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This chapter defines and discusses biosemiotics, which is a growing field that investigates semiotic processes in the living realm in an attempt to combine the findings of the biological sciences and semiotics. It offers a way of understanding life in which it is considered not just from the perspectives of physics and chemistry, but also from a view of living systems that stresses the role of signs conveyed and interpreted by other signs in a variety of ways, including by means of molecules. The succeeding sections of the chapter draw on Peirce’s semiotics to construct two semiotic models—one of the cell’s genetic sign system, and one of signal transduction in B cell activation—the aim of which is to shed light on the notion of information as it is employed in the biological sciences.

This chapter presents a physical-computational model of sensorimotor grounded language interpretation for simple speech acts. It discusses that the interpretation of directive and descriptive speech acts consists of translating utterances into updates of memory systems in the controller. It explains that the same memory systems also mediate sensorimotor interactions, thus serving as a cross-modal bridge between language, perception, and action. It suggests that a viable strategy for modelling language use is to focus on simple language use, such that of young children. It defines three facets of ‘meaning’ that need to be explained, leading to functional specifications for a model of language use framed as semiotic processing. It describes the embodiment behavior of Ripley, a conversational robot built in the laboratory that serves as a concrete launching point for a more general model.

This chapter lays out the key moves, and organizational logic, of the entire book. It argues that, rather than privileging mere ‘relations’, our analysis must foreground a particular ensemble of relations between relations if we are to properly understand the following modes of mediation: semiotic processes, semiological structures, agentive practices, environment-organism interfaces, communicative channels, social relations, and parasitic encounters. And it shows the ways such modes of mediation get computationally enclosed through processes that automate, format and network them, such that their meaningfulness is made to seem relatively portable: applicable to many contents and applicable across many contexts. It reviews and reworks several key ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism. And it summarizes each of the chapters, highlighting key themes, arguments, and interlocutors.

This chapter defines the notion of human sociality, drawing on a range of aspects of social cognition, among them theory of mind, cooperation, trust, altruism, and social accountability. Some fundamental ideas of the book are introduced in summary form, including the idea that communication is a form of tool use in the social realm, that communication and other aspects of social interaction are grounded in semiotic processes, and that social interaction is driven by, and regulated by, norms and heuristics. Two basic imperatives for social interaction are introduced: the need to manage and monitor information, and the need to manage and monitor social affiliation.

This chapter presents a linguistic anthropologist’s view of translation, problematizing the term and finding that it is a fruitful metaphor suggesting a whole family of processes. Most generally, translation processes purport to change the outward form, social place, or meaning of a text while also, at the same time, seeming to keep something about it the same. Thus, judgments of similarity and difference are fundamentally at issue. These are not only matters of informational content but depend on broad presuppositions about linguistic practice that anthropologists call “language ideologies.” The chapter defines this and several other terms in order to explore the semiotic processes by which social science and law influence each other, as different yet related disciplinary languages. The chapter suggests that two significantly different types of “translation” are important to distinguish and exemplifies these through the case materials in the chapters and with other, related evidence.

This chapter discusses the concept of social action, defining action with specific reference to the pursuit of goals in the social realm. Several lines of previous research are reviewed, including work in phenomenology, psychology, sociology, and the philosophy of language. The concept of social action is explicated in terms of a set of nested constituent components of speech acts, following the philosopher John Austin and the psychologist Herbert Clark. This is grounded in the basic anatomy of the semiotic process. An important distinction in conversation analysis between practices and actions is discussed, and the terms are defined with reference to distinctions in the social goals being pursued and achieved, and the means being selected to reach these goals. The ontology of social action is argued to give rise to a generative account of action within the context of social relationships.