Notes on The Evolution of Semiotic Self-Control

The Peircean reference to Kaina Stoicheia was found in Frederik Stjernfelt’s contribution The Evolution of Semiotic Self-Control. This notion of semiotic self-control seems like a very nice interpretation of the concept of autonomy, and this essay extends this notion throughout evolution. I really need to read “Natural Propositions”! Of course, autonomy calls out to the distinction between “physis” and “nomos” more directly than the term self-control.

The article begins critiquing Deacon’s notion that symbols can be distinguished as a phase in biological evolution. Stjernfelt points out that “dicisigns” are a type of symbol and points out that “natural propositions” must occur very early in biological evolution. This is consistent with the biosemiotic notion that thirdness and life are coextenstive.

So Peirce may describe the Dicisign as a special sign uniting two different signs both related to the same object, but in two different ways.

So does the Dicisign have the structure of a loose morphism (i.e. span, cospan or possibly profunctor)

Pragmatically, the existence of Dicisigns will be displayed by specific perception-action connections – in an organism’s behavioral possibility of acting in a typical, categorized way prompted by the categorical perception of some biologically important, stable feature of its environment. p. 45

Baez analyzed this perception-action link as a cospan in their “agent” blog series, but thinking of a cospan as a habit allows for 2-cells to represent the habit of changing habits.

It would be valuable to analyze this example of e. coli and sugar as an example of an evaluation.

The main argument of the paper is that self-control essentially involves hypostatic abstraction, and that this ability is key to thinking about thinking, in that the original thought must be transformed into an “object of thinking”. There is a ladder of self-control in this chain of abstractions. Several quotations from Peirce are used to illustrate these chains.

A correspondence between semiotic self-control and joint attention is developed. He references Tomasello’s work on joint attention, which I haven’t read. This section seems important as it covers the same gap as from individual to collective autonomy covered by Castoriadis. A link is made between the game-theoretic understanding of logic in Peirce and joint attention.