This article interprets Jakob von Uexküll’s understanding of different beings’ Innenwelt, Gegenwelt, and umwelt through Deleuzian insights of multiplicity, context, and particularity. This Deleuzian interpolation into Uexküll’s insights acknowledges the absence of a unitary ‘human’ view of nature, recognizing instead that plural viewpoints of cultures, subgroups and individuals understand and interpret natural signs variously not just because of ideology but because of physiology and contrastive fundamental ways of accessing the world. Recent formative research in comparative neurobiology suggests that universal anthropological claims of cross-cultural semiotic similarity are incorrect.Interpreting biosemiotics as the investigation of apprehending the Innenwelt of radically different others (species), such semiotic understandings themselves are not necessarily generalizable between different members of the same species in a group, same-species groups in different natural cultural contexts, or even (as with humans) the same animal at different points of time (based on new understandings, patterns, or events of meaning altering interpretations of self and events). Conjoining Deleuze’s insights of the complexity of multiplicity with Uexküll’s scientific-imaginative system of comprehending other creatures’ ways of understanding their world offers an increased self-reflexivity regarding the simultaneous levels of actual semiotic activity for biosemiotic inquiry.

This article attempts to give a plausible explanation to the long-debated question about the nature of mental imagery (MI). The traditional approach to this question is based on the representational paradigm, which, I claim, is misguided. Instead of representational aspects of mental imagery, I emphasize the functions of mental imagery, the variety of properties that images exhibit in experimental studies, and the relations between different characteristics of images, their functions and the subject of imagery. That is, I propose to account for mental imagery as a sign system, consisting of different types of signs. A mental image can contain important properties as parts of the complex sign. This approach to the explanation of the nature of MI is beneficial, since it suggests the phenomenon of mental imagery, which overcomes some long-standing controversies on the issue.

This article builds on C. S. Peirce’s suggestive blueprint for an inclusive outlook that grants reality to his three categories. Moving away from the usual focus on (contentious) cosmological forces, I use a modal principle to partition various ontological layers: regular sign-action (like coded language) subsumes actual signaction (like here-and-now events) which in turn subsumes possible sign-action (like qualities related to whatever would be similar to them). Once we realize that the triadic sign’s components are each answerable to this asymmetric subsumption, we obtain the means to track at which level of complexity semiosis finds itself, in a given case. Since the bulk of such a “trinitarian” metaphysics would be devoted to countenancing uninterpreted phenomena, I argue that current misgivings about sign-based ontologies are largely misplaced.Includes: Comment. Semiotics is not metaphysics by Jean-Marie Chevalier (pp. 553–559).

This paper examines the connections between triadism and processuality in Peirce’s semiotics by comparing two reducibility theses. Peirce’s thesis regarding the irreducibility of triads and its corollary in semiotics, the irreducibility of signs, is compared with the process metaphysical thesis regarding the irreducibility of processes. The comparison indicates that (1) there is a connection between the irreducibility of signs and the irreducibility of processes; (2) that the triadic condition of the sign entails process metaphysical commitments; and this in turn (3) urges us to consider the ontology of the sign from a process metaphysical perspective.

In The Symbolic Species (1997) Terrence Deacon identifies human verbal language acquisition as the first and foremost evolutionary threshold where symbol use happens, with all the concomitant adaptive advantages it affords, but along with these advantages in this book and elsewhere he alludes to certain disadvantages that result from symbols. To describe these disadvantages he uses words like maladaptation, parasitism, cognitive penumbra, and other hyperbolic terms. He does so offhandedly, either in connection with the results of some laboratory experiments, or simply in disconnected ominous generalizations, but never justifies these sign effects within the dominantly Peircean model of language acquisition that gives the book its title. In later works Deacon attempts to contextualize these generalizations within Richard Dawkins’ theory of the meme. Deacon is sometimes disparaged for his supposedly imprecise or incorrect use of the sign theory of Charles Peirce to defend his claims about memes and symbols. The problem is not that Peirce should not be used in this way. In fact Deacon’s book is a singular achievement in the application of Peirce. The problem is that Deacon’s Peircean model is too simple. In fact Deacon’s claim about the possible disadvantages of symbol use can be reinforced with a closer look at the mature, turn-of-the-century Peircean sign model. This preserves the theoretical integrity of The Symbolic Species and clarifies the relation between memes and signs.

The theory of emotional interpretant is mentioned only a few times in Peirce’s works. My hypothesis is that if Peirce did not develop this concept through and through, and reflected on it only very late in his writings, it is because it had been implicit in almost all his previous epistemological and semiotic works. The qualitative nature which defines belief and doubt makes the whole theory of inquiry rely on feelings, and is a consistent part of the characterization of beliefs as dispositions. In spite of this, objectivity is still preserved.Includes: Comment. Emotion and belief by Henrik Rydenfelt (pp. 496–500).

This paper looks at the usage of depictions of monsters as a form of self representation on the Internet and attempts to discover what may hide behind this choice of the avatar. It endeavours to tie the notions of representation, visuality and monstrosity together, with the avatar at the intersection of images and identities. The purpose of this exploration is to open up a discussion to analyse and elucidate the phenomenon of monstrosity from a semiotic perspective, namely as a form of representation of the human being in the virtual world. The choice of an icon of a monster as avatar establishes a link between image and identity since a certain mind has put it forward as its representative in an effort to prove its own presence to the others with the intention of being seen in a particular way. Communicating this sign over the Internet is akin to the mediaeval carnival where the sign shield stands for the masquerade disguise, allowing one to overcome dogmatism and alienation engendered by the hierarchy of the society through making it possible to contact people of every rank, title or position, allowing one to become free.

On the basis of the principle of non-premeditation of speech, we argue that the synchronicity of hearing shared by everybody present is incompatible with a division of time between a sender and a receiver of a message. The act of speech brings the participants together in a single moment of perception called a synchronous point. Both the act of speech and music do not appear through time; rather, speech and music create time. The present time of our casual experience always contains a part of radical novelty, probable a posteriori, yet never predicted. Despite our capacity to predict many things and repeat procedures, in the advent of a given moment, the present will always show its uniqueness. Thus, improvisation is based on two principles of uncertainty: the non-premeditated occurrence of speech and the non-predicted part of present time.