Terrence Deacon‘s 1997 The Symbolic Species is briefly mentioned in Chapter 3, but his body of work could undoubtedly have occupied multiple chapters (even if we didn’t mention his brilliant discussion of the limitations of Shannon’s information theory in “Information and Reference”) as he is a leader in the emergence of semiotic cognitive neuroscience, which is an attempt, as he explains, to find common ground between neuroscience and semiotics by reframing neurological processes as semiotic processes and vice-versa.
His view is that this can be accomplished by cognitive neuroscientists abandoning their dominant “computational metaphor” and the view that the basic functional unit of cognition is an individual neuron’s response properties and by semioticians abandoning their strictly structuralist conception of the sign relation and adopting a process perspective that treats iconic, indexical, and symbolic relations as phases in a hierarchically recursive interpretive process. He argues that “the basic neurosemiotic operation is iconic interpretation and that neurosemiotic interpretants take the form of neural dynamical attractors.”
Although all this sounds formidable, it is also surprisingly accessible. In addition to his several books, his other publications range from the intriguingly-titled “How Molecules Became Signs” with its nod to Binghamton University professor emeritus Howard Pattee’s classic paper “How Molecules Became Messages” (spoiler alert: Pattee himself indicates that he sees little connection between Deacon’s theorizing and his own given their very different interpretations of “interpretation”, though other commentators in the December 2021 Biosemiotics issue have been more sympathetic), to his “Beneath Symbols: Convention as a Semiotic Phenomenon,” an investigation into Steven Harnad’s celebrated “symbol grounding problem” (how the mind connects any specific thing to a meaningful interpretation of that thing— and a very useful discussion by Li and Mao in Philosophies on the current state of “the problem” is available here) which attempts to, as Deacon says, “turn the problem on its head” by utilizing Peircean semiotics to investigate how toddlers “unground” the problem for themselves as they learn language.
He writes, “the problem is actually to explain how iconic
and indexical forms of communication—which are intrinsically “grounded” due to the sign vehicles sharing features with their referents—can be used to develop communication using ungrounded sign vehicles (aka words/symbols). This is of course the challenge faced
by every human toddler. The reason that the challenge is seldom framed this way is because the infant-caretaker interactions are not generally understood in semiotic terms
either in psychology or development linguistics and because the development of language competency is not seen as a transition from an earlier to a later more developed semiotic
process. From a semiotic perspective, however, there is a rich and complex set of social semiotic skills being acquired during the first year of life and significantly prior to the early
stages of explicit language acquisition. Seen from this semiotic perspective, then, the explosive growth of language during the second and third years of life is a process in which these earlier iconic and indexical capabilities aid the child’s discovery of how to use words and word combinations symbolically. This is an ungrounding process to the extent that the toddler has to discover how to transfer from using intrinsically grounded to using ungrounded sign vehicles, all the while maintaining referential grounding. This can only be maintained if these iconic and indexical relations are in some way preserved in the transition to symbolic communication. Since properties that could provide referential grounding are absent from linguistic sign vehicles grounding can only be preserved by means extrinsic to them, i.e. in the relations between them.”
His argument is built on the recognition of “semiotic constraints” which he describes as follows: ” Grammatical relationships don’t automatically come to the fore with all forms of symbolic communication. This is because grammar is a property of symbolic reference that emerges when symbolic reference is amplified by combinatorial operations. Once it is recognized that symbolic reference is not a simple mapping relation, but emerges from a base of iconic and indexical relations transferred to symbol-symbol relations, the many contributions of these underlying semiotic constraints to the structure of language will become obvious. Iconic and indexical relationships are constituted by sharing explicit properties that with their referents. These are implicit ineluctable constraints that are inherited by features
of grammar and syntax. These become re-expressed in operations involving symbol combinations, such as phrases, sentences, arguments, and narratives. These constraints
emerge from below, so to speak, from the semiotic infrastructure that constitutes symbolic representation rather than needing to be imposed from an extrinsic source of grammatical principles (e.g. innate universal grammar). Although this infrastructure is largely invisible—hidden in the details of an internalized system and largely automated during early childhood—using symbols in combination in communicative contexts necessarily exposes these constraints that determine iconic and indexical grounding.”
With his collaborator Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi of the University of Warsaw, he has been exploring how this approach to understanding the use of symbols through “ungrounding” can also be applied to modeling emergent symbolic communication in artificial systems, particularly by “double-grounding” (that is, by developing models in which the relations between indexical and iconic signs can appear both in coactions in the world and in other linguistic forms that may be especially suited to epigenetic robots).
Deacon’s work here adds a fascinating underpinning to the customary view of early childhood development, especially in terms of early literacy, providing a provocative alternative to Vygotsky’s influential theory of semiotic mediation in relation to pedagogy, and is perhaps also relevant to the possible role of robots in libraries, as there is growing interest there in doing LIS-related research, including on embodied cognition. It would certainly give new (if artificial) life to ongoing literacy efforts within the library.
Keywords In and Out of Context 