Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Revista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio

Abstract

One way to understand the basic semiotic relation is that a sign-vehicle signifies an object to an interpretant. Biosemioticians sometimes talk about this relationship in terms of “codes”. When thinking about this relationship in the context of language, a natural move is to conceptualize semiotic relationships among speakers, meanings, and utterances as codes: speakers encode messages in sentences, which are then decoded by an interpreter. This view of communication is inconsistent with core tenets of a distributed approach to language, which holds that language is an embodied and encultured activity taking place across multiple timescales. I argue that a neo-Aristotelian metaphysics can be of help. A sign’s pointing to an object for an interpreter is a triadic relation, which can be described in terms of “abilities” or “powers”. On this view, talk about “codes” is eliminated in favor of talk about powers of agents and utterances.

Pages

121-138

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.4396/2021202

Volume

15

Issue

2

Publication Date

1-2022

Keywords

causal powers, biosemiotics, signification, distributed language

Disciplines

Philosophy

ISSN

2036-6728

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