Agency, biosemiotics, terminology

I recently published a paper with my friend Juan R. Coca about agency, biosemiotics, and biosociology. Now, whenever I’m faced with the concept of agency, I’m not all that comfortable because of the loose nature of its definition. We tried to make the argument that collaborative behavior emerges in simple biological organizations and that such behaviors are mediated by signs, and they can be understood as a source of protosociality, at least to some degree. Still, agency (much like, say, consciousness) is a word that we can’t play fast and loose with, and so whenever we invoke it in an article, we delimit our definitions to something that is manageable. So what we call agency here is rather the capacity of organisms to engage in interpretive behaviors, that is, such a definition hinges on us using a biosemiotic description to begin with. With that come some problems too: How do we ascribe interpretive faculties to simple organisms? People involved in biosemiotics may often invoke the non-mental view of the sign as is the standard in the current biosemiotic interpretation of Peirce’s philosophy, and I would agree that, to a point, using signs removes some mentalistic requirements. One problem though is that interpretation still needs some important work, which often may seem representational. Signs, after all, are units of representation. What we mean by representation, however, needs to be addressed much more directly, because a naive view of sign representation into internal states is not desirable and comes with the same issues that we may think we’re leaving behind by invoking signs. Anyway, I’m rambling, but the point was that the article has been out for a bit, and it’s available here, in open access thanks to the national Czech Library agreement with some scientific publishers.

[NOTE!] The paper is here