Chapter 13: Signification and Meaning

Chapter 13: Signification and Meaning

“What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world- and defines himself afterward.”

(Sartre, 2007, p. 26). 

Making Meanings 

“Content” and “contentful meaning” differ from “significance” in that the former terms have conditions of veridical normativity. The veridical meaning of content is relative to truth and accuracy conditions. Significance is made contingent to vital norms enacted by an organism. Signification occurs during the process of perceptually differentiating figure-from-ground (i.e. a process of sense making or enactive objectification), and involves pre reflective enactment of vital normativity. In contrast, referentially contentful meaning-enactment involves intersubjective normativity with others and has truth conditions. In this usage, meaning therefore involves intersubjective normativity enacted with conspecifics, while signification involves vital normativity, but not necessarily intersubjective normativity. 

Meaning enactment does not involve representation of things-in-themselves. Instead, this process involves enacting referential normativity with others in a shared world having common know-how. Intersubjective meaning (including linguistic-based meaning) can be conceived as a socioculturally scaffolded co-enaction with tetradic synergy. Instrumental, pragmatic norms from this closure can be retrospectively redescribed via abstraction. The rest of this chapter will explain this conception, towards outlining the processual activity structure for intersubjective meaning enactment. This is a processual framework for minimal meaning making.

“Tetrad” refers to a four-member system, as in “monad, dyad, triad, tetrad.” The tetrad involved in enacting intersubjective meaning is the interactive system with abstracted components of: 

1. An intersubjectively practic referential tool e.g. referential calls, gestures or words 2. an afforded object, 3. the specific subject with a response contingency from a conspecific, 4. the conspecific with a state of response-contingency to the specified subject. The latter can be either present or virtual as a re-enacted trace with a virtual response contingency. 

Note that intersubjectively practic referential tools can broadly include other socially or culturally scaffolded systems of referential symbols, not limited to spoken or written language. Response contingency could be to a re-enacted perceptual trace (Chapter 10) of a conspecific's response, or to a directly coupled response of a spatiotemporally present (i.e. intersubjectivity coupled) conspecific.

These abstracted members are to be considered part of a synergistically holistic concrescence. Contentful meaning obtaining intersubjective normativity break down in some way if this processual structure is incomplete or disrupted. This heuristic is a way to profile dimensions and degrees of how contentful meaning (and related normativity) comes-to-be. Each case of meaning enactment (whether in humans or other social and referentially communicative animals) must be qualified in contexts of concrete situations. This is not an all or nothing process, but a qualitative and idiosyncratic continuum. 

Considered by itself, intersubjectivity is actually a triadic relationship in this heuristic. That is, intersubjectivity involves interaction between a specified member, a conspecific, and an object under joint attention and shared affordance. In contrast, the enaction of meaning with truth-conditions necessitates a tetradic coordination. Bare language, abstracted as a formal-syntactic system, is triadic between two conspecifics and the cultural referential tools (word, call, praxic gesture, emotional facio-praxic gesture, emotional prosody structure, etc). Meaning is enacted tetradically between the two intersubjective conspecifics (or the operational conspecific plus the perceptual trace of a virtual conspecific's response contingency), plus the referential tool (e.g. syntactic language, calls, gestures), and the jointly attended object-to-be-conditioned with meaning. 

Instrumental, pragmatic norms of meaningful intersubjectivity are relevant to the organizational structure of this precarious closure and its history together. To abstract a normative conclusion of meaning is a hermeneutic activity of retrospective redescription by a specific subject, embedded and historized.

This is an autopoietic, autonomic process involving a tetradic, synergistic interrelationship between coupled conspecifics, language (referential cultural tools), and the objects under shared attention and signification/affordance. Abstracted, normative meanings can be retrodicted by a specified subject, having a shared history with this concrescence. This process involves a concrescence when synergistic members are co-operative. Members and their normative meanings can be abstracted. 

Meaning enactment collapses in situ when members of this process are removed. Meaning is thereby enacted precariously, facultatively, and transiently. Processes of meaning enactment come together during the situations when-and-where these members come together in synergy. In this framework, meanings and purposes are not inherent as pregiven telos within substances. 

To restate and clarify:

Abstracted language by itself, as a formalized syntactic system, is triadic between two conspecifics and the cultural referential tool-system (words, syntax, calls, praxic gesture, emotional facio-praxic gesture, emotional prosody structure, etc). Thus traditional linguistic ‘dialogs’ are more abstractly/accurately considered as ‘trialogs,’ between the specified subject, the conspecific, and the abstracted syntactic formal system. 

Thus, the processual enactment of meaning necessitates a tetradic interrelationship between the two conspecifics (or the conspecific plus the re-enacted perceptual trace with a virtual conspecific's response contingency), with the referential tool system (e.g. words, the linguistic system), and the afforded object-to-be-conditioned with meaning.

For enactive linguistic bodies: Linguistically based purpose or meaning does not originate via telos yielded from a trialog between a telec object, the knower, and the referential system. A knower does not represent objects with inherent telos, using symbolic language with pre grounded meaning. This is teleology applied to the final causes of substances, their properties and functions. Nor does meaning get enacted between conspecifics and bare language by itself: this is linguistic teleology applied to the final-cause of meaning being functionally grounded in the formalities of a syntactic system. 

Instead, the general ontogeny and evolution of purpose/meaning is a processual concrescence via a tetralogue between conspecifics having response contingencies, their culturally based referential-tool system, and the afforded object to be meaningfully conditioned. Meaning considered by itself is an abstraction from this synergistic conscrescence. However, to say that meaning is somehow inherent in any one of these members, by themselves, is a fallacy of reification. This is also a fallacy of misplaced concreteness for meaning considered by itself. These fallacies apply to propositions of linguistic teleology regarding the meaning of bare language as a formal-syntactic system. They also apply to teleology regarding the meaning of things and functions, under substance ontology. 

The Roles of Evolution, Development, and Niche for Minimal Meaning-Making 

Minimal meaning-making (epistemics) differs from minimal sense-making (signification, perception) in important ways. The afforded-object deserves a place in this tetrad by consequence of its natural history within a niche construction, and its role in minimal sense-making. Physical patterns have biosemiotic relevance to an organism attuned with its niche construction, relative to vital norms and the organism-environment system’s co-eco-evo-devo history together. 

In a poetic way, the phenomenology of biosemiotic affordances gives a virtual presence to one’s phylotypic ancestral influence. This influence is passed on via the progeny’s heritability of the progenitor’s embodiment, and via reiterated stability of niche construction over time. The phenomenal experience of biosemiotic affordances is like the remanence of a progeny’s phylotypic ancestors having a virtual presence. The progenitors are speaking via inheritance of their embodiment and via reiterated stability of their niche construction. In this way, the fourth member of the meaning-enactment synergy (i.e. the afforded object-to-be-conditioned) has potency via phylogenesis, inheritance and development, and stability of niche construction. In other words, via eco-evo-devo history. This notion corresponds to Edmund Husserl’s generative phenomenology, in addition to the previously outlined (Ch. 11) genetic phenomenology:

“Generative phenomenology [...] widened the scope of this genetic analysis beyond the self-other relation to include the parameters of birth and death as well as the interconnectedness of generations. In this context, the term generative has a double meaning: it means both the process of becoming and the process of occurring over the generations [...] the historical, social, and cultural becoming of human experience. […] [T]he subject matter of generative phenomenology is the historical and intersubjective becoming of human experience, whereas genetic phenomenology focuses on individual development without explicit analysis of its generational and historical embeddedness.” (Thompson, 2010, p. 45).

In a way similar to Husserl’s generative phenomenology, affordances (of opportunities-to-act) and signification (of signal from noise, figure from ground) can be considered as a referential-communication between an organism and its phylotypic ancestry, via inheritable form, behavior, niche stability, and cultural niche stability. A ripe fruit looks red contrasting from a canopy appearing green, and the snow is a blank white. These colors once had relevance to the organism’s ancestors' vital normativity, as manifest in phenomenal biosemiosis. The figures, grounds and fields are stable in their genetic differentiation between progenitor and progeny, via inheritance of embodiment and via typical experience-and-development within a reiterated niche construction. The phylotypic ancestors are mediating significance via the descendent’s inheritance of their bodily forms, and their stable niche with opportunities to act. Colors are not a real property of the noumenal physical world, but a property of biosemiotic significance relative to vital norms with an eco-evo-devo-history. Processes of affordance and biosemiosis stabilize intergenerational continuity of generative phenomenology via inheritability of embodied form, habitus and embedded niche and field. Development of a phylotypical and neurotypical phenomenology of perception is contingent on typical biological ontogeny, developmental stimuli, and developmentally critical experiences with a niche. Disruption is dramatically exemplified in conditions of experiential blindness and other abnormalities. The phylotypical and neurotypical phenomenal experiences of perception are not “for free” as stable properties and functions inherent to a morphologically equivalent body, as may be expected in substance ontology. 

Overall, these poetic expressions are meant to highlight the dimension of biosemiotics and significance when referring to an “afforded object” as being part of a meaning-enacting synergy. Further, biosemiotic significance precedes contentful meaning enactment, and the two word usages are not to be confused nor conflated. Significance relates to differentiating figures from ground in a field, during the genetic organization of perception. Meaning relates to a process of epistemic synergy. Perception is the involuntary action of signifying and differentiating one’s world to oneself, like breathing. Meaning-enactment is an intersubjectively synergistic process to condition jointly attended affordances with shared referential systems, and opportunities to act with them. Unlike perceptual-signification which is a continuous, automatic and obligate process, minimal meaning-enactment is a transient, voluntary and facultative process. The former involves a dyadic processual relationship between one’s inherited embodiment interacting with one’s reiterated niche construction. The latter involves a tetradic processual relationship between conspecifics, a referential tool system, and jointly afforded/signified objects to be conditioned with meaning. 

Abstracted phenomenal experience, i.e. phenomenal biosemiotic perception, results from a dyadic relationship. Perception with ecological information (as the automatic/involuntary enaction of qualitative phenomena) is the communication of afforded information between one’s phylotypic progenitor to the evolved/developed inheritor.  “Communication” metaphorically is via inheritance of embodiment, behavioral/phenotypic ways of acting, and niche stability with opportunities-to-act. This constitutes a dyadic referential relationship, between progenitor and progeny in a niche, linked by inheritability of both embodiment and niche construction. This inheritable “communication” of embodiment and niche-construction has vital contingencies upon one’s phylo-normative development, and presence of contextual niche-regularities for opportunities to act, under which the action-of-perception evolved. 

Note that this is not a means to instantiate evolutionary teleosemantics, because no aspect of meaning nor significance is taken to be evolutionarily imbued as a “final cause” of meaning. This is a move enabled by substance ontology, not process ontology.  Process ontology does not claim that bodies and environments can “evolve” meaning into their stable being and history, as a telec final-cause property of normativity. Process ontology rejects the notion of evolving teleosemantics into the substantial forms of bodies with essential properties of functions and histories. History has a role, but it’s not to shortcut the enactment of meaning by “programming” it into evolutionary history as a teleosemantic property or function. The norms to make meaning are not instantiated by evolving them. This is too simple, static, essentialist and teleological.  

Deviations 

Note that phenomenal perception is reliable under most normal circumstances, but is highly vulnerable, contingent, and can have pathology. Perception as a relational process with one’s environment is usually a heavily stereotyped, rigid, reliable, and species-typical experience. However, this assumes contingencies upon typical developmental experiences, niche construction, and generally a phylo-normative relationship between the progeny’s actual habitus and field. 

On experiential timescales, perceptual performance is generally rigid, stereotyped and involuntary. Perception has degrees of plasticity on slow developmental time scales, and can vary on a quicker time scale according to attentional modulation. Even so, there is very little opportunity for perceptual agency, voluntary flexibility, and regulation of one’s perceptual performance (apart from grossly blocking sensory structures, like closing one’s eyelids or covering one’s ears). This means that phenomenal perception is not an “intelligent” action under Nathan Emery’s definition, per Chapter 14 (intelligence defined as skilled/flexible use of a behavior differently than in the conditions under which it evolved/developed). Perception is a relatively inflexible action and is thus reliably usable under the conditions/contexts that it evolved. However, actual perceptual development and performance is highly contingent, even though it “usually works out fine” for most iterations. Change may lead to an illusory disruption, or to pathology (congenital, developmental or acquired). Further, biophysical patterns that are irrelevant to evolutionary and ontogenetic history will not be biosemiotically perceivable, as they are not “attuned” to the organism’s history and vital norms. These informational patterns are not relational to the organism’s operational closures, precarious autonomy, form and behavior, and thus these physical patterns are impotent to elicit any signifying change in the organism. For example, this is why humans cannot perceive UV colors while bird species can, and humans cannot perceive dark matter/energy, because we did not evolve nor develop to interact relationally with these physical patterns. There are no opportunities to act, and there never were for one’s adjacent phylotypic progenitors. This is also why organisms have illusions: an eco/eco/devo-attuned body of pre-reflective sensory phenotypes mis-signifies patterns in the field, because signification is a correlative relationship between embodiment, perceptual performance, and opportunities to act. Due to this co-relative relationship, signification is usually reliable in associating patterns with opportunities and embodiment, but this is a question of reliability, not of validity. Perception is not a task of representing valid affordances normative to objective truth conditions, but one of co-relating pragmatically reliable opportunities to act relative to vital and pragmatic norms (Ch. 11).

While perception is not adaptively intelligent under typical circumstances, it is still alterable on a developmental timescale, altered by pathologies, atypical environmental situations, unreliability or mismatch of the afforded physical pattern with an actual opportunity to act (a correlative mismatch between the actual physical pattern with its signified vital normativity, i.e. an illusion or deception), or metamorphoses. An example of “mismatch between actual physical pattern with its biosemiotic signification” is the example of a Death’s Head Hawk Moth fooling honeybees via mimicry: the moth mimics the same vibration sounds as a queen bee, and the bees leave the moth unharmed as it exploits the hive for honey. A dramatic example of metamorphosis of embodiment transforming perception is the life of a sea squirt, or ascidian. The ascidian develops as a larval free-swimming organism with various sensorimotor structures and a CNS. Upon progression of its life cycle through metamorphosis, it eats its CNS and transforms its development into a sessile filter feeder. This embodiment no longer perceives and acts upon the same opportunities in the environment; this is a wholly transformed way of being and perceiving, both in its metabolic and sensorimotor embodiments. Metamorphosis can come in different processual types, for example holometabolous metamorphosis (holo = whole), and hemimetabolous metamorphosis (hemi = half).

Synergy 

Thus far, this framework has defined minimal meaning-making as the holistic processual structure of a “tetradic synergy.” The tetrad has been operationally defined, but the qualifier of synergy still needs explanation. 

Michael L. Anderson pp 274-275 in After Phrenology sums up the notion of synergy for the purposes of his book, and references a passage from Dale et. al (2013). This chapter will reuse the same passage from Dale et. al, but with application to the process of minimal meaning-making:

"Coordinated action involves, this is to say, the construction of a synergy: a functionally driven reduction of degrees of freedom, where components do not simply align, but also complement and compensate for each other.... [T] wo people interacting in a joint task come to form their behaviors through compensatory complementary behaviors. These behaviors influence one another locally and incrementally, making the whole conversational performance itself a kind of self-organizing synergy.” (Dale et al. 2013, p. 54-56).

Anderson elaborates: 

“This is to say, one of the effects of conversation, and of general communication, is the construction of social synergies in which dialogue moves to invite and induce phenotypic reorganization in one’s dialogue partners. Such stance-taking in dialogue has the effect of reducing one’s degrees of freedom, simplifying what might otherwise be an intractable problem of social coordination." (Anderson, pp. 274-275). 

Synergy is a working-together, from the roots syn and ergos. This involves multiple partners in a joint concrescence, in co-operative operational closure, including enabling-constraint closure and work task closure. Partners differentiate within an integrated closure, under various degrees of external pressure and integrated coherence. Enabling constraints generally reduce the degrees of freedom, enabling free energy to useful work on a system, instead of being dispersed and diffused without constraint. These organizational patterns remain true for dialogic synergies, to triadic and tetradic synergies. Synergies involve holistic concrescence, with emergent system behaviors “more than the sum of their parts.” This applies to the synergistic emergence of minimal meaning making as an irreducibly emergent process, not localizable within any one of its isolated/abstracted members as an essential property or function. 

Recipe for Minimal-Meaning-Making as a Socioculturally Scaffolded Process:

1. Start with throwing away telos, teleology, and teleosemantics: give up on trying to ground a pre-given “final cause” of meaning in evolution or pre-ordainment. This recipe is for enacting meaning, not for finding it nor representing it as a realist property of telec things-in-themselves. 

2. Embed a subject in a sociocultural behavioral field with others (mitwelt), having common phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and sociocultural histories. Do not decompose the organism-environment-culture system; do not reduce meaning to the subpersonal level. 

3. Operationally define “meaning enaction” as a sociocultural epistemic practice (as in praxis, pragmatics). Do not objectify meaning as an occurrent (vorhanden) knowledge “-of '' facts. Instead, epistemic practice must treat meaning-enaction authentically (pre-reflectively), using skilled coping (zuhanden) and practic knowledge “-with” and know “-how.“ Reified objectifications will result in an inauthentic product. 

4. Meaning enaction as epistemic practice involves a synergy (syn-ergy meaning working together) between a minimum of four players (tetrad > triad, dyad, monad). This epistemic practice is a four way (tetradic) synergistic conversation (tetralogue > trialogue, dialogue, monologue) in concrescence. Meaning-conditioning as a synergistically emergent process is not reducible to a property immanent in any one of the isolated members.

5. Operationally define the conversation/synergy partners for epistemic practice as A) the specified subject; B) the conspecific, either physically present or imagined via a re-enacted perceptual trace with response contingency C) the shared socioculturally evolved referential tool system, e.g. calls, syntactic language, gesture, facial expressions, etc (stand in for das man) D) the designated (semiotic/biosemiotic) sign under joint attention and affordance (e.g. equipment, zeug), as the equipment-to-be-conditioned with meaning, the equipment under joint consideration of semiotic signification and epistemic verification. 

Signification and minimal sense-making is not the same as epistemics and minimal meaning-making. Member D, as a process of perceptual signification/affordance, involves its own dyad between a progenitor’s inheritable phylotypic history and niche construction, and the progeny’s inherited embodiment and reiterated niche with opportunities to act. The abstracted dyadic process of communication between progenitor and progeny is via inheritance over reproductive and ecological closures. This is analogous to the conventional intersubjective and sensorimotor closures typical of day-to-day dyadic communication, but upon a different time scale and upon trans-organism reproductive and ecological closures.

6. Holistically combine these ingredients together in concrescence: intersubjectively, interactively, and authentically in situ. Avoid abstracting or reducing prior to concrescence, in order to enact authentic truth-conditions for an intersubjectively attended affordance, using socioculturally scaffolded referential tools. Avoid dis-embedding or decontextualizing any ingredient while meaning is being processually enacted; do not mix behind a veil of ignorance. Remember that nothing makes sense out of context and historical attunement, so keep ingredients transparent and ready-to-hand. Excessive objectification and meta-reflective analysis may result in “the nausea” per Sartre (2007), or absurdism. Finally, remember that epistemics without ethics is half baked.

7. Normative conditions for meaning are relative to this precarious organizational closure’s instrumental, pragmatic norms, and its historical performance together. For a specified subject to abstract a meaning label from this process is an action of retrospective redescription (retrodiction). In this way, a subject or a group can condition their joint affordances with abstracted labels of meaning, and reinforce these conditions through further intersubjectivity and histories together. 

Positive Feedback Loops and the Self-Stabilizing Processes of Intersubjective Referentiality, Languaging, and Epistemic Practice 

Pragmatic abstractions of referential meaning-labels feed back into this concrescence, acting as enabling pragmatic constraints. Enabling constraints further guide intersubjective practices of referentiality and processes of meaning-making. This process forms positive feedback loops between the self-stabilizing products of a meaning-making process, and their continuously reiterated reinput into the process of meaning making. This involves a synergistic, intersubjective concrescence coevolving and self-stabilizing via reinputting its own pragmatic tools and conventions, over time. In general, abstracted referential labels and tools are reinput as enabling constraints for intersubjectivity, thereby stabilizing, integrating, differentiating and co-ordinating the synergistic process of meaning-conditioning. 

The abstracted products of this concrescent process of meaning-making include: a. intersubjectively conditioned pragmatic norms, subsequent to precarious intersubjective organizational closure; b. abstracted referential tags or labels, following reiterated joint reference while practicing with such norms; c. retrospectively re-describable pragmatic/practic referential systems (e.g. language) embedded in a cumulative culture, with differentiated syntax and meta-operations; d. abstracted, crystallized labels become normatively bound with referentiality to joint/public affordances. Joint affordances become normatively bound with their referential tags in practice. This is via stabilization of pragmatic norms regarding symbol grounding, thus binding public labels with public affordances, and constraining variance or ambiguity.

Such products feedback into the conscrescent meaning-making process in a self-stabilizing, integrating and differentiating positive feedback loop. Examples of such positive loops include: 1. Reinput of referential-labels, reinforcing and constraining referential tool use. Such tools include words, gestures, calls. 2. Reinput of referential tools reinforce and constrain the types of meanings that can be made; 3. Reinput of referential tools reinforce and constrain their own adoption and normative conventions for use. The reiterated usage and looping reinput of referential tools thereby self-stabilize and reinforce their own normativity and systematic conventions for use. Over time and coevolution, a highly differentiated, integrated, and intersubjectively normative  referential system precipitates and crystallizes. This follows from historically reiterated positive feedback loops under tightly closed, pressured, and integrated intersubjective closures. The defining example of such a closure is the cumulative sociocultural closure of modern humanity. 

The field of linguistics abstracts norms, rules and syntactic structures from this historical, pragmatic, intersubjective sociocultural concrescence. However, to say that such rules prospectively entailed the evolution of language is to put the cart before the horse. To say that a brain spontaneously evolved a so-called “language acquisition device” is also a resort to substance ontology, teleofunctionalism, and a move of deus-ex-Darwin. Such rule-structures are abstracted retrospective-redescriptions; cross-sections of a concrescence. The role of norms and systematic conventions is one of positive feedback and self-stabilization. Their co-ontogenetic and co-evolutionary origins are via differentiation under the tightly integrated and pressured closure of a sociocultural concrescence. Reinput of normative conventions stabilize their own adoption and differentiation via positive feedback loops. The roles of norms and conventions are not to serve prospectively entailing rules. The relationship is not of mereological reductionism, nor bottom-up genetic determinism. The origin is not of spontaneous evolution as a complicated rule-set, programmed as a telec functionality into a special brain module. This belies commitment to substance ontology.

To recap, referential tools (such as gestures, words, syntax) can be operationalized as pragmatic enabling-constraints. Inititially, an intersubjectively synergistic concrescence forms instrumental, pragmatic norms due to its precarious closure. Specified subjects then abstract meaning conditions, like labels, from their reiterated history together (via retrospective redescriptions). These meaning tags feed back upon the use of referential tools, acting as further enabling constraints to guide the usage of such tools. In this way, referential tool systems (e.g. language) continue to accumulate, differentiate, and evolve under a highly constrained, pressured and integrated sociocultural operational closure, as it coevolves over time. 

Processual meaning-making and epistemic practices involve a synergistic concrescence. As derived from this concrescent history, abstracted meaning-conditions, like labels, are subsequently reinforced by further pragmatic intersubjectivity and use. These abstracted meanings and referential labels precipitate to enable and constrain the practic use of referential tools. Words, calls, and gestures crystallize and evolve as practic tools with norms for meaning-conditions. Their stabilization is reinforced by the positive feedback loops from reiterated joint usage with others. Over continuous reiterations, further meaning-abstractions yield from the holistic process, feeding back into the loop and serving as enabling pragmatic constraints. This guides the practic usage of referential tools, and referential norms for referential practice. In this way, a referential tool system stabilizes and precipitates in a highly evolving cumulative culture. 

Epistemic practice involves a holistically tetradic synergy between A) a specified subject, B) a conspecific (real or imaginal via a re-enacted trace with response contingency) C) das man (e.g. language as a socioculturally evolved pragmatic referential tool), D) a shared affordance/signified equipment. The stabilized products of this concrescence can be retrospectively redescribed as abstracted meanings, referential tools and labels, and normatively constrained conventional systems. Abstracted meanings feed back to constrain and guide the use of practical referential tools (e.g. words), crystallizing these tools with further referentiality. This positive reinforcement holistically reiterates and coevolves with further pragmatic use and history. Languaging and epistemic practices are never in static equilibrium. Language and epistemics evolve their immanent operational closures over time. Their emanent embedded niches and pragmatic fields likewise evolve and change in non equilibrium. Together, habitus (as languaging and as epistemic practice) and field (as niche construction and pragmatic fields) coevolve continuously, over time. Conventions are dynamic and relative, normative to precarious instrumental and organizational closures. Meanings, norms, and conventions are never absolutist nor static unless in equilibrium states, which implies dissolution. 

The Four Member Synergy of Minimal Meaning Processes

Minimal meaning making requires a four-member synergy. A triad, dyad or monad (as in trialogue, dialogue, and monologue relationships) does not suffice. Meaning making requires a tetradic relationship of synergistic concrescence with precarious closure. Pragmatic instrumental norms are consequent to the precarious nature of this closure.

Synergistic (“working-together“) interaction between these four players requires intersubjectivity (direct social perception), joint attention, and shared attunement of ontogenetic, phylotypic, and sociocultural histories, in situ.

Meaningful epistemic practice is synergistic, with others (a pragmatic knowledge-with and know-how), and it is historically and contextually holistic. Meaning-enaction is a sociocultural practice in a specific sociocultural behavioral field with conspecifics (mitwelt) during a specific zeitgeist.

This recipe for socioculturally scaffolded epistemic practice cannot be simply:

Monologue/monologic/monadic: i.e. of monads to themselves, panpsychism (as in Leibniz’s account of monadic meaning)

Nor

Dialogue/dialogic/dyadic: i.e. between 1. the specified subject and 2. telos (This is a recipe for pre evolved, pre ordained final causes, and requires usage of premade meanings) 

Nor

Trialogue/trialogic/triadic: i.e. between 1. the specified subject, 2. conspecific, and 3A. bare language, or alternatively 3B. an afforded object by itself. 3B requires teleology applied to representing properties and functions of substances as immanent final-causes. The move of 3A leaves an ungrounded symbol that necessitates a philosophical move of linguistic teleology/teleosemantics. 3A requires using language that has pre-given meanings already bound up in its syntactic form, and suffers from the symbol grounding problem. Derrida’s concept of différance highlights the intractability of this problem: meaning is not final/determinate, but remains in a state of becoming. Meaning from the syntactic differences of bare language is deferred until contextualized with the fourth member of this synergy. Overall, triadic recipes for processual meaning-enactment rely on teleosemantics and teleology as final grounds. 

Instead: socioculturally scaffolded epistemic practice must minimally be emergent via a tetradic synergy, i.e. via a concrescent tetralogue with sociocultural synergy.

Again, this involves a holistic sociocultural behavioral field with A) the specified subject plus B) intersubject(s) with response contingency(ies) plus C) a practical referential tool (culturally evolved, as in language and gesture), a stand-in for das man, plus D) the shared signified affordance to be conditioned with meaning

Distinguishing Minimal Sense-Making from Minimal Meaning-Making 

Signified affordances are stand-ins for a dyadic relationship between progenitor and progeny, communicating an inheritable perceptual embodiment and niche with opportunities-to-act. This has contingencies to eco-evo-devo history, and may be typically or atypically instantiated. Biosemiotic affordance as minimal-sense making is distinct and precedent to meaning-making as epistemic practice. In this way, significance is only concrescent with meaning and truth-conditions when facultatively holistic with the other players (A-C) of a synergy. Biosemiotics/significance by itself does not equate with the process of epistemics/contentful meaning (at least per the technical word-usage of this philosophical framework). Overall, player D in this tetrad can be thought of as a stand-in for one’s phylogenetic ancestors via one’s inherited form and reiterated niche, or habitus-and-field, with eco-evo-devo contingencies. 

This draws a distinction between biosemiotic sign-ification and epistemic ver-ification, whereas ver is the root word for truth. Signification, by itself, does not have meaningful truth conditions with the goal of representing objective reality, but is instead made relative to conditions of vital and pragmatic norms. D can still occur if severed from B and C, but will not have meaningful truth conditions. Contentful epistemics, on the other hand, necessitates a holistic (A-D) as a synergistic process of ver-ification, as in truth-conditioning.

Thus, sign-ification ontogenetically precedes ver-ification. Significance (biosemiotic perception and affordance) precedes content-bearing meaning (verification, i.e. epistemic practice). From Heidegger, beings-in-time have a characteristic of thrownness, and their pre-reflective perceptual significations (involuntary, like breathing) precede epistemic practice upon such reflectively shareable experiences.

With regards to epistemic practice, logical positivism is a good processual tool among many, but it is not the essence of philosophy-of-science. Neither is logical positivism the minimal process to enact an epistemically verifiable meaning. There is no one grand unified theory of philosophy of science, but an epistemic pluralism of various practices. These are each scaffolded from this processual framework of minimal meaning-making i.e. minimal intersubjective ver-ification.

This recipe is late Wittgenstein-esque, as it involves types of epistemic language games (epistemic practice, linguistic practice) in a cumulative-sociocultural behavioral field. This recipe is also Derrida-esque, as it recognizes the difference and deferral (différance) involved in problems of symbol-grounding, sense-making, and truth-conditioning. This practical framework highlights the relativistic and synergistically tetradic processual structure of epistemic practice. As a modality-flexible (substrate neutral) processual structure, minimal epistemic practice can apply to various fields including science, philosophy, math, and day to day intersubjectivity holistic with joint attention and referential communication. The world isn't made up of facts; facts are processually enacted with others in highly contingent contexts in various behavioral fields.

Finally note that ethics are inseparable from social epistemic practice. Epistemics is also conative, having a vital characteristic of care. 

From the introduction to Uexküll’s Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with a Theory of Meaning, Dorion Sagan comments on the relationship between biosemiotics and epistemic practice. This excerpt helps to support the processual-enactive account of epistemics. 

“ ‘firstness’ refers to existence, ‘secondness’ to contiguity of relations therein, with ‘thirdness’ and the possibility of semiosis occurring only with an interpretant reacting to the sign. A third ‘party’ in other words is necessary to make sense and recognize the relations of one thing to another. The mute interaction of one thing with another opens the possibility of signification, especially in the living, where material complexity and thermodynamic lag ensures that the appearance of one substance will follow another.”

This excerpt highlights the synergy involved in the process of signification between existence, interaction, and a specified subject to relate. Note that this pertains to minimal sense making, and not yet to epistemic practice. For this, a sociocultural field is invoked: 

“Uexküll suggests in the final section of his essay, where he discusses the worldviews of the astronomer, the chemist, and the physicist, science also has its Umwelten. [...] Uexküll gives the lie to the idea of scientific objectivity divorced from the perspectival, perceptual subjectivity of the observers themselves and the signs they use. The idea of an independently existing external reality divorced from minds occurs only within minds.”

This excerpt relates to the processual-enactive framework’s rejection of objective realism. This also emphasizes the epistemic contingency to pragmatic norms in a sociocultural behavioral field, and to the vital norms of perception. 

Conclusions

To conclude this chapter, word-usage and etymology will be deconstructed for the term “consciousness.” This makes reference to ideas from Martin Heidegger alongside ideas from Daniel D. Hutto with Erik Myin. 

“Science” or “scious” is a Latin root for “knowledge.” “Con-“ is a root for “with.” “-ness” is a suffix for “state“ or “quality.” Thus con-sciousness can be taken to mean the Heideggerian usage as a state having pre-reflective “knowledge -with” or “know -how,” contra the cognitivist and representationalist usage of consciousness as reflective/meta “knowledge -of.”

Per Heidegger, basic knowledge is a prereflective/pragmatic knowledge -with and a know -how, not a reflective/representational/meta knowledge -of. In this way, basic knowledge is a con-sciousness, a knowledge -with others, -with perceptual signals, and a practical know-how -with bodies, vital norms, environments, cares, behaviors, motions, motives and emotives.

Thus con-sciousness, as a “desevered” pre reflective and practic knowledge-with and know-how, is contrasted with the “severed” -science (-sciousness) as a representational, reflective knowledge-of. “Basic” minds are characterized by prereflective knowledge -with, whereas epistemic, contentful, meta minds are characterized by reflective knowledge -of. Still, knowledge -of is at root and fundament a knowledge -with and know-how in a specific -scientific behavioral field, sometimes socioculturally scaffolded with meta practices upon meta practices, with scientific technological prostheses. “Objective” knowledge -of is built from and with a fundamental knowledge -with and know -how, -with others, even in the most socioculturally and technologically scaffolded behavioral fields of rationalist -science. Thus the root and ground for the mental fundament, i.e. the existentially precedent state characterizing basic mindedness, is Heideggerian con-scious-ness (desevered knowledge -with and pragmatic know -how). This is contrary to the cognitivist, representationalist, and rationalist usage of consciousness as meta/reflective self-awareness, a type of “knowledge -of'' oneself.

Overall, this explanation of the pragmatic  activity structures for knowing is important to clarify what type of epistemic practice occurs during the process of minimal meaning-making. This word usage is also important to clarify how meta knowledge can be scaffolded from pragmatic knowledge. This segues into the next chapter, regarding the operational definition of intelligence.