence which moves the universe in some part closer to ability to sustain biological life. “Genuine Thirdness” in Peirce’s mathematical sense requires simultaneous existence of the three terms of the triadic relation, such that the Third has the same relation to the Second as does the First. However, when an Interpretant as a physical situation results indirectly from a direct dyadic interaction that changes the relation of the universe in the direction of being closer to being able to sustain life, that new situation must be regarded as a Thirdness in comparison with the brute Secondness from which it resulted.

There is no “Thirdness” in Hume’s example of billiard balls interacting: the situation starts with contact between billiard balls moving, and ends with billiard balls moving affected only as to their direction of movement. That is a classic illustration of “pure Secondness”. But that is not at all what we have occurring in the evolutionary trajectory the universe has taken from its biologically lifeless beginning to regions where biological life has become actual.

Of course, many physical interactions result in “nothing really new” (as in Hume’s billiard ball analogy); others result in a (physically) degenerate “new condition or state” (of a “Thirdness” “degenerate” in a physical rather than mathematical sense) detrimental to life, as in the hypothesis (see “Asteroid Impact” 2011) that collision between earth and a comet or asteroid wrought extinction of the dinosaurs.

But the Thirdness I am speaking of occurs when dyadic interactions bring about existence of a new condition or state which (by definition) does not reduce to dyadic interaction(s), yet results nonetheless precisely from dyadic interaction: for were there no such occurrence as this, then no evolution of the universe would be possible in the first place, let alone the evolution which led a lifeless universe to a universe both capable of and actually supporting life in local environments — localities which had no actual existence at the very beginning yet came about gradually as indirect accumulation of sic et non novelties not directly predictable from the physical interactions of “brute Secondness” which, indeed, only sometimes (and far from always) bring about such indirect consequences changing the physical environment in relation to a “living future”.

Thus, while the universe does not consist exclusively of signs, it is yet perfused by Thirdness as the action of signs, beginning as a “physiosemiosis”, and only culminating much later (as far as we are concerned!) as “anthroposemiosis”.