Laws of Symbolic Mediation in the Dynamics of Self and Personality *

Abstract

The concept of the symbol shows the way to overcome RenC Descartes' partition of man into the self as res cogitans and the body as yes extensa. I n the symbol psychological meaning and physical sign appear as a unit. We find the personality of a human being in the meaning of his words and actions, habits and gestures, and we experience this meaning as being identical with its bodily bearer, resembling the unity of symbol and meaning. Klages' in his studies of expression, Spranger,2 in his Verstehende Psychologie of personality apply this concept of the symbol. It is unnecessary to probe the justification of these authors for their application of it because for our point of view a different use is central. Symbols are not only a model for the unity of body and mind of people as they present themselves to us outwardly in their behavior and appearance. Symbols also provide a method of understanding this unity from within as it is reflected in the constitution of personality. This paper is based on the hypothesis that all emergence of psyche or experience in man and animal is associated with sign systems in the function of a symbolic medium just as human thought is linked with language.Apart from its task in the communication with other people, language, in inner virtual speech, acts as the medium for comprehending and reflecting experience in thought. Only with the help of a symbolic sign system in the form of language is man able to rise above the immediacy of his emotions and perceptions toward the supremacy of reason and the experience of an objective world of facts. The central nervous system is a communication system that transforms the excitations of the sense organs and the signals received through hormones and other chemical substances into the code of its own excitations. Through these coded excitations it steers the actions and reactions of the organism. The central nervous system also enables the organism to decode the excitations generated in these vital communication processes. Through the latter process the organism discloses to itself in living experience, that is, in emotions and perceptions, the significance of its own situation and the character of its environment. Just as the decoding of words yields meaning, thc decoding of excitations within the central nervous system yields perceptions, emotions, and imagery: that is, the phenomena of mental life.Language ranks highest in the hierarchy of the internal sign systems, which are superimposed in layers Upon each other in the course of evolution. The lowest level of communication processes corresponds to those of the somatic periphery, of the sense organs, peripheral nerves, and muscles, and is directly related to palpable reality. On the level of the vertebrates the neural canal is

Where Does Pattee’s “How Does a Molecule Become a Message?” Belong in the History of Biosemiotics?

“…Almost contemporarily with Beadle & Beadle connecting of life and language (1966) or even with Rotschild's alleged first use of the term (1962( , see Kull 1999a and, clearly, years before the other christenings of the field (Stepeanov 1971, Florkin 1974; see, for instance, Barbieri 2008d, Favareau 2008), Pattee was already advancing and developing, in an independent way, concepts and ideas that cannot but be considered as resonating with some of those which will later become the 7 Precisely in his contribution to the collective volume on The Concept of the Gene in Development and Evolution edited by Beurton et al (2000). core of Biosemiotics.…”

“…Nevertheless, I think Favareau (2008) is quite right in assessing the significance of most forerunners, when he says that the work, the people or even the meetings around Theoretical Biology did not build up anything as a coherent new area of research and, naturally, this may well go for Pattee too. Likewise, he notes that "no interdisciplinary movement resulted from [the] individual efforts" of Florkin (1974), Rotschild (1962) and Stepeanov (1971) who independently coined the term biosemiotics (p. 55). Instead, for Favareau, the encounter between Sebeok and Hoffmeyer in 1990 is going to fuel a movement that he describes as irradiating from Copenhagen and leading through several workshops to the International Gatherings starting in 2001 precisely in Copenhagen (and later in 2005 to the first journal and the society).…”

Classification of Cell Signalling in Tissue Development

“…Semiotics, the ' science of communication studied through the interpretation of signs and symbols ' (Oxford English Dictionary, 1989), though classically associated with linguistics, was fi rst applied to biology by Rothschild in the early 1960s (Rothschild, 1962). In the context of living organisms biosemiotics (biology interpreted as sign systems (bios ϭ life, semion ϭ sign)) holds that all information exchange in living systems is mediated by the use of signs.…”

Uexküll, Peirce, and Other Affinities Between Biosemiotics and Biolinguistics

“…While the name biosemiotics appeared already in the 1960's (Stepanov 1971;Rothschild 1962;cf. Kull 1999), the term biolinguistics was coined by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini in 1974 for an international meeting at MIT, in cooperation with the Royaumont Institute in Paris, 'that brought together evolutionary biologists, neuroscientists, linguists, and others concerned with language and biology' (Chomsky 2007:9).…”