Namely, a sign is something, A, which brings something, B, its interpretant sign determined or created by it, into the same sort of correspondence with something, C, its object, as that in which itself stands to C.
In the minds of scholars and lay persons alike, the concept of the sign is usually associated with the linguistic realm, in which signs are used as a vehicle of communication between human agents. However, in the most general sense, a sign can be considered to be a “carrier of meaning” and as such it exists in biology. The reason I put the expression “carrier of meaning” in quotation marks is that meaning cannot be carried as if it were an object. This is a misleading metaphor. Meaning always involves a response and is thus an activity rather than an object. This idea is clearly presented by Holquist: “lack of water means nothing without the response of thirst. […] It is still the case that nothing means anything until it achieves a response” (Holquist 1990: 48). For example, the meaning of a monstrous face staring at us from the dark is the response of flight. No meaning is encapsulated in the face. The meaning of a molecule’s being identified as an antigen can be comprehended only through the immune response (Cohen 2000). No meaning is encapsulated in the molecule. Why do I emphasize the idea of meaning as a response? For two reasons: first, to dismiss the misconception that meaning is encapsulated in the message; and second, to introduce the idea that the sign is not a “carrier of meaning” but a trigger for meaning-making (Neuman 2004)
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What is the minimum condition for semiotics, i.e., for the use of signs in a system? The answer is clear: a distinction. That is, at the heart of any semiotic activity we must assume the existence of differentiated states that are being subject to signification.
Comment: Differentiated states include contrasts, such as the contrast of the dark shapes of a printed letter on the light of a page, the contrast of a particular sequence or letters from all other sequences, the contrast of two days of relaxation from five days of work, the contrast of a keyboard key that is pressed down from its resting up position, the constrast of a loud alarm from the silence before, the contrast of night from day, and so on. Contrasts can be associated with meaning.
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However, the existence of differentiated physical states at the base of our ontological hierarchy does not necessarily imply that there is a contemplating mind interpreting these differentiated states as signs. After all, differentiated physical states existed long before organisms started populating the earth. Why do I emphasize this point? Because a physical distinction can not be truly used as a unit of signification. Any physical difference/distinction is a singular event without the existence of a contemplating device that may convert it into a more general and abstract instance of a class that may be communicated across domains (i.e., a sign).
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Physical states are pure singularities, a property derived from the fact that they occupy different positions in space–time. For example, as a physical entity, each cat is a unique creature with its particular position in space and time. It is what Peirce described as the “dynamical object”. Only the ability to group the various instances under the concept “cat” makes it possible to approach the singular cat from a general and abstract perspective and to communicate this general perspective across space and time as a sign. Following this line of reasoning, I would like to define a sign as follows:
A sign is the name we, as outside observers, give a concept — a functional generality — that is communicated across realms.
Let me illustrate this idea. Each of the four DNA nucleotides is a singularity, since it occupies a unique position in the linear sequence of the DNA. However, when transcribed into mRNA these nucleotides lose their singularity to become a part of the DNA triplets known as codons, each signifying/specifying the synthesis of a specific type of amino acid. A codon is a sign — a communicated functional generality. ... Codons are signs in another sense as well: that they may signify different things to different observers. Although in the standard code CUU specifies leucine, for yeast it specifies threonine! In other words, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the sign and response it invites (i.e., its meaning). This is a general characteristic of signs, and biological signs are no exception.
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Indeed, transcending the singularity of matter is a constitutive dynamic of living systems that is possible only through signs.
Semiotics is the study of signs and their meaning in society. A sign is something which can stand for something else – in other words, a sign is anything that can convey meaning. So words can be signs, drawings can be signs, photographs can be signs, even street signs can be signs. Modes of dress and style, the type of bag you have, or even where you live can also be considered signs, in that they convey meaning.
These signs all ‘stand in’ for the idea of a tree. But they do so in different ways. We generally categorize signs into three types:
In each case, the sign can be broken into two parts, the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the thing, item, or code that we ‘read’ – so, a drawing, a word, a photo. Each signifier has a signified, the idea or meaning being expressed by that signifier. Only together do they form a sign. There is often no intrinsic or direct relationship between a signifier and a signified – no signifier-signified system is ‘better’ than another. Language is flexible, constructed, and changeable. de Saussure uses the word ‘arbitrariness’ to describe this relationship.
A good example is the word ‘cool.’ If we take the spoken word ‘cool’ as a signifier, what might be the signified? In one context or situation, cool might refer to temperature. But in another, it might refer to something as ‘stylish’ or ‘popular’. The relationship between signifier and signified can change over time and in different contexts.
This is important, because signs are understood and encoded in context. As with the words ‘cool,’ the relationship between signifier and signified is made meaningful in context. ...
From Media Studies 101
... it is basic Darwinian selection pressure that makes organism depend upon signs being able to to inform truthfully about the environment. ...
... As soon as individuals of a species appear as an object in the Umwelt of other individuals, the possibility of evoloving that appearance for communicative means is established. This appearance may be shaped in order to communicate stable signs (like the black-and-yellow striping [of insects]) or more timebound signs (like firefly flashing). The important thing is that the cognitive ability in individual organisms now makes it possible for other organisms to try to influence that cognition. While simple, pre-communicative cognition enables an organism to establish some simple environmental fact (is there sugar around?), the semiotic aspects of such behavior lie hidden in the perception-action cycles of the organism. As soon as communication enters the game, explicit signs makes their appearance with all the aspects of attention-directing in a proto-public space of many individual organisms.
While the capacity to influence cognitive functions of other organisms is of course a tremendous tool for deception [such as when harmless flies display the black-and-yellow striping deceptivly in order to scare away predators] it may also be a tool for cooperation as is seen in the sophisticated semiotic interactions controlling colony behavior in social insects."
The self's relationship to information is where for-ness and about-ness are most apparent. Information is always significant for a self about its circumstance. Interpretation is not a simple two-part cause-and-effect relationship but a triadic relationship whereby a self (1) interprets an association between a sign (2) and what it's about (3) for the self.
We often loose sight of the role played by interpretation. We do so by treating information as completely contained and produced within some material object. For example, we might say that a book contains information that causes us to think certain thoughts, that a stop sign contains information that causes us to stop, that pheromones contain information that causes animals to mate, or that DNA molecules contain information that causes adaptive traits.
Treated this way, information invites equivocation whereby on the one hand we can say that the sign is a material cause of material effects - the information within an object causing a self's action, and on the other hand we can say that the material object aims to convey information to us.
Treating information as cause of effects lends false credence to eliminativism. Information is often treated as a property of a material object that causes us to act. Treating it this way promotes the false notion that all phenomena are reducible to cause and effect.
Or we can equivocate in the opposite direction, treating information as humunculi, "little men" inside an object aiming to tell us something, for example, books and stop signs aiming to inform us, or DNA aiming to program bodies. Treating objects as aiming to convey information lends false credence to panpsychism, the theory that all matter, living or nonliving, has aims in mind. A panpsychist might argue that if signs are aiming to convey information, then there are aims in anything and everything.
We also often say things like "I interpreted this as a sign that I should act." This is a more accurate way to think about information. A stop sign doesn't cause us to stop unless we crash into it. A stop sign is instead a potential sign that some selves interpret as signifying that they should stop.
A stop sign is not inherently information. Plants, animals, and people from distant cultures don't interpreet stop signs as about anything. Potential signs are open to various interpretations. For example, a stop sign, for you, might be interpreted as about traffic saftey, not getting a ticket, too much government intervention, or slowing down to enjoy life. Interpretation is unpredictable in ways that cause-and effect events are not.
Cause-and-effect events only occur through the interaction of present material objects - Thing X and Thing Y interacting. In contrast, even the absence of somthing can be interpreted as a sign. A missing stop sign might be interpreted as about vandalism or lax traffic safety. The absence of an expected RSVP from a friend can be interpreted, amoung other possibilities, as a sign that there's been a misunderstanding, that your friend didn't receive your invitation, or that your friend is uncaring.
The absence of a cause never yields an effect, but the absence of a sign can yield an interpretation, and not just for humans. For example, a deer tick waits in high branches for the scent of butyric acid wafting up off the coat of a passing deer. When it senses the butyric acid, it falls from the branches, with luck onto the deer's coat. The deer tick is patient, waiting in the same spot for about six months. If six months pass without any sign of butyric acid, the ticks moves to a different location. The absence of butyric acid is significant to a deer tick, given it's interpretive competence.
I'll be making a string distinction between cause-and-effect phenomena and interpretation. Only selves interpret. We interpret potential signs. Anything in the entire universe is a potential sign, but only becomes an interpreted sign when selves intrepret it as significant.
... I'll steer clear of the ambiguous term information, focusing instead on potential and interpreted signs. Anything can be a potential sign. It only becomes an interpreted sign when interpreted by a self as a sign for the self, about its circumstance.
Neither Ghost Nor Machine, by Jeremy Sherman
The term interpretation is crucial here. To interpret normally means to understand an action, a mode, or a way of behaving as having a particular meaning. The act of interpretation thus seems to be a key to the production of meaning when this word is used in a situated local sense. Would we also accept this term to cover, for example, the case of a bird’s broken-wingtrick? A fox, say, is lured away from the bird’s nest because it “interprets” the clumsy movements of the bird as signifying an easy catch. Instead of searching for the nest it therefore follows the bird away from it until the bird suddenly stops pretending to have a broken wing and flies away.
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Already more than one hundred years ago the American logician, scientist, and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) defined a sign as a logical relation of something (the sign vehicle) that is referring to something else (the object) by inducing the formation of an interpretant, as he called it, in a receptive living system. To take a very simple example, smoke is a sign vehicle when or if it provokes the formation of fleeing behavior (the interpretant) in an animal that takes the recognition of smoke to mean danger (the object). Although human cultures operate on very complex chains or webs of signs of all kinds, most of the world’s other species are predominantly guided by iconic or indexical signs (based on likeness and physical relatedness, respectively). The dividing line between humans and animals cannot therefore be whether or not a species possesses semiotic capacity; rather, it concerns the kind of semiotic capacity the species will master. Humans possess the ability to communicate and think via symbolic references, while all other organisms seem to be limited to iconic and indexical referencing.
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Nor is semiosic activity exclusive to the animal kingdom, because all living creatures need to adjust their activities to changing conditions around them and are utterly dependent on the ability to interpret important cues in their surroundings (their local semiosphere) no matter how primitive this interpretative capacity is.
From A biosemiotic approach to the question of meaning, by Hoffmeyer.
To make this clear though, one needs to dissociate information from any approach that confuses it with data; on the contrary, and thanks to the work of philosopher Gilbert Simondon, information is amplified as that which drives any process of individuation. In other words, information becomes synonymous with meaning: what is informative is whatever is significant enough to catalyse a transformation.
...The first-order cybernetic machine performed homogeneous, repetitive work and it is for this reason that Simondon criticised it as a quantitative theory that is fundamentally detached from its main technoecological objective: not to examine information per se, but rather the experience of information. Simondon claims that when information is approached as its experience, it becomes characteristic of the very becoming of every individual in their affective-perceptive relations with their environment.
Five Points Towards an Architecture In-Formation by Stavros Kousoulas and Dulmini Perera
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