First I would like to tell you what my papers is about and a bit on one the several motives for semiotic ecology and its derivates.

I want to introduce you to some key issues of semiotic ecology.

Semiotic Ecology is best described as a set of conceptual tools. One good description of the purpose of this set of tools is that they allow a realistic description of the Human Condition.

By “Human Condition” I mean everything we can observe, induce, presume, infer and present that is a condition of what we human beings are, have been, and what we may become as well as everything we human beings are doing or can do and which influences the course of the world. In particular, the word “condition” is chosen to cover both that humans are conditioned by their world and that humans are a major condition for the constitution and change of this world.

Considering this I cannot avoid thinking that our understanding of the Human Condition is in a lamentable state of affairs, compared for instance to the amount and quality of our knowledge about any amount of details thereof.

In particular — and I select just one of many possible perspectives on that state of affairs — I can barely longer stand the fact that we have two grand and totally incompatible classes of views and viewers of the Human Condition, namely those who think the Human Condition can be explained on the basis of one particular conception of its elementary particles and the way the interactions of these determine everything and those who propose to understand it by doing a symbolic construction of phenomena in an analytic and synthetic procedure.

To concenviently designate these attempts I speak of the former as the physicalistic or mechanistic reduction program and the latter as the linguistic reduction or reduplication program.

I repeat these to be, in my understanding, total incompatible programs. You may roughly identify these as the natural science aproach and the mental or cultural science approach. This is not just two cultures — or three if you want to count those engaged in attempts at bridging the gap and not having a substantial influence in modifying either of the two.

Neither of them is capable of doing justice to the Human Condition: physicalistic reduction because it does not take humans serious; linguistic reduction because it takes only humans serious — to state the reasons in very simplistic terms. And neither of these programs can be improved because this would have to shatter their fundamental presumptions. And yet, adherents of the former approach are on the verge of demolishing the Human Condition while the latter in vain engage in word magic to prevent desaster, both not fully without their personal and group interests. Both approaches are fated to miss their target to help prepare reasonable action, in spite of their two and a half millenia of continuous renown. Or, if you prefer, because of their two and a half millenia of incessant failure.

So my reaction to these bitter insights is to abandon belief in the reasonability and respectablity of either of those approaches. I think the problem lies within their fundamental assumptions which have originated under highly particular conditions — whether to serve leisure pleasure or presumed powers in this or another world.

Those are not repairable. You may agree or not. I appeal, however, at your honesty. Have you never sighed at the brutal fact that none of the great philosophical problems — from the order and disarrays of this world to making subjective and objective knowledge compatible, from the essence of the human existence to determining what is true, good, or beautyful?

So I propose an attempt to start from other starting premisses. The hope, and I have good reason to believe, the effect will be to get an astonishingly simple understanding of apparently complex settings. I start from much simpler and more realistic premisses than those common. In simply watch where this might lead me. I invite your curiousity as to where I am lead. You need not follow me. But, please, don’t judge my ideas on the basis of assumptions I do not make! Do as if my assumptions were valid and follow within that as-if up to certain conclusions. Then, please, ciritically judge whether I have made errores and point those out. Whether error of assumption or errors of inference or observation.

Let me add, as a last and not least of these introductory remarks. Semiotic Ecology, as I collectiveley designate this set of tools, is not proposed to solve any of the extant fundamental questions about the world or about humans in their world.

Rather, as a side effect of its acceptance as a tool, semiotic ecology dissolves many of the extant questions — whether it be truth, knowledge, human nature, or conceptions of the subject, of objects, of mind, of culture, of the person or whatever you want to scritinize.

As for my procedure, today, I present roughly a dozen key concepts and give them new and connected content. I cannot avoid to treat some of them very cursorily only.

Another shorter Intro

have written several intros, all too long

wanted to give you an impression about what I am doing and a glimpse on my motives

much of that has been said yesterday by all of the speakers: Jürgen Straub, Gustav Jahoda, Bob Serpell, and Carl Ratner: cultural psychology is marginal, is fragmented, is without conception, is divorced (universal nomological or perhaps nominalists scientists vs. interpretive hermeneutic belles letterists); psychology as a whole is the same and worse; most sciences have become arbitrary and dogmatic, have become the churches of today they have aspired to replace yesterday. It appears to blossom, but in fact is in shambles, is a scandal in view of its role in destrying humanity and more

For the least humans understand is the Human Condition.

Sciences caring to understand humans are marginal in the universities and have copied and restricted themselves mostly to a repair role instead of claiming and attaining a leading and central role in erverything humans are concerned

But I am stubborn. I have wanted to understand the Human Condition in my young years. I didn’t from studying psychology and related fields. But I still want to.

by ‘Human Condition” I mean:

By “Human Condition” I mean everything we can observe, induce, presume, infer, imagine and present that is a condition of what we human beings are or have become, and what we may become as well as everything we human beings are doing or can do and which influences the course of the world. In particular, the word “condition” is chosen to cover both that humans are conditioned by their world and that humans have become a major condition for the constitution and change of this world.

I think both humanity and understanding the Human Condition are in a lamentable state

there maybe quite simple reason for this: I believe, we started at the wrong end:

to put it simplified: We are all victims of Plato and Aristoteles and the repair attempt by Leibniiz has not really changed anything. In other words: we still believe there is a master plan of the world (roughly Plato) and we are decided to find it whatever the costs; most of us no longer search for it in another world but think it inherent in every elementary particle and the energies involved in them (Leibniz); and we patiently collect the impression the pieces of the world make on our senses, categorize and analyze and synthesize, and infer from strange experiments we do with these things what they may really be and how they could determine everything that is composed of them (Aristoteles)

and most strangely: we do with humans as if they were things like any things else; and then install ethics committees to prevent the worst consequences — the abominable split into the sciences and the humanities replicated!

etc etc etcs

No, I really want to understand the Human Condition

But if there is no master plan but an evolutive process I cannot hope to arrive anywhere by analyzing arbitrarily selected fragments, isolated, taken out of their connective web, beraved of their meaning in the whole setting of which I myself am also a part.

Human culture, human psyche, in short everything we encounter and we can do, arises and changes in time. so instead of presupposing a master design we better attempt to understand how things and humans and culture arise. I have chosen to adopt the constructive methodology, Kurt Lewin among others has proposed in vain. I want to specify not what things are but what the principles are according to which they come about

there is a remarkable analogy for this: chemistry was alchemy up to the moment it switched strategy in the sense I have just described: with the construction of the periodic table of elements and the eventual explanation of its constitutive principles in the nature of the atoms it has become a science, a powerful science, indeed, as we all will agree at the moment we have poisened most of life including ourselves

But humans and the contents of their minds and and the contents of their cultures are not atoms. So I do not use chemistry as a model, simply as a pointer to the constructive strategy

for the Human Condition is much more complex and it is not static. It evolves in many respects. And we have to account for meaning, whatever that is

I have, after 30 unhappy years of knowing how not to do a science of humans, developed in the past 10 years conceptual tools which I call semiotic ecology. and I want to give you an impression of its key issues.

Naturally, I cannot expect you will get everything into your heads within an hour. Rather I hope you are fascinated by this or that element and feel the underlying coherence of that whole of my conceptual toolkit. Much will be very uncommong and you should perhaps forget for a while almost everything you believe in. iosity.

As for my procedure, today, I present roughly a dozen key concepts or ideas and give them new and connected content. I cannot avoid to treat some or all of them very cursorily only. Something you may call cultural psychology, or perhaps better cultural ecology, the strategic key science about the Human Condition, should emerge as a result of using these tools.

Let me make one single and only starting assumption: that our world, i.e. everything we can perceive, conceive, infer, or presume, is genuinly evolutive.

By evolutive I understand that whatever exists and whatever it is results from interaction (or transaction) of preexisting entities. There are no other grounds of existence of anything. No plans nor designs nor principles that exist independently of what they are supposed to account for or explain. Where could such entities exist outside and nevertheless have effects into the existing world and how could causes from outside have effects into our world?

It is true that religious and philosophical traditions dwell on such presumptions. Yet never have the ways been made clear by means of which could bring their effects into being within our world; and, worse, when asked about the reality of such presumptions as to such causes outside, never have descriptions been given that can be checked independently of the phenomena to be explained. For example, if some child has been come save of a dangerous situation that ordinarily is known to do damage to the child undergoing such influence, an explanation is give to the effect that X interfered ö

It is also true that to some extent presumptions of the kind just described have also been evoked within the framework of scientific accounts of the functioning of our world. By example, I point to concepts such as chance. Chance is a construct entering the scence when the functions assumed to account for some event cannot be made fully accountable. Obviously, as a concept in itself, chanced has no explanative value. In fact, it amounts to a declaration of explanatory failure. The presumption that phenomena can be accounted for by point to their determating causes in their entirety cannot be upheld. And of the two exclusive classes of chance possible, the secondary one of method introducing a random component cannot be valued as accounting for the total deviation of the function presumed to explain the fact. So the primary random factor has to be projected onto the process as such.

This is a strong assumption. It claims that there are no other conditions of whatever

Question of prime origin, not answerable

structure - process

relative distinction essential of evolution: structures formed and retained and capable of having effects later, in other connections

I find it essential to conceive of cultures as evolutions,

to develop a general concept of evolution of which there are types, and

to understand within the same concept the commonalities and the differences between the types

and so being capable of understanding the relation and particular place of the of the genuine evolutions of life, of individual (experience making) organisms, and of cultural traditions of groups over generations

So culturality is conceived as that type of evolution which arises when experience making individuals develop mediated experience, i.e. when in groups of individuals entities are produced, maintained, changed, and dismissed that will be the conditions for further entities to be produced, maintained, changed, and dismissed

My claim is that we cannot understand culturality (neither individuality nor the scientific method) if we have no inclusive concept of evolution

of which bioevolution is just one particular kind of evolution

the character of which cannot be conferred upon individual and cultural evolutions

(witness the absurd results of transporting neo-Darwinism upon the economic or the social process; witness the poor and misleading picture attained by transporting the gene concept onto a supposed unit of the cultural process, such as Dawkin’s Meme idea

There appear to be 3 genuine types of the evolutive process: of living beings, of individual organisms (experience gathering and using), and of socio-cultural groups

Those are dependent on 3 more basic types of evolutions that are not very virulent these days, sort of in a rather stable phase: the chemical (the formation of atoms and small molecules), the cosmic (the formation of heavenly masses and their behaviro in space and time), and the mineral (the formationevolutions

obviously our present ideals of science is imprinted by attempts at understanding the cosmic and the chemical processes; from which the idea of eternal law is derived, a bit shortsightedly, but for all practical purposes not wrong

none of our modern sciences think truly evolutive, perhaps the geological sciences in some sense more the the biological sciences, becaus with few exceptions the latter attempt to reduce bio-phenomena to physico-chemical law

Bioevolution presupposed and presupposes an almost, but not quite absolute stability of (a) the cosmic conditions on earth

and (b) that particular mineral evolution of its surface (including the atmosphere);

That whole set of conditions is neither necessarily so at it is, nor is it simply a chance event, but rather the result of a series of resulting conditions that made at any one step the probability of what happened then much larger

At some stage bioevolution

So, over all, it seems wise to conceive of evolutions in general as processes of structure formation and change with a particular balance of innovative and stabilizing moments at any time of the process.

When we venture to understand the genuine evolutions as proceeding kinds of structure formation, maintenance, change, and demise we may become able to conceive of the world as a continouus process of structurization and we may better see the differences as well as the commonalities inherent in the 6 or at least the 3 genuine evolutive processes.

Evolution. This world of ours is of an evolutive nature. Whatever we can make out in it has its conditions in nothing but this very world as it exists before. Whatever emerges may become part of the conditions for the further evolutive process. Based on what the physico-chemical, the cosmic and the mineral evolutions have resulted in, the three genuine evolutions of life, of individual beings, and of the cultural traditions is what we need to understand in order to understand the Human Condition. These are all complex entities that are at any one time of their existence what they are because of conditions determining their becoming. That this is an evolutive world and that we are both an emergence and a condition of this evolution is the single basic assumption I need to make.

If the subject matter of a scientific endeavor is of evolutive nature, it is strange to look for principles or absolute determinants of everything and then add chance concepts for what does not fit the principles. Both in biology and in the psychological and cultural sciences this procedure amounts to a bancruptcy declaration (we really, unfortunately, do not understand!) rather than to an explanation of that subject matter.

So we really should take the evolutive character of our fields serious. There is practically no evolution in the domains of physics and chemistry. But everyting is evolutive, however systematic and expectable in principle, in the domains of life, of individual becoming, and of cultural traditions and their interactions. So why dream of the physical science model? Do you really think, biology is mostly biological? And not mostly chemistry of stuff found in organism after they have been killed?

The crucial question, the key question that comprises everything my thus be formulated: how come the structures including the regular processes we can make out, and that repeat or near repeat all over and that sometimes change, how come they arise as we can make them out? For short: how come structures are formed they way they are?

Remember: the normal answer is either by grand design or by principles inherent in the behavior of elementary particles that determine how they combine and how their complexes behave; unfortunately (?) spiced with a spoonful of chance.

Oh now, what a miserable answer! When I speak here, I continously form structures. What determines them? What is the role of chance therein? Shall I decide to stop and let you think themselves! What determines me to go on? How do the particles qualities determine the social conventions I follow when I have decided to accept the kind invitation and consequently have kept to my decision and come here?

Transaction. Evolutions require a type of causation capable of explaining diverging and converging capable of account for the new and excluding . Branching refers to the innovative or variation producing scene where new structures are formed and modified. Merging refers to the valuative or selection scene where structures are maintained or dismissed. Diverging and converging processes depend on triadic relations of the nature of transactions, i.e. an interaction resulting in something beyond. When reduced to the minimal conditions, two structures interact contingently and thus generate a third structure or change one of themselves. There is a systematic or convergent effect of transaction in that only structures affine to each other (or “knowing” about each other) transact; and there is a generative or divergent effect of transactions in that the spatio-temporal contingencies of interactions can make for ever more and different new structures. Branching and merging in combination result in some regulated or innovative and essentially unpredictable systematicity we in fact can observe in all genuine evolutions. Transactional structure formation based on meaning among affine structures demands a semiotic not only much more general than anything that so far has been proposed by semioticians, but in addition conceives of semiosis as a generative process. For structures can only mean something to another structure, i.e. have effects upon other structures, when structures with this kind of potential are generated. The interpretation of a structure must always imply the generation or actualization of another structure. Generative semiosis thus is a conception of meaning based causation capable of explaing evolutive process in general.

Obviously, the contributions humans perform to shaping their environment are much more pertinent than those of any other species.

It is usually thought that this is so because of humans’ unique capability of understanding what they do. Consciousness, rexflexion, planning and similar capacities, most of them enhanced by social coordination and supported by language are terms which refer to this. Such processes and their consequences are often pointed to collectively as having to do with meaning understood as a special device (whether mental or brain related) for taking or dealing with something (reacting or treating) not only directly on the basis of its surface qualities but also and in particular on the basis of qualities that are hidden yet proper to the entity in question, maybe somehow attributed to the entity by somebody having at their disposal the specific knowledge about these hidden qualities.

The question arises if this possibility of treating entities on the basis of or in relation to latent qualities really depends on capacities exclusively to humans or at best to some selected so-called higher animals.

I think, if we abstain from claims which when appropriate would force upon us the assumption of a fundamental break in the overall or even in the bio-evolutive process itself, we can easily leave such fixed thinking habits and find an important role of meaning

Meaning. The the evolutions are best conceived of as the sum total of instances of structure formation, maintencance, modification, and dissolution. In fact, they build upon an alternation of structure and process: structures interact with the result of structures dissolved, changed, regulated, or brought about. Obviously, new structures, indeed the whole process is neither predetermined by design or plan nor simply random; rather the structures and their possible effects in the interactive encounters become in some sense incorporations of the very history of the structures involved in their becoming. This constitutes some degree of continuity and consistency of the evolutive process; at the same time Once structures of a certain complexity are attained, their interaction will, in spite of no law of the behavior of their elementary components being hurt, also be determined by substructures of them which, having co-evolved, can recognize and count on the potentials of the interacting structures. This “knowledge” incorporated and used by structures genuinely interacting — from large molecules, organelles, celles, organs, organisms, and parts of their genuine environments — allows for transactions between affine structures that cannot be explained by the qualitites of their elementary constituents but rather results of their evolutive history. Thus genuine evolutions are founded in what is ordinarily called “meaning”. The concept of meaning used here, evidently is not dependent on brain or mind related structures (this being just a special case of meaning) but, more generally, is based on the possibility that structures are taken and used by other structures for the sake of hidden qualities or potentials only recognizable by structures which have an at least partly common origin.

The mineral evolution on the planet Earth in the presence of the then (and essentially still) given chemical and cosmic conditions enabled to formation of ecosystems, i.e. of relatively complex structures alway forming a central substructure and a peripherythat depend on and thrive upon their surround structures and conditions: what we call proto living structures and what emerged from them in coevolution with their environment

We have at present some presumptions as to how these key structures have gained the capability of (near-)replication; and yet very little insight into their second entirely new capability, namely that of generating or recognizing secondary structures of no iconic similarity or complementary features to their generator, such as proteins from DNA or governing the formation of an organism out of a cell or select or selecting suitable and avoiding poisoneus nutriments etc.

The formation of ecosystems

Understanding organisms is impossible without understandig their relation and their material, energetic, and informational exchanges with their environment; understanding a given situation is impossible without understanding the role of the various contributing structures, such as the atmosphere depending on the balanced interplay between oxygen producing and consuming entities.

The basis unit of understanding what happens in our world must be ecosystems

Ecosystems should be understood as a role as being the concrete system with an individual organisms or similar entity and its environment. The latter obviously is not an entity to be pointed out in the same way as a living organism may be pointed out. The observer has to record the relationship between individual and environment for a long time and has to draw conclusions from scores of observations and their synthesis in order to specify what kind of structures the individual is prepared to deal with and what kind of envirenmental entities may possibly have waht kinds of effects upon the (kind of) organism in question

In organims that gather indivividual experience that comes to effect in changes of the organisms behavior in view of given facets of the environment the ecosystems gain ad add

All living beings contribute to changes in their environment and they rely on contributions of other organisms in view of their survival (usually specifiable in terms of needs and the like) and progeneration. Humans are in particular those animals that contribute most, indeed, that generate in large part most of their environment.

Ecosystems. The same is true of the milieu in which these evolutions take place. For these evolutive emergences altogether produce not only their direct offspring but also contribute to generating a mileu upon which the evolutive process is as much dependent than upon the biotic, the individual and the cultural continuities. The genuine evolutions thus essentially depend on ecosystems, i.e., as a rule, systems differentiating concrete, individual organisms and those environmental.

Semiotic Function Circle. Ecosystems arise and form themselves and each other by generative semiosis. The major subsystems of an ecosystems, namely an individual (actual organism) and the sum total of all environmental structures with which that individual is capable of interacting based on meaning, are semions and composed of semions, i.e. structures having a potential to transact with other semions affine to them. This is easy to conceive when we follow the time course of all transactions a given individual enters in the course of its life span or part thereof. In very simple organisms, according to von Uexküll’s Umweltlehre, we find receptive and executive subsystems (Merkwelt and Wirkwelt) which are prepared to become influenced by certain environmental structures and to have certain effects upon that environment or the relation between the organism and the environment. This relation is of the character of an instinct and related process types; seen at a given time, this amounts to a two-phase process of mutual influence. If that individual is capable of learning both its Merkwelt and its Wirkwelt may be systematically changed by those very receptual and executive interactions which become transactions resulting in a changed organisms as well as a changed environment. The change in the organism has the character of a memory which interferes in the connection between incoming and outgoing semioses and thus leads to a thre-phase semiotic process spiraling in through through a changing individual and a set of changes in ints environment. In addition, in individuals systematically shaping their environment, whether by instinct or by cultural tradition, the structures formed in the common environment of several individuals may attain reshaping by other individuals; so a fourth phase of the function circle is added.

Affinity and Anaformation. As a consequence of what happens over thousands and millions of circles, seen in the perspective of a given individual, both the individual and his environment are shaped or co-evolve in coordination in such a way that either is dependent on the other. The concept of anaformation is used to describe the relation between the two subsystems in that either is a kind of duplication of the other, often as much in terms of complentarity and even contrast as in terms of similarity. While anaformation describes the results of what happens in the semiotic function circle, the term affinity describes this relation in view of the conditions for fruitful encounters and further semioses.

Bourdieu: Homology as correspondence between individual and social settings. An Anaform?

Culturality. In the human species most of what happens in the function circle of all individuals is best described as culture. For most of what humans have brought into existence by modifying their surrounds is important to other individuals and they need to have available internal presentations thereof in order to function well in their communities. I don’t like to speak of culture or cultures because these are concepts looking like objects available to an epirstemological subject. Culture is a process producing memory both within and among the members of a smaller or larger groups of individuals and in that very same process these indivduals become enculturated and should known as their becoming personhood.

The person as conceived by Western law and, as a consequence, that life long unity of a very comples entitiy that is to remain oneself in spite of accumulating experiences and that is taken by others and by oneself to remain the same in spite of it operating in various circumstances In order is obviously a social construction. A construction in contradiction to the fact that only lifelong development can lead to a satisfactory life and image of oneself.

Personhood is given to every member of the species and then taken away, in totality or particular respects, off smaller and larger children, of mentally handicapped, of individuals gone astray in forms called pathological, in individuals used to attain certain objectives such as in soldiers, in worker of some kind, in functionaries of some kind.

Personhood. Personhood of course is the complement of culturality

Secondarization. From very simple to extremely complex semions a capability of duplication and secondariization can be observed that has proven extremely important in expanding speed and richness of the genuine evolutions. The issue can be easily described at the basic level and may then be elaborated for more complex ecosystems. Reconstructing the origin of life there are two crucial capabilities that are examples thereof. The first is the near reproduction or duplication of DNA and similar semionic structures in the process essential in division and merging of cells. The second is the production of proteins and, in the effect, organisms under the guidance of the genome under suitable environmental conditions. In some sense the organism is an anaform of its genome and vice versa; and the the genome with its potential is an anaform of the environment for which its organism has suitable fitness. So while Secondarizations are always anaforms, yet in the special sense that the secondary system is a part of its primary system in such a way that the secondary enjoys both relative independence of its functions from its primary, but also the capability of influencing the primary in important ways. This special relationship is a most interesting condition in that it can found degress of freedom in the behavior of the whole system comprising primary and secondary in relation to their supersystem. The two examples also show the broad scope of anaformative achievements in that the former is ideally a perfect repetition, yet for evolution to go less than perfect replication is required, and in that the latters is a purely symbolic presentation in the sense of arbitrariness of the presentant which could be in principle an entirely different structure (you cannot predict the qualities of the proteins or the organism from the qualities of the genes, except on the basis of observation. There can, in the course of the genuine evolutions, made out several types of secondarization according to the relation obtained between the respective anaformations.

complement formations, wether by program (sensory organs suitable for transforming environmental qualities; instincts, e.g. nest building) or by execution (traces of process, e.g. paths guiding the locomotive behavior of oneself and other individuals

functional enhancement or replacement devices such as specialized organs or cultural tools (

The most important secondarizations are the

ExtrA-secondary-structures serving als collective memory and guiding potential we usually describe als culture, and the

IntrA-secondary-structures built up and secondarizing the immediate connectedness of individuals into their environemt by superseding subsystem. I have, so far and with some satisfaction that everything is covered, described 4 IntrA-Secondarizations:

Immediate Experience, an actualization and focussing device which serves indexical and emphasizing functions

Imagination, an iconic presentation device which lets non present semions have effects via presentations that retain much of the qualiites of their referents

Language, a symbolic presentation device that allows arbitrary coordination of presentant to referents according to a system of interpretants that are both fixed and flexible

Self or conherence and consistency regulation

The presently dominating concept of communication has been imported inti the social sciences from the technical setting of “transporting” voice or other information forms from a sender to a receiver by means of electric or electronic carrier over wire or by radio transmittance. It has not been basically changed in the process and this has unduly restricted understanding of what happens between individuals or entities in general who influence or attempt to affect each other. Terms like sender, receiver, message, channel, code, encoding and decoding have been given a metaphoric sense which prevents a broad and deept understanding of that fundamental social process based on biotic and cultural means. The semiotic involved is of the traditional type of a split between carrier and meaning, the former physical, the latter mental; except that both decoding or interpreting as well as encoding are taken into consideration. Machines are also conceived to do encoding and decoding while the final interpretation of a code and understanding of the meaning communication is reserved to humans. Some openings as to applications of these concept to organic systems on lower lovels, such as between cells or organs has also been accepted. On the other hand at least some psychologists want to restrict use of the term to intentional and addressed sending of a message.

At the same time, a larger number of problems has been rised in this conception and have not been solved to general satisfaction. Among them are the relations between instances where either the channel or the addressee or both cannot be identified, such as in messages spread at large or messages (e.g. in mass communication) received by unrelated receivers (e.g. by archeologists). The problems of intentionality, whether in the strict sense of a want to communicate or in the loose sense of a relatedness between sender and receiver, have never been been cleared to general acceptance. There are certainly scores of unintedend and unaddressed messages around and they may or may not reach some receiver, whether it is a target of the message or not. In addition, the information processing conception of communication is burdened by the technical notion of error according to which errorfree replication of the original sender message in the receiver is the criterion of good communication; this contrasts with the observation that deviations from this ideal are common and even required for evolution to innovate. Perhaps the severest of problems with this conception lies in the fact that the code is presupposed rather than explained: how are channels attained and how does code arise in the coordinated manner that is assumed to exist between sender and receiver? And even more severe may be the isolation of this notion of communication from what it does: how do messages in the sender arise? what does the receiver do with the message? are messages not part or outflow from and input to larger systems of functioning and members chains or nets of a spreading spreading process that often is to attain something much beyond the simple transmission of a message? Obviously few messages contain everything that is needed that they can be understood. So a useful conception of communication should care for its embeddedness in the larger context in which it is operating.

In semiotic ecology a conception of communication does fulfill the latter requirement naturally and it does follow self-evidently from the premisses attained by ecosystems semiotically functioning in common surrounds. A single act of normal communication in its essence may best be understood as a process connecting two ecosystems via a common environmental element. In terms of semiotic ecology communication is a dynamic relation realized as a sequence of an ExtrO-semiosis in one ecosystem followed by an Intro-semiosis in another ecosystem where the presentant of the ExtrO coincides with the referent of the IntrO.

In the following I shall elaborate this conception a bit and illustrate with a range of examples. It will be seen that this conception of communication covers all facets deemed essential

Communication. Sender, Receiver, Message, Channel and Code and similar concepts are a very special case; indeed taken as model from mechanistic machines. These models, whether explicitly semiotic or simply of information processing type, are creating scores of problems when one attempts to understand what happens in human culture and they may be misleading applied to innerorganismic regulative processes and communication between animals within or between species. Semiotic Ecology, based on the relative distinction and relation between individual and its environment makes clear that a communicative process going out, say, from some state of some instance and resulting in some state of some other instance, whether living or apparatus, makes evident that the process should be conceived as spanning those two or many instances and their common environment as well as be seen to becomposed of several phases. In addition the idea of correct or errorfree communicationf is a margin phenomenon and rather ficticious in living systems; error should not be made a criterion for understanding communication. Simply stated a communicative event is a strem of influence which, as minimal case embraces an ExtrO-semiosis and an Intro-semiosis where the presentant of the ExtrO at the originating instance is identical with the Referent of the IntrO at the receptive instance. Problems of mass communication, of addressing, of denied reception, etc. are easily solved in this conception.

Temporality. (vgl. Visor) Spatiality and temporality are products rather than preconditions of the evolutions. Actual interactions and transactions constiute a series of presents of any semionic item. It is only the presence in which an item exists in the sense that it can have an effect at all. The sequence of interactions of a marked item (its stability or change notwithstanding) form its (real) history or past; the story may be told in degrees of approximation to what really has occured, but it the history can never be repeated in evolutive systems. Also the future of an items has “only” a symbolic existence; no upcoming stage of an item can interact and have effects without constituting one of a series or chain of presents of othat item. On the other hand, any symbolization of an item, whatever the stage and whether assumed to occur in some imagined or real past or future, may well have effects of its own in any of the pressents of that symbol. So the temporality of any semion is not a linear sequence, but should be conceived Y-shaped, wikth the past as stem and a set or fan of possible futures fanning out from any one possible presents at that branching point.

Methodology. Semiotic Ecology conceptual tools allow for realistic presentations of evolutive processes in general. Thus it is basically a general methodology. Obviously tools are generally of the nature of interpretants. As a methodology SemEco has thus built in its foundations the relatively new insight that there is no represention of anything except in a perspective and that all scientific as everyday semiosis is to present a potential for further effects in the evolutive streams considered. Science thus has no special place in culture.

In addition, SemEco allows for adequate methods for researching evolutive systems. Research

In reseaarch an evolutive world, methodology must also renounce searching for universals spiced with chance. If what emerges is to some extent open and while quit regulatory in principle can changne anytime within some barely specifiable limits, you should not attempt to specify phenoma or, worse, classes of phenomena, but rather construct the principles according to which the phenomena may emerge this or that way.

Reconstructive methodology for evolutive systems does what the name says: it reconstructs with suitable presentents sections of the history of some suitable wide aspect of a world of some or a few individuals in context. From this it constructs a fan of possible and impossible courses of things and tries to specifiy the conditions that further or hinder this or that more or less probable alternative and so also gives hints as to what action taken by whom under what circumstances may change the course of events in this or that direction.

Saying what is the case and not saying what may also be the case smells an imperative attempt when dealing with evolutive systems.

Ratner has a book in print on cupsy methodology

Horizons. Horizons are encapsulated levels of semiosis and semions. They are best understood by grasping their methodological importance. As made clear from the beginning the evolutive processes are to a large extent copositional in that ever new structures are formed composed of building blocks that are emergencies of earlier stages of the evolutions. So

Comparison. Comparison (a) may be one of the most fundamental operations of living beings in dealing with their environment; (b) it is evidently one of the basic logical operations in general and (c) it is probably the method not only used by all sciences but also the most used method for most sciences. It is then astonishingly strange to find that little consideration has been given to understand the process of comparison and comparison plays no place at all in logic.

Autonomization and Integration. (vgl. Visor) Understanding semionic items means reconstructing stretches of their interactional history, including the transactions effects and incoming influences, and then building upon the reconstruction views about the ranges and degrees of its potential. A semion is never only what it is; rather it is its transactional protential that approaches its role in the evolutive process. The sum total of the affinities of an item may be abstractly presented as its integrationals potential as well as its tendency for autonomization. The higher the autonomization of sets of items in their evolutive stream, the less this stream will show change; the higher the degrees of integrations ???

Evolutive Polity (or Active Ethics). Western scientific tradition has separated a world of values from a world of facts and awowedly restricted its activities to the latter. That this must be illusory is long evident but still not generally accepted. For value systems do nothing but bring a set of facts, real and possible ones, into an order under guidance of qualities like desirability, problematicity, damage or benefit to be expected, whether of x or y. This has much to do with temporality; for in evolutive systems change, and for cultural systems in particular, human action of desirbable change, is what allows for attaing or approach high values and for avoiding or mildening problematic values. In addition, no diffrent than facts, values are perspectival. I.e. both are more or less different in the perspective for one or another individual and yet a potential for generality if inherent in both to a lesser or larger degree. Humans wanting to live together, on all levels of intensity, have to attain at least some middle degree of concurrence in judging both factual and value relations. Obviously SemEco has made thorough procedures to deal with temporality and with perspectivy; in addition it provides for conditions for treating factual and value relations within the same conceptions. For every selective encounter of semions is a manifestations of values inherent in the affinities of the structures involved.. So both, branching and merging processes in the evolutive streams are fromthe beginning conceived as valuative relations inherently co-determined by the factual. Value determined semiosis contradicting the factual will in the long run have little chance to gain stability and thus a future. Also the role of secondary presentations, whether internally or externally, is crucial.

Obviously, the Human Condition includes the cosmic and physical setting and everything that exists and happens on the surface of the planet earth. A major condition of what happens these centuries on this planet are human activities. Obviously, this cannot be explained by natural law. And all attempt at explaining what humans do by physical law is absurd. As absurd as it would be to explain chemical reactions by human will or planning in spite of humans inducing chemical reactions and those chemicals’ consequences in setting from cooking to explosives or pharma industry. Yet the scientific community is still dominated by a program of reduction of all phenomena to a few basic principles. Because of the absurdities just mentioned, the scientific community had to split and the fractions follow separate paths of either physical-mechanistic or linguistic-invocative reduction. There is a deep abyss between the “chairs”; the university claims universality but forces youth to split themselves.

Would you expect a valid explanation of what humans do by a cultural psychology of the kind it exists among us and our fellow cultural psychologists worldwide? — After some 40 years in that business I am convinced that something is foul in this estate. Fundamentally foul. To a degree that it needs a radical remedy.

Why should we remain sitting on the consequences of an impression some people have had millennia ago, namely that there is a fundamental difference between things we can see or grasp and things we can think or feel? What about things we can hear? The sound waves are declared to me matter in movement; but we hear music. Is music material of psychical or geistig? (Note the the English speaking world cannot even make an unambivalent difference between psychisch and geistig.)

I seriously doubt that we can understand the Human Condition by a split dualistic or trialistic strategy. It inevitably leads into power conflict. After long centuries of prevalence of linguistic reduction we are now in a period of tyranny of the mechanistic program. Neither looks very good in terms of where they probably lead to. We need to get out of that deep and deadly trap.

I propose semiotic ecology as a promising way out. And I hope you are interested enough and able to show me in what respect I am wrong. I may look mad in my engagement in that project. Please show me I am not really mad but only appear to be mad.

Intro: a Couple of Distinctions

Understanding the cultural process in its embeddedness, in other words, understanding the Human Condition is the single crucial key to human dignity and survival. We do not understand it, at present. We follow dozens of religious traditions and another couple of philosophical and scientific or other traditions, all of them in contradiction with each other and no fundamental concordance or order of importance in sight. Of recent, vulgarized Darwinism is transfered to various attempts at understanding and guiding human individual and collective introducing an important element of competition of each one, individual or group, against anyone else; it is obvious that this leads to senseless competition and prepares forms of conflict or war of any group and individual against any other one.

Our modern scientific approaches to understanding ourselves are manifold Neither physicalistic nor linguistic reduction — conceptual reconstruction of our reality

Neither Erklären nor Verstehen — pointing out the factual and the possible to guide evaluation and acting

Why “Culturality” — we have to understand that special kind of evolutive process with its structure generating potential; focussing prematurely on its statics leads to all kinds of missunderstandings and abuses, because we are always participating in several cultures, from familiy, friend groupd, neighborhoods, etc. to national and racial and linguistic commonalities

Starting question: how come the structures we can discern are as we can observe them and what can we expect from their transactions among each other and with us and what does it mean to act upon them in certain ways?

1. Evolutions

Place and Role of Culturality in the Evolutions

2. Ecosystems

An important organismic structure together with its Umwelt

3. Meaning

“Meaning” — generative Semiotic

4. Transaction

Structture Formation in genuine Evolutions is Transaction in Ecosystems, Ecosystems Transacting in Common Environment

5. Function Circle

Semiotic Function Spirals in four phases: IntrO-, IntrA-. ExtrO-, ExtrA

6. Culturality

and the problematic of the culture concept

7. Temporality

Time is an generalizing abstraction resting on the sequences of semiosic events, their Process and Structure phases.

8. Methodology

SemEco as a conceptual toolkit is mainly a methodology for describing Evolutive Systems.

9. Polity

This other kind of conceiving the world without eternal law can found perspectives.

Conclusion: another Couple of Distinctions and a Couple of Pioneers

Let me sort of locate what I have presented by some meta-comments:

Semiotic Ecology is not primarily a particular theory of culturality; but it prepares such in particular and radical new ways by sttempting and applying new concepts to the Human Condition as a whole. In the main SemEco rather is a conceptual methodology, a tool to reconstruct the Human Condition. In order to reasonably deal with the variety of extant interpretations of our overall constitution we have to climb onto a platform beyond. Overlooking the approaches available in the various cultures of the world, whether religious, political, philosophical, or scientific in origin, the impression is one of insulae and clefts. The situation is comparable to the state of affairs in religious orientiation in early modernity: the one church suddenly being confronted not only with a dozen or so reformed churches and their claims to represent the true faith, but also shattered by the accumulation of ethnographic reports from all over the world of a bewildering variety of ways of believing. But comparing religious beliefs and ways of understanding each other: the situation is different. You cannot make of private matter of how ot understand the Human Condition.

Semiotic Ecology is not a belief systems. Rather it is a tool to reconcile beliefs with facts.

Strategic key role

Pioneers - see list