Symbols are Grounded not in Things, but in Scaffolded Relations and their Semiotic Constraints (Or How the Referential Generality of Symbol Scaffolding Grows Minds)

摘要

As the accompanying articles in the Special Issue on Semiotic Scaffolding will attest, my colleagues in biosemiotics have done an exemplary job in showing us how to think about the critically generative role that semiotic scaffolding plays "vertically" - i.e., in evolutionary and developmental terms - by "allowing access to the upper floors" (Hoffmeyer Semiotica 198: 11-31, 2014a) of biological complexity, cognition and evolution.