Life and language: Is meaning biosemiotic?

Through evolution, the living unites life, language and human experience. A ‘one system’ view thus attends to acts of
meaning, knowing and ethics. Pursuing this domain, I offer general discussion based on Paul Cobley’s Cultural
Implications of Biosemiotics (2016). Interpretation, he argues, peels back symbolic, indexical and iconic layers of living.
While applauding the scope of his view, as a linguist, I baulk at identifying ‘knowing’ with symbolic reference and its
objects. Given first-order language, I think, people use observations (by both others and self) to construct as persons. While
the symbolic is hugely useful, nature - pace Chomsky and Deely – gives no indication of an epigenic break. In ontological
terms, one can ask if, as Cobley suggests, meaning depends on modelling systems (with ententional powers) and/or if, as Gibson prefers, invariants shape a history of direct encounters with the out-there. Whereas one view identifies the semiotic with the known, the other allows biosemiotic description of the observed. I invite the reader to decide what s/he stands. In either case, one can use experience of being alive to consider Cobley’s challenge to individualism and voluntarism. Ethics, he argues, arises from participating in the living. Knowing, and coming to know, use repression and selection that can only be captured by non-disciplinary views of meaning. As part how life and language unfold, humans owe a duty of care to all of the living world: hence, action is needed now.