The preceding analyses have not rejected biosemiotics outright.
They have done something more precise:
they have examined what remains of its core claims when a single constraint is enforced consistently:
meaning must not be conflated with value.
This constraint has been applied across:
- the extension of the semiotic into life,
- the concept of the sign,
- the notion of interpretation,
- the appeal to code and information,
- and the claim of continuity.
At each point, a shift was identified:
value was being redescribed as meaning.
Once that shift is disallowed, the structure of biosemiotics changes significantly.
1. What Does Not Survive
Several central claims cannot be retained in their standard form.
Life as intrinsically semiotic
The claim that:
life is fundamentally semiotic
does not survive.
Because it depends on:
- treating biological selectivity as meaning,
- and responsiveness as interpretation.
Without this move:
life remains organised, but not semiotic.
The generalisation of the sign
The extension of the sign to:
- molecules,
- signals,
- and biological cues
cannot be maintained.
Because:
- sign requires construal,
- not merely correlation or functional relation.
Interpretation as response
The identification of interpretation with:
- differential response,
- adaptive behaviour,
- or system sensitivity
does not hold.
Because:
response does not entail “as”-structure.
Code as meaning
The appeal to:
- genetic code,
- informational structures,
- and encoding/decoding
as evidence of semiosis fails.
Because:
- mapping is not meaning,
- and constraint is not interpretation.
Continuity between life and meaning
The claim that:
meaning emerges gradually from life
cannot be sustained.
Because:
- value and meaning are distinct organisations,
- not points on a shared scale.
These are not peripheral adjustments.
They remove the core mechanism by which biosemiotics extends semiosis into biology.
2. What Can Be Retained—Under Reinterpretation
Despite these removals, biosemiotics is not reduced to nothing.
Several of its insights survive—but only when carefully delimited.
(a) The rejection of strict mechanism
Biosemiotics correctly resists:
- purely mechanistic accounts of life,
- and the reduction of biological organisation to simple causation.
This remains valid.
But what it reveals is:
the complexity of value, not the presence of meaning.
(b) The centrality of organisation
Biosemiotics emphasises that:
- living systems are organised,
- and that this organisation matters.
This also survives.
But the organisation in question is:
selective and functional, not semiotic by default.
(c) The importance of relation
Biosemiotics insists that:
- life is relational,
- not composed of isolated parts.
This aligns with the broader framework.
But relation here must be understood as:
coupling between distinct organisations, not evidence of a shared semiotic domain.
(d) The insufficiency of information alone
Ironically, biosemiotics itself recognises that:
- information is not enough to account for life.
This insight can be retained.
But its conclusion must change:
the insufficiency of information does not entail the presence of meaning.
3. What Changes in the Explanatory Regime
Once the conflation is removed, the explanatory landscape shifts.
Biosemiotics typically operates by:
- extending semiotic vocabulary downward into biology,
- and interpreting biological processes through that vocabulary.
Under constraint, this is no longer viable.
What replaces it is a stricter articulation:
- value accounts for biological organisation
- meaning accounts for semiotic organisation
and:
their relation must be described without reducing one to the other.
4. The Cost of Precision
What is lost in this reinterpretation is significant:
- the unity of life and meaning
- the elegance of a continuous account
- the ability to speak of semiosis at all levels of life
What is gained is equally significant:
- conceptual clarity
- preservation of the specificity of meaning
- and a non-reductive account of relation
5. Final Formulation
We can now state, without qualification:
Biosemiotics survives only to the extent that it relinquishes the claim that life is inherently semiotic, and instead recognises that biological organisation (value) and semiotic organisation (meaning) are distinct, though non-independent.
Closing Remark
Biosemiotics began with a legitimate dissatisfaction:
- meaning seemed too narrowly confined,
- life seemed too richly organised to be purely mechanical.
Its solution was to expand semiosis.
Under constraint, that expansion cannot be sustained.
What remains is more austere:
life is not meaning,but meaning does not stand apart from life.
They are not continuous.
They are not reducible.
They are:
distinct organisations that hold in relation without collapse.
And with that, the series closes as the others have:
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