Semio- or Semi-ethics: Semioethics for Animals?

By Matthew Cuffaro 

Semiotics (the study of signification) has a deep tradition for universalism. A deeper tradition in thought is the concession that humans hold a special place among lifeforms as “conscious,” and semiotics is no different. In Sign Crossroads in Global Perspective, the authors Petrilli and Ponzio argue that if humans are conscious of the significance of things, then they are responsible for their signification, curtailing polluting or destructive cultures and practices in favor of “planetary semiosis [process of signification]” (the analogue of the “Spaceship Earth” idea you might have heard about). Petrilli and Ponzio define semioethics for us:

“…1) invent a plurality of possible worlds; 2) to reflect upon signs; 3) to be responsible for one’s actions; 4) to gain conscious awareness of our inevitable involvement, of each and every one of us, in the sign network of life over the entire planet; and 5) to be responsibly involved in the destiny of planetary semiosis.” (3-4, Petrilli and Ponzio).

How does semioethics look in our day? For example, if I say “forest”, I denote the complex of trees that scaffold a rich ecosystem, but I can also expect to connote something in the listener that is met with a response. There might be stress: the listener that is familiar with the films Silent Running, Medicine Man, and Avatar is familiar with the disappearing forest—something invaluable, yet mercilessly exploited, yet something distant. There might be interest: the listener may be a logger who equates the forest with their income, or an ecologist who sees the forest as a complex of interdependent lifeforms. There may be religious or existential feelings to the listener that knows the forest to possess supernal power or sagacity, healing benefits, or the basis of their livelihood. Further still, the Puritan coming to the New World sees the endless forests as ripe with resource to be drawn from systematically through their labors. Through cultural and scientific influence, our example paints the forest as something once a symbol of innumerable economic plenty to something of indispensable ecological value. If we follow these trends, we imagine the forest as a “life support system;” something of personal and functional value, Thus, the forest is represented in a way that alters its significance to the people.

Now I believe Petrilli & Ponzio’s project is bioethical because they are both critical and imperative towards environmental practice, but their focus on the human is uncharacteristic of the contemporary trends in semiotics to extend its essentially pre-linguistic domain to lifeforms. If biosemiotics wishes to construct a basis for extending signification to (all) lifeforms, then can we depart from Petrilli and Ponzio to say that animals are in some way semioethical? Prima facie, this is absurd, because the hare does not have the logging companies, the socioreligious campaigns, NIMBY sieges on civic projects, etc.; what the hare has is grassy flatlands, abundant cellulose, and other “critters” that are supposedly significant to it.

The example I like is the “fable” of the Fox and the Hare. In the introduction to Jesper Hoffmeyer’s Biosemiotics (of which I paraphrase): A hare in a field becomes aware of a fox stalking close by. The hare stands up on its hind legs and the fox, seeing this, aborts its foxing and trots away. An ethologist reporting on this claims that the hare stood as a gesture to the fox that chasing it would be a waste of everyone’s time and energy. The meat behind this claim is that it does not argue that the behavior is instinctual. After all, brains are calorically very expensive so the ethologist believes that the hare’s act is an example of signification, or that standing up is a gesture invented by the hare to communicate.

What is possibly semioethical in this account of the fox and the hare is that the creative status of the hare’s gesture leads us to ask the status of consciousness of the hare, which leaves us with open questions. If the hare is communicating something to the fox, then does it recognize the fox as something that can respond or react to the gesture? Do animals of supposed creativity understand their intercommunicants as “animated threats” (how the heck does the fox appear to the hare)? If so, then can we attribute a variant of the semioethical capacity we attribute ourselves to an animal that is cognizant of the capacities of other animals?

Why is this semioethical account useful to us?

If we adopt a biosemiotic strategy of extending semiotics “globally,” then the ideal common system for describing things semiotically allow us to ‘approximate’ ourselves beyond scientific prejudice of an unchecked human exceptionalism—the notion that all “human” qualities are exclusively “human.” If we form through our inquiries the grounds for suspecting the rudiments of consciousness in other lifeforms, then we not only invite scientific interest to explore and validate these suspicions but confirm the deep intuitions of those who advocate for ecocentric (more like un-anthropocentric) thought.

Notwithstanding, it is problematic already for us in the political arena to attribute animal rights in the very least, but if we can extend an ethical basis to animals first, then we have the philosophical freight to carry these arguments further. We may look at the vegetarian pamphlets thobbing the horrors of factory farms through the animal anecdotes and praising soy diets, perhaps with Ryan Gosling’s testament in there for good measure (I’m looking at you, Vegan Outreach.). In these pamphlets chickens named Kevin, pigs named Emily, and fishes named Calvin are celebrated for their ability to solve puzzles, count, communicate and especially escape, yet the semioethical project underlying this is that these animals are worth something by their apparent human attributes. We should treat these arguments by not evaluating the animals by their humanness, but by the attributes that allows us to understand the intentions of the animal (or plant), at the threat that we continue to think “humanness” is superior to “animalness” and is a standard beyond the niche of our circumstances. In a more fundamental way, the semioethical problem I try to convey would, if realized, mark a step in the scholarly imagination: those who could peer into the eyes of the rabbit peering into the fox, or to surject themselves onto the mind of the plant.

Matthew Cuffaro is a philosophy student at the University of South Florida with a concentration in the philosophies of mathematics and religious studies. 

Deadline Approaching

The deadline to submit for the Daniel Callahan Young Writer's Prize is this Saturday, November 15th. Below is a summary of the contest and the guidelines for submission. Don't forget to submit!

Prize Summary 
This post is pleased to announce a new award, The Daniel Callahan Young Writer's Prize, sponsored by Daniel Callahan. Submissions will take the form of essays on a bioethics topic that are written as blog posts, designed for this blog, Bioethx Under 25. From all submissions, a group of finalists will be chosen and then an expert panel of bioethicists, including Daniel Callahan, will read the finalists' essays and award one prize amounting to $500. 

All submissions will be considered for publication on the blog and eligibility to be a finalist or receive the prize is dependent on willingness to edit and revise the essay for publication. Submissions will be judged anonymously. Please see guidelines below for further information. 

Prize Submission Guidelines

- Essays must be 500-1000 words and original submissions to Bioethx Under 25 i.e. never posted before on the blog. 

- Essays must conform to all other submission guidelines for the Bioethx Under 25 blog and thus, be clearly related to bioethics and be written in an accessible manner. Please refer to the blog's About Page for more information. 

- Essays will be accepted from September 10th, 2014 to November 15th, 2014. 

- Any writer who is also a student in high school, college, or a graduate program is eligible to submit. Any writer who is not a student is eligible so long as he/she has not completed a PhD and/or worked more than 5 years in the bioethics field with a terminal degree (e.g. JD or MD). So long as the other guidelines have been met there is no age limitation or requirement for submission. 

- Writers are not eligible if they currently or have previously worked full time for The Hastings Center or Daniel Callahan. Anyone affiliated with Bioethx Under 25 in an editing capacity is also ineligible. 

- To submit, please email bioethicsunder25@gmail.com with your essay attached in word format. In the body of the email please indicate that you are submitting for The Daniel Callahan Young Writers Prize and include your name, phone number, email address, current occupation and place of occupation (if a student, then your school, potential degree, and expected graduation year), and your highest degree attained with the school and year. 

- For any questions please email bioethicsunder25@gmail.com or comment below. 

A Minor Case for Existentialism in Biosemiotics

By Matthew Cuffaro

“Existentialism protests the rationalism and idealism who would see man creatures only as a subject—that is, as having reality as a thinking being.” p. 12 Angel, Ellenberger, May, Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry in Psychology.

The following argument advocates existentialism in biosemiotics to the reader of this blog—presumably up-and-coming bioethicists—to mull over how an existentialist understanding of biosemiotics is relevant to considering the ethics of medicine and health, environment, etc.

What biosemiotics is, how it can integrate existential thought, and how it relates to the bioethicist is a major concern: the predisposition to think of animal cognition and decision-making as purely genetic impedes our attempts, as organisms “creative past our genes”, to identify with animals, if not the biological world. In fact, you can derive the entire motivation and most of the points from the first page of the preface in J. Hoffmeyer’s Biosemiotics. Hoffmeyer’s writing is beautifully lucid and recommended to the readers, but it will be kept short so the existential argument may be covered.

To begin, the crux of contemporary biosemiotics can be understood as the disbelief that organic communication is merely “mechanical.”

What J. Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotician, offers:

With the current outlook, other organisms remain empathetically inaccessible—they are separated by a gulch of misunderstanding or anthropocentrism. We are still surprised when new research reveals “human” emotions (grieving) in animals. Perhaps the difficulty of stationing “complex” emotions in cultural terms—terms not patently equivalent to a notion of a general animal culture—perpetuates this idea.

Partially the mechanical explanation is to blame from theoretical biology’s honest expedition to resolve the problem.[1] The complete genome is an enticing structure; it is not hard to imagine that a reductive appetency towards a promise of rich structural coding creates a tendency to “delegate to [the animal’s] genetic apparatus” the complete spectrum of their ethology as well. This continually denies the creature the evolutionary merit of having an intellectual middle-man. Hoffmeyer uses this example to describe the creative semiotic faculty of the animal:

“When a brown hare spots a fox approaching in the open landscape, the hare stands bolt upright and signals its presence instead of fleeing…ethologist A. Holley [claims that the] hare can easily scape a fox simply by running – a fact that the fox seems to ‘know.’”.

The hare signals the fox that it has been spotted, and so subverting the actual use of its physiological advantages. The quick legs of the hare begin to have a more symbolic importance to the hare that tries to remove the need of their use.

Perhaps we can assume that a being capable of understanding not just their asset’s advantage, but what the asset means for it, is to imply that the genetic body of the hare is interpreted and communicated to other animals by a being that can experience itself.

The hare capable of interpreting and communicating itself must recognize the significance of itself in sustaining its life. We suppose that the hare has not just experienced life but is capable of commuting its interpretations into actions fundamentally significant to its survival, e.g. signaling the fox. The hare is striving to exist, and so it is exercising a creative faculty to mediate itself with the environment.

To account for the experiential and concomitant existential[2] questions that would crop up if Hoffmeyer and Co.[3] had their way, I sketch in the sand existential biosemiotics (EBS) to take up the burden.

           

What Existential Biosemiotics offers:

The overt task for existential biosemiotics is to extend semiotic theory, or the study of signs—“things that refer to something else”—into the domain of experience. We may formulate this project to coincide Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology with scientific knowledge under a common metalanguage. Hoffmeyer lobs us a notion of biological referentiality to organize the analyses of the organism’s relation to itself. In the case of the hare above, the hare’s reference to itself is tickled by a suppression of its internal or bodily ability to run (which it is genetically equipped to do well) in light of an external threat.

If we take seriously a creative faculty in the animal, then there is, in the fabric of experience, certain semiotic weights that give it shape. The EBStian would deal with identifying the significant[4] structure underlying shaped experience. In other words, how a bundle of signs (e.g. a predator, a potential mate, a hare’s leg, the arrangement of a room) designs the world of the experiencing organism, or á la Hoffmeyer, how the “ubiquitous intentionality of communicative behavior” is articulated, and how these decisions that govern the total and embodied experience of the creature (e.g. run very fast, a sense of peace in a clean room) have a conjugate physical response (e.g. mad adrenaline rushes through the prairie, muscular relaxation etc.) and vice versa (how does a particular space become associated with my impressions of it, my gut feeling, etc.?).

The biosemiotician in this scope hopes to demonstrate that communicative and behavioral similarities between organisms enriches approaches to interact, understand, and imagine the biological sciences.

Matthew Cuffaro is a philosophy student at the University of South Florida with a concentration in the philosophies of mathematics and religious studies. 

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[1] Conway’s Game of Life, for instance, illustrates evolutionary “life” as a series of small-order recursive processes that, with special initial states and a sufficient run-time, can construct superstructures that remind us of genetic transcriptions. Check it out here.

[2] Mind you, “existential” here brackets the organism’s self-consciousness of mortality; “There, organisms never ‘try to survive’–for the simple reason that they cannot know they are going to die.” Instead, viz. generalize “existential” to the organism by its own presumed agency making decisions not to avoid death but to continue life.

[3] Biosemioticians such as Emmeche, Merrill, Rigby, Seboek, Uexkill, &c.

[4] Pertaining to signs. Semiotics may be argued as a science that identifies the significant aspects in a scene caveat emptor, tread lightly.