Signa Data / Signa Naturalia

The Modern separation of Nature from Culture had the effect of binding the study of meaning-making practices (semiosis) to human-cultural terms: biology and information were understood as detached. This split informed a long-standing consensus that there is no possible bridge between mind-dependent experience (culture) and mind-independent reality (nature), introducing rigid epistemological distinctions between the ‘humanities’ and the ‘sciences’. As Planetary recognition necessitates an interpenetrating picture of ‘natureculture,’ there are embryonic cues from the history of thought prior to this split, from which a re-evaluation of signs and semiosis has emerged with regards to the importance of ‘meaning’ for both human and nonhuman lifeworlds. Re-examining foreclosed pathways from Ancient and Medieval thought opens the domain of sign-relations independent from the “advent of homo sapiens” because “a sign relation is not something that was created ex nihilo by the minds of human beings” but is a functional operator of nature itself.

The word ‘sign’ comes from the Greek semeion, which historically had a more medical meaning akin to a symptom: the external appearance of an internal state. Drawing from such a legacy, Medieval theologian Augustine de Hippo sought a unified theory of the sign transversing human, and natural worlds (with divine motivations), classifying the ‘sign’ into two genres: signa data and signa naturalia. Signa data, like our diverse human natural languages, are created by the intentional use of socially instituted, arbitrary rules (like grammar) where no substantive connection between the sign and its meaning exists (words and their referents). Signa naturalia are when there is an unintentional material bond between the sign and its meaning, predicated on an “if → then” causal relation: if there is the sign of smoke, then there is the meaning of fire. By bringing ‘cultural’ (or artificial) sign-relations in dialogue with those of natural ‘symptoms,’ Augustine de Hippo’s expanded treatment of signs has opened thought to the role of meaning and/or information as constitutive of life in biology across species.

Extrapolating upon Augustine de Hippo centuries later, the discovery of DNA reveals that genetic information or code is what governs ‘meaning-making’ within a cell, leading to the establishment of Biosemiotics, wherein semiosis is understood as an essential component of life itself, collapsing the separation between culture and nature. Signs, in this regard, are not the exclusive domain of human language, but adhere to the lifeworlds of organisms and their unique sensory affordances and ‘meaning-making’ practices, driven by an array of non-linguistic signs relevant to their lifeworlds, such as chemical and olfactory signs (like the chemistry of human sweat from the sensory lifeworld of a tick). In the enduring, and ever-debatable pursuit of the “basic building blocks” of our world, it may be the sign, and not the molecule that constitutes the basic unit of life itself.