Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to present a possible theoretical articulation between Terrence Deacon’s concept of ententionality and the concept of pertinence as posed by semio-linguist Luis J. Prieto. The advantage of such articulation is that it brings together two seemingly incompatible approaches within semiotics, namely the Peircean and the Saussurean ones. We start by subscribing to the definition of semiotics as the study of forms of knowledge in order to highlight the importance of analyzing intentional phenomena as semiosic phenomena. Afterwards, we present the concept of ententionality and the levels of organization (homeodynamics, morphodynamics and teleodynamics) that ultimately set the conditions for entention to emerge. Then, we present an analysis of this concept aided by Prieto’s notion of pertinence. Our main conclusion is that ententionality and teleodynamic organization presupposes the existence of a pertinence principle that enables the recognition of differences in the extrinsic conditions of a system, and that such recognition of differences is at the basis of proper intentional phenomena.
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Notes
Since Prieto wrote mostly in French, when referring to this concept he used the French word pertinence. Nonetheless, the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, first edited by Sebeok in 1986, contains an entry on relevance written in English by Prieto (Prieto 1994), wherein he treats “relevance” as being equivalent with “pertinence”. In this paper we will prefer to use the English word “pertinence”, instead of “relevance”, as it seems a more direct translation of the French term.
Throughout the text we will use “semiology” or its derivate adjectival forms for referring to the tradition within semiotics that comes from Saussure. The term “semiotics” will be used for our discipline in general without making distinction among schools. We will follow Deely’s claim that semiology is only a part of semiotics as a larger discipline (cf. Deely 2009).
“[T]he solution found by linguists to the classification and cognition of sounds should be valid in principle mutatis mutandis, for classifications and knowledge in general” (translation by the author)
For a review of the definitions of “intentionality” as used in biosemiotics, see Favareau and Gare (2017).
I take the idea of a pertinence principle articulating the classification system by means of which an organism cognizes its environment from Prieto’s Pertinence et pratique: essai de sémiologie (1975).
For the sake of the argument presented here we will assume that classification systems logically precede the semiotic structure. Nevertheless it is important to notice that a proper account of this assumption would call for a redefinition of a big part of Prieto’s theory which can’t be done in this text (some problems related to this issue can be found, for example, in Russo 2007: 108–109). Thus, I ask the reader to make this assumption with me. We will let the examination of relationships between classification systems and semiotic structures for future research dealing with the problem of taking Prieto’s theory as a general theory of semiosis.
We follow Prieto on defining the complementary class in the following way: “Reconnaître l’appartenance d’un objet à une class […] signifie le reconnaìtre d’une part comme étant different d’autres objets, don’t on dit qu’ils n’appartiennent pas à cette classe et qu’ils forment la classe « complémentaire » correspondante” (To recognize an object as pertaining to a class […] means, on the one hand, to recognize it as being different from other objects of which it can be said that do not pertain to this class and that they form the corresponding “complementary” class). (Prieto 1975: 81–82)
“Every practice accomplished by a subject is therefore normalized […] In consequence, given that a practice is precisely what determines the aim of all knowledge, the adoption of a norm is definable as the final outcome of the semiotic process” (translation by the author).
Since Prieto was of Saussurean and Hjelmslevian filiation, these authors could very well be Hjelmslev himself and Greimas. In fact, there is some research already done in this regard. In France, Denis Bertrand has published an article wherein he tries to establish links between biology and semiotics by means of the Greimasian theory of language (Bertrand and Canque 2011). Very close to this line of thought, Alessandro Zinna presented a paper called La sémiotique du vivant at the 13th World Congress of Semiotics in Kaunas, Lithuania, in which he pointed to a possible expansion of Greimasian ideas into the living realm. Regarding Hjelmslev, Miguel Ariza has been laying down the foundations for a semiotic model that joins together Hejlmslevian algebraic semiotics with René Thom’s topology (Ariza 2014). Although up to now Ariza’s work has been dealing with narrativity, his more recent research project involves the development of a computational biologic perspective shaped by the aforementioned semioticians.
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Acknowledgements
A sincere acknowledgement goes to Professor Kalevi Kull for his advice during the making, and re-making, of some parts of this paper. I also want to express my gratitude to the kind colleagues, and excellent semioticians, who reviewed the first submitted version of this paper; their suggestions helped to make this text a lot better. I would also like to thank Tyler J. Benett and the editors of this journal for improving the grammar of this text. The research for this article was aided by the grant IUT2-44 from the Department of Semiotics of the University of Tartu.
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Chávez Barreto, E.I. Ententionality and Pertinence: Framing End-Directedness within Two Semiotic Theories. Biosemiotics 11, 105–120 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-018-9317-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-018-9317-z