The World of SPLectrum
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Semiotics
Semiotics is the study of signs and of how meaning is made — and in its account meaning is restless, each sign giving rise to a further one, passing onward without end. Where the other branches stay with human expression, semiotics runs below the human: into the sign-life of organisms, meaning-making before and beneath language, from the cell upward.
Semiotics, in Peirce: the sign is triadic — a sign stands for an object by producing an interpretant, itself a further sign, so meaning passes endlessly onward in what Peirce called unlimited semiosis. That onward passage of interpretants reaches the same never-closing pole as Derrida’s différance, from a wholly different ground — logic and the theory of inquiry. And unlike the others gathered here, Peirce’s sign needs no human in it: an icon, an index, a symbol do their work wherever one thing stands for another. That is the opening through which semiotics walks below the human.
Biosemiotics took exactly that opening. Carried forward by Thomas Sebeok, grounded in Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt — the world as it is disclosed to a creature through its own signs — and developed in Jesper Hoffmeyer’s reading of signs from the cell upward, it treats meaning-making as running across the whole of life, well beneath language. The fuller account lives on the biosemiotics subject; what matters here is its claim — that interpretation does not begin with us.
Where this runs next is the SPLectrum side — a gradient rather than a clean cut between the intentional and the intentionless, with no sharp floor, shading down through autopoiesis, assembly theory, mineral evolution, complex adaptive systems, and relational quantum mechanics toward the substrate, and on to the evolution horizon: a direction the branch points, not one it argues here.
Peirce’s triadic sign, and the biosemiotic line that walked through its opening: the dynamic at work in the sign-life of organisms, meaning-making that does not begin with us — and keeps going, by degrees, down toward the substrate the site maps elsewhere.
See also: Aesthetics (the surface this belongs to) · Semiotics · Autopoiesis · Assembly theory