Biosemiotics, Aboutness of Meaning and Bio-Intentionality.

Biosemiotics, Aboutness of Meaning and Bio-Intentionality. Proposal for an Evolutionary Approach

Christophe Menant

The management of meaningful information by biological entities is at the core of biosemiotics [Hoffmeyer2010]. Intentionality, the ‘aboutness’ of mental states, is a key driver in philosophy of mind. Philosophers have been reluctant to use intentionality for non human animals. Some biologists are in favor of such usage. J. Hoffmeyerhas been using evolutionary intentionality and Peirceansemiotics to discuss a biosemioticapproach to the problem of intentionality [Hoffmeyer1996, 2012]. Also, recent philosophical studies are bringing new openings on the subject.[Asma2014]. We propose here to use an existing system approach to meaning generation to introduce a link between biosemiotics and bio-intentionality at basic life level in an evolutionary perspective.Meanings do not exist by themselves. They have to be generated for a given reason by a defined entity. A system approach to meaning generation based on constraint satisfaction has been developed to that end: the Meaning Generator System (MGS) [Menant2003a]. It has been used for biosemiotics in an evolutionary perspective [Menant2003b, 2011]. In order to look at relating biosemiotics to intentionality through meaning generation we use the system structure of the MGS with the agent that contains it. Meaning generation and agent interfacing with environment make available components for the groundings of the generated meaning in terms of data, data processing, interfacing and constraint [Menant, 2011].

These groundings of the meaning can be in or out the agent containing the MGS. They display what the generated meaning is about.For basic life the ‘aboutness’ of the generated meaning relies on a ‘stay alive’ constraint that has to be satisfied (others constraints, like ‘live grouplife’, are to be introduced through the evolution of life).

Such ‘aboutness’ of a generated meaning within basic life can be associated to an elementary biological intentionality, to a ‘bio-intentionality’. As biosemiotics deals with meaning management by biological entities, the relations introduced by the MGS between meaning generation and bio-intentionality introduce a link between biosemiotics and bio-intentionality for basic life. We present and develop that link. Besides making available a model usable for bio-intentionality, the proposed approach may also provide an entry point to the concept of intentionality without having to take into account human specificities like self-consciousness.

It should also be noted that the approach takes life as a given and that the ‘stay-alive’ constraint brings in a teleological component. Such presentation of bio-intentionality calls for other developments and continuations. Some will be introduced.