Have you tried investigating this issue through Vygotski's perspective? His idea of child development is based on a similar observation.

Dear Tomasz, there is nothing to be learn if things cannot give us a concept or meaning.Children learn through codes that it comes from surrounding like Vygotski say that is a social cultural learning, for example, politeness is a concept that give meaning to children,yet is a symbol of social norms. Piaget say that children learning through the cognitive process but cognitive is related to mind concept that comes from learning code or symbol.Again,we have to accept that symbols that can give us a concept that conventionally use in our society.

I'm convinced it is a process that combines several mutually orthogonal cognitive cues, reason, experience. and impression included. Separating them is meaningless, yet you have no influence over each cue's capacity. What you may influence are the sensory cues and the symbols therein. Whatever metaphors are exchanged within one's head is largely untouchable, and I'd skip it. FMRI may give you clues, but they'll remain untouchable regardless.

Concept of synergy is well put.

Dear Cyril-Mary,

I personally think that the whole psychic process that takes not only knowledge, but also the interpretation of the facts, and understanding, ie, to the sense they have for us, is of semiotics character. This is demonstrated in my Doctoral Thesis: "Semiotics of real systems" and in my two books: "Psycho-bio-socio-cultural aspects of human natural language" and "Psyche - Structure and Function." All are available in RG, of course in Spanish.

Dante, I'm right now struggling with various semiotic sources for my own thesis, and I'll appreciate your help in this matter. Apparently there are only authors that deal with human-made symbols and structures. That all works perfectly in urban environments, yet in utter psychedelia of nature those are of little help.

Do you know of any source dealing with semiotics in nature?

Thank you.

Dear Davor,

There is a lot written about semiosis in nature. There is a whole branch of semiotics called biosemiotics. However, a lot depends on what you mean by semiotic: to biosemioticians, what happens within the cells is already a kind of semiosis. For my part, I think this is making semiosis so general the notion becomes meaningless (and certainly the original question asked above would be completely beside the point). In cognitive semiotics, on the other hand, we try to deal with different levels of meaning constructions, some of them already in nature. You can have a look at the wikipedia-article on the theme. Or you might want to visit the home page of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics (www.iacs.dk). At the Centre for cognitive semiotics, which I direct, we have made studies with both children and apes, to determine when certain semiotic thresholds are reached (see http://project.sol.lu.se/ccs). But because that is not what you mean by semiotics in nature.

Göran, thank you for intervening. My question was not at all clear as I did not put my research in context. What I need is some facet of semiotics that explains symbolism of nature as a tool to navigate through nature by means of symbols found there without human intervention. Scouts do that all the time, but I simply failed to find any semiotic source that would go in that particular direction. Semiotics of architecture is easy and in fact most of the people are constantly within a synthetic environment, choke-full of man-made symbols to guide them around.

I calculated on the basis of cadastre data that about 99% of people in my country reside within some 6% of the area, and all 100% of people within 15% of total area. That still leaves a lot of territory very much natural, but also some 1% of people surrounded by lots of nature, and they need to navigate through it. People do get lost in nature, unfortunately.

We know people have virtually no path integration ability, so maintaining a mere orientation in nature is a bonus.

Any hints?

Thanks.

Dear Davor ,

Despite the expansion in response to your request to Göran , who was oriented in the same direction as me, I not yet clear the purpose of your research. If it's anything, I would say that man like animal that is , has the orientation in nature that has provided him the civilization and culture (urban semiotics ), but does not lose for that, biologically oriented learning by being an animal. The fundamental difference between human and non human animals is that the former do not have to learn it, or only very little , whereas man is born helpless in this regard. But , like animals , those who are born and raised in rural environments , for example, handle much better signs offered by nature for guidance purposes . I say signs, not symbols, because symbols are an exclusively human prerogative and depend on their psychic elaboration , something that animals lack . The orientation of man in nature is a biological question , namely , animal and therefore works guided by signs , and in that sense is a real semic act.

Dear Davor and Danto,

I understand that Dante does not think Davor's interest is clear as yet, but it got a little clearer to me. I do indeed think it is a third sense of "semiotics of nature" which is involved, that is, how human beings interpret what they (we) experience as nature as opposed to culture. To some extent, this is no doubt the same as what other animals, in particular primates, experience (although they probably do not have any concept of nature) - something both I and Danto were writing about (so maybe my references to the IACS and its conference next year, as to the experiments realized by the CCS in Lund are more relevant to Danto. Now, I do remember that there are some articles by Kalevi Kull about our experience of nature (I do not remember if he is present on ResearchGate, but you can easily find his articles on the web). Timo Maran has written about animal camouflage, which is no doubt part of the natural environment. I do not usually recommend Umberto Eco, but his article about the Serendippus brothers in Eco & Sebeok, eds., The sign of three, seems to be very relevant to Davor's preoccupations (actually is can be seen as the scholarly work resulting from the same sources as The name of the rose). In a way, what we do, and people like Seynfarth & Cheney, Tomasello etc. before us, is to find out how this detective work works out in fact, in small children and animals.

Anyhow, we seem to have lost track of the original question. There is nothing wrong with knowing from symbols, or, rather, signs. In the Peircean sense of sign, there is no other way. My interpretation of the notion of sign is much narrower, but even in this sense, knowing from sings is quite important. In fact, what we seems to be arriving at is that signs, in this narrow sense, are only available to human beings and perhaps to some higher primates. But that is a complex story, which I have told in my articles.

Thank you very much on this. Nassim Nicholas Taleb speaks highly on Umberto Eco and at this point it is enough for me. I'll seek the other sources too.

Now why my interest in symbolism of nature, it is simple, navigation as we know it is built upon it. Stars, Sun, Moon and winds. In fact many different winds. It all helped early navigators in their journeys.

I'd make a small distinction between humans and animals in regard to basic keeping a mere course - we humans do it far worse than many animals without help. Animals tend to continue their path in a straight line, a trait called "path integration" which we humans do not have.

Anyway, thanks for your help so far, and I'll surely ask for more eventually.

Dear Davor,

I am afraid a lot of people speak highly of Eco, but I have been mostly concerned in my own work to criticise him. Nevertheless, I think the article I mentioned is a useful one. It does not say much about the starts, the moon, and the sun, however. As far as I know, nobody who calls himself a semiotician has written about the latter. On the other hand, the work of Malinowski and, more recently, Hutchings could be called crypto-semiotical, and it should be highly relevant to your concerns.

Thanks.

I'll go from there.

Dear Cyril-Mary,

I agree with you when you say that we acquire knowledge through a semiotic process. Maybe it would be better to say the semiotic theory explains very well the process of acquiring knowledge. What sounds a little strange is your question: "What is wrong with knowing from symbols?" The Peircean Semiotic perspective, from which I belong, it's not possible to isolate one kind of sign of the others. So, it would be better to make the question: What's is wrong with knowing from signs? But, I undestand what is your question.

You lost me here completely. Linguistics are not my strongest field. I only learned some Hebrew and a bit more Sanskrit, and although I've seen some scholars do linguistic gymnastics of this kind with some verses in Sanskrit, they remain within the bounds of Sanskrit and its sandhi and grammar constraints. There is a similar thing in Kabbalah. But I've never seen such hopping from one entirely random meaning to another on the basis of homonymity. Except in poetry. There must be some method in this, but I can't see it.

I'm a STEM person from telecommunications fields with mild interest in symbols and semiotics. Call me insensitive if you like, but prior to your last sentence which was mostly in plain English I did not realise you seek help.

So what could I possibly do to help you?

Dear Ans,

I'm sorry for your personal problems, I really am. I hope it works out OK.

Thank you for clarification. I think I understand the process by which you transform the words, but I still fail to see the point.

In my view, symbolism is the great crutch for our lazy minds to cope with cognition strain. E.g. if there is a McDonalds right before the intersection I need to turn left, my lazy mind does not have to remember every other intersection before that - it is free to daydream right to the critical intersection and engage only when I see McDonalds arches. My journey is easy and relaxed.

We all do that all the time. We are also more efficient that way, and it is not only in navigation we use symbols as mind crutches, but in just about every other activity. It helps with serialisation of tasks, and we perform those more efficiently than multitasking. Multitasking is a cognition killer.

This helix process seem to go in entirely opposite direction. You start with a symbol, but in a next step you turn it into a metaphor of some completely different, or worse, apparently similar idea, and so on. Instead of providing a mind crutch, it engages the mind in perpetual battle of confronting metaphors, a tedious task.

I've noticed the blind engaging in similar word plays. They are not as systematic, but they usually get completely absorbed in it. So much so they lose track of space and time, and remain cognitively cut from the rest of the world. In a way you may consider this behaviour as one form of blindism. I'm not convinced it serves any useful purpose, aside from maybe a pastime. I don't believe one can learn much either.

I'm trying to establish interfaces that will be able to facilitate cognition process by engaging mind with timely symbols in optimum quantity, to enhance the cognition of visually (or otherwise) impaired people. One of the main objectives is avoiding tedium of the automated symbol stream, while enhancing the importance of symbols by providing simultaneous stimuli via different senses.

Does that make sense to you?

The only work I know of dealing with natural symbols is by Mary Douglas.  You might take a look a see whether it is relevant to your work.

Thanks.

I'll look more thoroughly to her work. Sadly she is no longer with us.

Cyril-Mary pius Olatunji,

Semiotics is the study of signs and sign processes, from cultural representations to languages, to warning signs, brands and emojis. Peirce (1873) described semiosis as any process that involves signs, including the production of meaning. Within the context of the semiotics model above, semiosis describes the interplay and interaction between the concepts of sign, context, and meaning. It is a worthwhile position to pursue. Semiotics is a useful tool for understanding how we create meaning and how we communicate with each other. However, there are some challenges to this position. One challenge is that it can be difficult to define what a sign is and what it means. Another challenge is that different people may interpret signs differently depending on their cultural background or personal experiences.

Plus, there is nothing inherently wrong with knowing from symbols. In fact, semiotics is a useful tool for understanding how we create meaning and how we communicate with each other. However, it is important to recognize that different people may interpret symbols differently depending on their cultural background or personal experiences. Symbols are everywhere around us. Some of the most common symbols are:

• Heart symbol: this represents love, compassion and health.
• Dove symbol: this represents peace, love, and calm.
• Raven symbol: this represents death and doom.
• Tree symbol: this represents growth, nature, stability, and eternal life.
• Owl symbol: this represents wisdom and intelligence.

Other examples of symbols include the swastika, which dates back at least 5000 years and represents good fortune; the radiation symbol; the male or female symbol; the smiley; the Illuminati symbol; and the middle finger symbol.

I hope this helps!