A system can be sensitive to a difference.
But sometimes the difference does more than affect it.
It tells us something.
Or, more carefully, it can indicate something.
A dark cloud can indicate rain.
A footprint can indicate an animal's passage.
A chemical gradient can indicate the direction of a concentration difference.
A fever can indicate a change in the body's condition.
In each case, one difference is related to another.
The important word is related.
The cloud does not mean rain.
The footprint does not mean animal.
The fever does not mean infection.
They can indicate these things because there is some relation between what is present and what is not immediately present.
This is already more than simple sensitivity.
A system responds to a difference.
But an indication allows a difference to function as information about another difference or state of affairs.
Something present makes something else available to inference, prediction or action.
The footprint is particularly instructive.
The footprint is here.
The animal may not be.
Yet the footprint can make the animal's presence relevant.
It is a trace left by an earlier event, and its relation to that event allows what is absent to become accessible.
Nothing needs to have intended this.
The animal did not necessarily leave the footprint in order to tell anyone anything.
The footprint can indicate without communicating.
This is a crucial distinction.
Information does not require intention.
Nor does indication require meaning.
A thermometer can indicate temperature without knowing anything about temperature.
A tree ring can indicate something about past conditions without anyone having designed it to do so.
A footprint can indicate an animal without being a message from the animal.
Indication can therefore exist before signs.
And perhaps this gives us a more precise way to think about the transition from sensitivity.
A sensitive system can respond differently to different conditions.
An indicative relation goes further.
The difference encountered is correlated with something else in a way that can guide what happens next.
The chemical gradient does not merely affect the bacterium.
It can guide movement towards a concentration of nutrients.
The smoke does not merely alter visibility.
It can provide information about fire.
The difference has become informative.
But informative is not yet meaningful.
This distinction matters because it is tempting to treat information as the beginning of semantics.
If the footprint carries information about the animal, we might say that it "represents" the animal.
But that word can conceal the very transition we are trying to understand.
The footprint does not have to represent anything.
It can simply be a physical consequence of the animal's presence.
The relation between them may be entirely causal.
What matters is that the relation can be exploited.
A system capable of responding to the footprint can behave differently because the footprint makes another state of affairs available.
The indication therefore belongs to a relation between differences.
One difference is present.
Another is absent or not directly accessible.
The relation between them allows the first to provide access to the second.
This gives indication a peculiar temporal structure.
Sometimes the indication points backwards.
A footprint indicates something that happened.
Sometimes it points forwards.
A darkening sky can indicate what is likely to happen.
Sometimes it points sideways.
A smell can indicate something occurring nearby.
In every case, the present difference opens a route to something beyond itself.
But the route does not have to be symbolic.
A causal relation can be enough.
This is why we should resist the temptation to call every informative difference a sign.
The world is full of information.
But the world is not thereby full of meanings.
A difference can carry information without standing for anything.
A trace can guide behaviour without becoming a symbol.
A correlation can be exploited without being interpreted.
We are therefore approaching another threshold.
At some point in evolution, culture or practice, differences cease merely to indicate.
They begin to be used as signs.
And when that happens, the relation changes.
The sign is no longer simply a trace of what happened.
It can be produced, selected, recognised and shared as something that stands for something else.
The difference is no longer merely informative.
It has entered a semiotic system.
So the question becomes sharper still.
When does a difference that indicates become a difference that stands for another?
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