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Semiotic Modeling: A Pragmaticist’s Guide

W. John Coletta
Professor of English
University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, USA
[email protected]

ABSTRACT

Principles of semiotic modeling are presented in such a way that

readers are led to understand (1) what semiotic models are and are
not (they represent semiosis, the action of signs and the fields that
signs both create and within which they are enmeshed), (2) what
such semiotic models do (they both make the world and help us
interact with it, that is, they have ontological and epistemological
force), and (3) what readers have to do to make semiotic models
themselves (readers are provided with lists of the components or
elements of semiotic models as well as with models—models of
models—for how to organize said components).

Key words: semiotic models, semiotic modeling, semiosis, MST

(Modeling Systems Theory)
First, an Ecovian warning to all model makers:

“When I talk with Ubertino[,]” [said William,] “I have the impression that hell is heaven seen from the other side.”
I did not grasp his meaning. “From what side?” I asked.
“Ah, true,” William acknowledged the problem. “It is a matter of knowing whether there are sides and whether
there is a whole.”

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (1994 [1980]: 65)

I. Modeling: The Semiophysics of Graphical Space

Broadly considered, semiotic modeling is a category and a process that encompasses

“representational phenomena” of most every type from how living things create the very
conditions for their acts of perception to how human beings represent in scientific terms the
fabric of the space-time continuum to how social space and time are created by the literal fabric
of a new Fedora tilted just so. Semiotic modeling, as defined by Thomas Sebeok and Marcel
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Danesi, has ontological and epistemological status; it is an “innate ability” that is “derivative of
semiosis” itself. Semiotic modeling, for Sebeok and Danesi, then, is “the innate ability to
produce forms to represent objects, events, feelings, actions, situations, and ideas perceived to
have meaning, purpose, or useful function” (2000: 1). No wonder then that some consider
semiotic modeling so significant: “The ability to make models is, actually,” Sebeok and Danesi
continue,
a derivative of semiosis, defined simply as the capacity of a species to produce
and comprehend the specific types of models it requires for processing and
codifying perceptual input in its own way. Semiosis is a capacity of all life forms;
representation, on the other hand, is a unique capacity of the human species,
which develops during the neonate and childhood periods.” (2000: 5)

The work of Sebeok, especially, has led to an understanding of semiotic modeling as always
already enmeshed within a framework of evolutionary ecology, of “biosemiotics.” Sebeok
writes, “‘Culture’, so-called, is implanted in nature; the environment, or Umwelt, is a model
generated by the organism. Semiosis links them” (2001: vii, emphasis added). Sebeok helped,
with his program of “modeling systems theory” (MST, related historically to the Theoretische
Biologie [1928] of Jakob von Uexküll, the “systems biology” of Ludwig von Bertalanffy [1928],
Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics [1948] and again von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory [GST]
[1968]), to formalize (“to produce forms to represent,” as Sebeok and Danesi write and I quote
above) the semiotic link between organism and environment, between so-called “nature” and
“culture.” Sebeok and Danesi succeed in formalizing these semiotic links, but they do so in a
way designed
(1) to undermine foundationalism and essentialism (see Norbert Wiley’s The Semiotic
Self [1995: 11] wherein Wiley discusses American Pragmatism’s substitution of a
semiotic model of the self for the social Darwinian one and then offers his own model
of the semiotic self deriving from his synthesis of Peircean semiotics [Charles
Sanders Peirce] and the semiotics of George Herbert Mead) AND
(2) to render uninteresting the so-called problem at the heart of the longstanding
Nominalism-Realism debate, and at the biological and material levels to boot, as had
Charles Sanders Peirce with his seemingly oxymoronic “objective idealism,” wherein
“matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws.” (1891, Houser and
Kloesel: 1992, 293)

Semiotic modeling, then, as the above summary would indicate, is virtually synonymous with
semiosis. According to the MST Perspective, what we generically call “semiotic modeling” may
be understood to obtain, to manifest itself, in four developmentally arranged registers, only one
of which is itself formally called “modeling”: these are “perception,” “semiosis,” “modeling,”
and “representation.” “Representation,” as discussed in Sebeok and Danesi’s The Forms of
Meaning, “is a unique capacity of human beings” and encompasses what are commonly called
“signs,” “texts,” “codes,” and “metaphors” (2000: 5). In fact, I will be most concerned in this
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chapter with models of “representation,” but modeling is an integral part of the other three
registers: “perception” represents modeling as so embedded within an organism as to represent
an always already and necessary erasure; “semiosis” represents “the biological capacity to
produce and comprehend forms”; and “modeling” represents “the activity of actually producing
forms” (5). “Representation,” while generally understood as “a unique human capacity” will in
the present chapter stand for either conscious human form- or model-making or for natural
processes that, while not necessarily conscious or intentional, nonetheless create forms and
models that serve, in effect, to communicate or produce signs, texts, codes, and metaphors. (See
Coletta 1999, 1997, 1996, 1993.)

In the present chapter, then, I will focus on representational models, mostly diagrammatic or
graphical ones (which is to say iconic, in the Peircean and MST sense, models that represent
their objects in terms of some manner of resemblance). These diagrammatic or graphical models
will be presumed to operate as do Charles Sanders Peirce’s “Existential Graphs”: a diagrammatic or
graphical model is to be understood as being “governed by a system of representation founded upon the
idea that the sheet upon which it is written, as well as every portion of that sheet, represents one
recognized universe” (1958 Collected Papers [CP]: 4.421). I call this system of representation the
“semiophysics [after Rene Thom] of graphical space,” thereby emphasizing the systematicity of
an MST approach to modeling. It is important to remember, however, though I shall here focus
on “representational” models, that even at the level of “perception,” the mind-brain-body-
affordance system of a given organism is in fact a model, what Jacob von Uexküll calls an
“umwelt,” of a given species’ ecological niche (2010 [1934/1940]). The “affordances” of this
“mind-brain-body-affordances” model (Gibson 1977) are what I call “environmeans” and
“environmeants,” objects in the environment of an individual, sometimes even introduced by that
individual—objects as made relevant to it. (See Figure 1, The Structure of the Semiotic Self.)
Indeed, as R. C. Lewontin writes, “In this sense, the environment of organisms is coded in [is
modeled in] their DNA and we find ourselves in a kind of reverse Lamarckian position” (86).
Thus, though I will focus on representational models here, the role of semiotic modeling in
perception, in semiosis, and in modeling (the “activity of actually producing forms”), should be
underestimated as always already informing forms of meaning.

Semiotic modeling, or, as I like to refer to it, the “semiophysics of graphical space” (with a clear
nod to Rene Thom’s “Semio Physics” [1990] and to Peirce’s “existential graphs”), should be
understood to span the three major classifications that constitute Peirce’s “semeiotic” (Liszka
1996): “Semeiotic Grammar,” “Critical Logic,” and “Universal Rhetoric.” For those interested
in semiotic modeling, “semeiotic grammar” represents an attempt to describe the formal
structure and function of sign elements. (Note that Umberto Eco calls the” sign,” when
understood in its [as we’ll see] “triadic” form, a “sign-function” [1979 (1976)] in order to avoid
the confusion between the triadic sign-function as a systemic relation of “sign-object-
interpretant” and what is merely one element of the sign-function, itself often called the sign—or
the “representamen” in Peirce.) “Semeiotic grammar” also represents an attempt to answer the
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question, “What counts as a sign?” Most semiotic models address this classification or
dimension of the sign

If “semeiotic grammar” represents an attempt to describe the relation of the sign to itself, its
structure, which relation is a key to modeling the sign-function, then “critical logic” represents
an attempt to understand the relation of the sign to its object and from that relationship attempts
to outline the rules “for expressing and inferring information” (Liszka 1996: 53). Modeling this
dimension of the sign-function requires that the modeler pay special attention to the resistance
of, the constraints of, or the “object-objections of” (as I call them) the objects to which signs
relate.

Of special interest to the modeler of the action of signs, of semiosis, is Peirce’s “universal
rhetoric,” which, in its concern for the relation of the sign to its interpretants, represents an
attempt to outline and describe the entelechy or telos of the sign. As Peirce writes, “universal
rhetoric” is “the doctrine of the general conditions of the reference of symbols and other signs to
the Interpretants which they determine (1958 CP 2.93, MS 793: 20). Universal rhetoric,
therefore, most fully represents the evolutionary, teleological, and emergent dimensions of the
sign, the very signing action of nature—and is understandably, therefore, the most difficult
dimension of semiosis to model. (Again, see Figure 1.) As semiotic modeling spans the three
major classifications that constitute Peirce’s “semeiotic,” so models might be thought of as signs
(versions) of the signing action of signs themselves.

As Liszka writes, in a way that is particularly useful to those seeking to understand the elements
of the sign-function that must be considered in any act of semiotic modeling, “Semeiotic
grammar is concerned with demonstrating the formal conditions for signs as such” (1996: 18),
which conditions consist of
 the sign’s capacity of representing an object,
 the sign’s capacity of presenting itself as connected to its object with respect to some
quality (its ground),
 the sign’s determining an interpretant, “understood as a sign which translates and
develops the original sign,” in an interpreter (which need not be human), its interpretive
condition, and
 the sign-function’s irreducibly triadic structure, such that “the sign’s power to represent is
mediated by its grounding and interpretation” (1996: 19).

Liszka then continues: each element of the sign-function (sign-object-interpretant),

is mediated through the others: the ability of the sign to represent also requires,
inherently, its power to be interpreted as a sign of that object in some respect; the
ability of the sign to be interpreted can only work if it is interpreted as
representing an object in some respect; and it can only be understood as
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representing an object in some respect if it is interpreted as representing an object

as such. (Liszka 1996: 19)

Keeping the above structural dimensions in mind, consider, all who would be model makers, the
following list of characteristics of semiosis that any good semiotic model should incorporate in
one’s semiotic models.

II. The Pragmaticist’s Guide to Using Models, Part 1 (See IV for Part II): Semiotic
models may be constructed according to, no surprise here, a model, that of the familiar
heuristic of Particle-Wave-Field. Below I describe some characteristics (Particles) of
semiosis; in sections to follow, Wave and Field characteristics of semiosis will be
outlined.

First: the particles or pieces: the following list, representing an attempt to demystify
semiotic model building, is comprised of key characteristics to include in semiotic
models purporting to represent the sign, its structure, and its action: we may say that
 a sign is recognizable; it stands out.
 a sign stands for something other than itself.
 a sign stands not just for something else but for something more than itself.
 a sign is easily reproduced.
 a sign generally has iconic and indexical qualities.
 a sign often has a multiple valence; that is, it has a tendency to carry more than one
meaning.
 a sign is often more powerful than that which it represents.
 a sign is often more flexible than that which it represents.
 a sign is context sensitive and can mean different things in different contexts.
 a sign has agency; it seems to call out of us or its environment a certain response; it
gets itself copied.
 a sign is capable of growth.
 a sign is re-inventible.
 a sign is easily connected to, forms assemblages with, other signs.
 a sign is easily substituted for in significant ways such that we are led to believe that
signs occupy and shape, make impressions upon, their environments.
 a sign depends upon the virtual to make it real.
 a sign can do things not just mean things.
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 as with matter and gravitational fields, a sign draws other signs to it and makes
things matter.
 signs (sign-functions, really) are usually represented as two-fold (signifier-signified)
or three-fold: sign, object, and interpretant (Figures 3,4, and 5)
 objects determine signs (called “objectivation”) (Figure 6); signs determine objects
(“signification”); and interpretants determine signs (“Interpretation”).
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III. The Liberating Function of Models

Modeling, semiotic or otherwise, with its seemingly inherent tendency to simplify and totalize
(see the Ecovian warning dramatized in the exchange between Brother William and Adso above
from The Name of the Rose), still often engenders understandable resistance. But modeling is
not inherently totalizing, as the history of linguistics and Structuralism demonstrates. Models
and modeling, especially since Russian linguist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) and French
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), can be understood to have had a liberating,
egalitarian function. Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss were influenced strongly by Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure, whose powerful model of the linguistic sign as a self-referencing
“difference engine,” a binary system or model comprised of signifier and signified (Figure 2), a
system that derived its power from the fact that by uniting language, thought, and action, the
linguistic sign was no mere spectator of the spectacle of the world but a participant-observer-
creator of it, a maker of worlds, and the linguistic sign accomplished this transformation by
virtue of a digital technology of the word (the signifier-signified model of the sign-function)—as
powerful a digitalization as the binary, 0-1, codes or models of the computer revolution would
prove to be. The lesson was twofold: that a tiny model of “reality” could accomplish so much
and that this model seemed to apply to all of us, to define us. Indeed, Lévi-Strauss saw the
implications of applying a Saussurean elegance of modeling to anthropology. In fact, the
structures (or models) that underpin the thought and language of the so-called “savage mind,” he
discovered, are no less sophisticated or complicated than those structures (or models) that
underpin the thought and language of so-called developed people. And, significantly, it was
modeling that taught him this! Later, Noam Chomsky’s X-Bar theory (1965, 1970) and
Universal Grammar (1957), while themselves challenging the principles of Structuralism (see
below), nonetheless present diagrammatic models of how all human languages share the same
deep structures (grammatical underpinnings or “bones”) no matter how dissimilar they may seem
on the surface. The models of such structures, as provided by the Structuralists (see for example
the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure), made this egalitarian insight possible as well
as demonstrable and communicable.
It is curious that this egalitarian insight—as provided by both Structuralist modeling and
the Chomskyan models that challenged them—that this (post)modern birth of modeling, begins
with an “aesthetic-zing,” that is, with the aestheticizing of minimal differences that make a
difference: Jakobson focused our attention on the fact that the music is the message (or model);
he focused our attention on the materiality of sound, on what he called the “poetic function” of
communication; he placed the “emphasis on message,” a materialist, aesthetic turn—like
painterly paintings that draw our attention to the medium of the representation, to the paint—that
impelled us to notice the materiality of the message. Indeed, who would have thought that all the
people, the languages, and the cultures of the world would derive their fundamental equality and
unity from an act of modeling, from a simple model of binary opposition and identity, as, for
example, between the “musical” difference between the phonemes t and d, of, say, tummy and
dummy (a difference that can make a big difference if misheard in a conversation), as represented
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by Jakobson in the neat “bundle,” as Crystal L. Downing calls it (2012: 114-120), or binary
oppositional model, of t/d. From this binary oppositional model, this t/d, a phonemic difference
that makes a semantic difference possible, that releases as it were “tummy” from “dummy,” we
are led to consider other binary oppositional models that serve to “release” or produce productive
difference (the liberatory function) where before there were only monadic in-difference, models
such as Ferdinand de Saussure’s structurally similar S/s (Signified/signifier) or Jacque Lacan’s
S/s (Signifier/signifier) binary oppositional structures—or Roland Barthes S/Z, a clear pun that,
as I explain below, both references earlier liberating models of phonemic difference that assert
commonality (differences that unite, see Frederic Jameson’s “difference relates” [1999 (1991):
31]) (such as t/d) and argues for an even more open, or liberatory, view of humanity and text, or
humanity as text. Curiously, the leap from t/d-modeling forms to S/s-modeling forms, while
structurally parallel at one level, represents a significant “quantum leap” in semiosis, as I explore
below.

Douglas Hofstadter, in a thought-experiment in I Am a Strange Loop (2008 [2007]) discusses, in

the context of what can only be called semiophysics, “[t]he idea—that the bottom level [of any
complexly layered system], though 100 percent responsible for what is happening, is nonetheless
irrelevant to what happens [at the next level]” (emphasis added). In attempting to describe or
model even a process as seemingly devoid of semiosis as a geological phenomenon, for instance,
“self-organization of sorted patterned ground” in alpine and sub-alpine zones (which processes
produce interesting and intricate circular and polygonal patterns of stone and mud that appear to
have been arranged intentionally), it must be noted that the atomic interactions that hold a stone
together (what we will call the phenomenon), while clearly 100% necessary for there to be an
epiphenomenon that we call the self-organization of sorted patterned ground, are irrelevant both
to a description of that epiphenomenon and to the forces that we observe at work on the ground:
frost heaves, freeze-thaw cycles, sorting, compression, . . . .

Just as the phenomenon and the epiphenomenon are insulated from each other representationally
(it would be highly inefficient to describe geological processes in atomic terms), there is a
parallel interactive barrier too in that the epiphenomenon, while literally made possible by the
phenomenon, is irrelevant to it in what amounts to a perfect disappearing efficiency, a “quantum
sweep,” whereby a whole level of interaction is in effect swept away with respect to relevance,
but swept away in such a way that it makes possible a clean slate for a whole new level of
interactivity. I call this process “irrealevance.” In Peircean terms, an epiphenomenon is a proper
significate outcome of, an Interpretant of, a phenomenon, if that phenomenon creates a reality, a
domain of greater semiotic freedom, that is, one for which it is necessary but irrelevant, as
Hofstadter puts it. These quantum sweeps, then, are the very type of the liberating dimension of
semiosis—and represent boundary phenomena that modelers of semiosis may choose either to
represent or bracket off.
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Similarly, the jump from t/d modeling to S/s modeling is one that represents a perfect
disappearing efficiency, “irrealevance,” such that the structure of the sound-image (signifier) /
concept (signified) epiphenomenon has made the phonemic phenomenon on which it is based
necessary but irrelevant: each domesticates the other, epiphenomena having always already
reduced—by having made irrelevant to their activity—the internal complexities of the
underlying phenomena and reducing those complexities to an “energy” source for itself.

From S/s-modeling forms it is only a simple “irrealevant” step to Levi-Strauss’ self-

differentiating binary oppositions of human/culture, culture/nature, male/female, friend/ enemy,
native/foreign/ or pretty/ugly, models that, when applied widely across language and discourse
communities drew attention to the structural equivalence of all language and culture.

As mentioned above, Noam Chomsky’s syntactic models (Syntactic Structures 1957), while
making clear the phonemic and morphological limitations of structural linguistics and its binary
oppositional models of human language, continue the liberating tradition of semiotic modeling,
as Chomsky’s “transformational-generative grammar” and “universal phrase structure,” for
example, even when understood as merely representing stages in his evolving corpus, are
nonetheless models that allow us to codify how no one language is any more complex
structurally than any other. Significantly, Roland Barthes’ S/Z (1970)—the title of which
clearly conjures the phonemic, binary-oppositional models of structural linguistics (the t/d of
above) only to undermine their limitations, which were their strength as well, the underlying
commonality, complexity, and equality of all human language and discourse—augurs the move
from Structuralist to Post-Structuralist models of productive difference: the achieved
commonality of all structures inadvertently erased their differences, understood as uniqueness
(différance). But, again, it was precisely as a function of the “modeling stance” or the mode of
modeling and remodeling that a discourse of both commonality AND uniqueness could emerge.

This liberating stance, which is, again, made manifest by semiotic modeling, holds true both for
languages as they may be understood diachronically as well as synchronically: no one language
or people is any less open to the future, all things considered. The linguist and semiotician
Michael Shapiro, for example, especially as articulated in his concept of the “telos of
diagrammatization” (The Sense of Change: Language as History [1991]), offers many explicit
and grammatically literal paradigms that serve as models of how language, like life, generates
novelty out of itself (within the context of, as Shapiro reminds us referencing Peirce, “that kind
of causation whereby THE WHOLE CALLS OUT ITS PARTS” [16])—a process that
undermines the “parts-determine-the-whole” deterministic bias of the “Central Dogma” of DNA.
Indeed, the extent to which a diagrammatic semiotic model incorporates into its structure this
“telos of diagrammatization,” this principle of emergence, as the biologists call it (not an easy
thing to do), the more power of a heuristic model it will be. Like a living thing, then, language
generates its own infinite array of workable (goal-directed) forms of meaning in that triadic
process that Shapiro calls the “telos of diagrammatization” (“diagrammatization” invoking
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semiosis as a modeling process), a modeling process that is not dependent solely on binary
models of difference. Indeed, the correspondences among (1) the triadic models of heredity, see
The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, Environment, by Richard C. Lewontin, and the “replication-
transcription-translation” model of the so-called “Central Dogma” of heredity involving DNA;
(2) the Sign-Object-Interpretant relation of Peircean “infinite semiosis”; and (3) the triadic
phrase structure (X, X’, X”) of Chomsky’s X-bar theory (which Coletta [1996] describes in
terms of a non-essentializing biology), for example, provide a framework of modeling / of
semiosis within which the more synchronically oriented binary models of the Structuralists may
be better understood as diachronic (even goal-directed) triads. (See Figure 7.)

Arguably one of the most significant steps in the history of the liberatory function of semiotic
modeling was that taken by, as Norbert Wiley argues, the American pragmatists: that step being
that they “theorized human beings as semeiotic”4 (11) and replaced the pseudo-biological models
of identity supplied by the social Darwinists with the semiotic models of human thought and
identity; they thereby succeeded in explaining “both freedom and equality, giving democracy the
foundation it needs in human nature” (17). As Peirce writes, “the word or sign which man uses
is the man himself” or “the man is a symbol.” In contemporary terms, as R. C. Lewontin has
asserted often, it is not all in the genes (1991: 17-37); we are signs. Thus, if the “living”
structures and models of the sign (d/t, Signified/signifier [Saussure], Signified/signifier [Lacan],
sign-object-interpretant [Peirce], I (present)-me (past)-you (future) [Wiley]) are models of the
human, then people are who they are as they are assigned / as signed. This non-deterministic
semiotic basis of the human is one that demands the re-coding of our understanding of the code
of codes, DNA. Again, as R. C. Lewontin writes, connecting the “language of DNA” with
human language, “A deep reason for the difficulty in devising causal information from DNA
messages is that the same ‘words’ have different meanings in different contexts and multiple
functions in a given context, as in any complex language” (1991: 66). Even heredity is
interpretive and contextual, a semiotic modeling system. (See Hoffmeyer and Emmeche’s “code
duality” in Anderson and Merrell, 1991: 117-166) However, identity is not arbitrary in a
radically uncontrolled sense. As E. San Juan, Jr., writes,
Peirce’s concept of semiosis is not the unwarranted extravaganza posited by
Derrida because there is in it a continual reference to the object of the
representamen / signifier existing in a world outside consciousness, a world
manifested in the phenomena of experience mediated by signs. This referent is
not a static entity but a dynamic object. (2004)

In conclusion, Structuralist, Post-Structuralist, and semiotic models and modeling more generally
have been the means by which scholars have been able both to discover AND to represent human
being in non-essentializing, that is, in “semeiotic” terms.

Figure 1 and 8 thus represent emergent models of semiotic “selving.”

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IV. The Pragmaticist’s Guide to Using Models, Part 2: Semiotic models may be
constructed, not surprisingly, according to a model, that of the convenient heuristic of
Particle-Wave-Field.

In a previous section, we explored the particles or elements of semiosis, which elements are
useful for representing the structure and function of sign-functions; now, we look at semiotic
wave phenomena, the temporal and “directional” patterns that Anderson Vinícius Romanini calls
the “axes of semiosis” and along which may be represented how objects, signs, and meanings or
outcomes (interpretants) are replicated, transcribed, and translated (as geneticists would say)
over time. More precisely, these waves or axes represent how objects may determine signs
(called “Objectivation”); how signs may determine objects (“Signification”); and how
interpretants may determine signs (“Interpretation”). First:

1. The Axis of Objectivation:

This is the axis along which Objects drive semiosis (see Peirce’s “Critical Logic”),
as when, as described in popular parlance in the Jeep-commercial slogan, “The
things we make, make us,” or as when Gertrude Stein writes, “I am I because my
little dog knows me”—an identity that arises out of the object, the Other to Stein’s
self, the dog. The axis of Objectification models this trajectory. (See Figures 9
and 10 for images of how IOs and DOs emerge as experienced Things.) In the
model to follow, IO = Immediate Object; DO = Dynamic Object; S = Sign; DI =
Dynamic Interpretant; FI = Final Interpretant. In order to illuminate this first axis
of “semeiosis,” let us consider the following example, which explores elements of
“Objectivation”—as well as of “Interpretation” and “Signification.” We should
not be surprised that Objects drive the semiosis along this axis, as my examples
below show. However, human artifacts / Objects would serve just as well as
examples, and the example below does link natural objects with human artifacts.

Mary Oliver writes, in her poem "Egrets," "a spindle of bleached reeds . . .
wrinkled into three egrets" (1983: 19). In this assertion, the equivalence "reeds =
egrets" is a metaphor, an actual physical isomorphism, and the perceptual flip-flop
that a poet, birdwatcher, or egret predator experiences. Since egrets in the natural
world have already evolved to look "as" reeds (to escape being seen and eaten), for
Oliver to use such a metaphor is merely to allude to or cite a pre-existing
biological "as-structure" or biological metaphor with a linguistic one. When, then,
a figure of speech (reeds wrinkle into egrets) and a figure of sight (again, reeds
wrinkle into egrets) are identical expressions, when the figure of sight (the real-
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world Object, DO) could even stand as the Sign with the figure of speech standing
as the Object, and thus when language itself can be the Object and nature the Sign,
then this, in a pointedly Peircean sense, is to say that language is the Interpretant of
the signing action of nature, that is, of Objectivation.

The above example may be grafted onto “the axis of Objectivation” below, such
that the IO and DO (the Immediate and Dynamic Objects) may be understood as
the pre-existing biological Object (and thus first in line reading left to right), the
pre-existing biological “as-structure” (the figure of sight in which “reeds =
egrets”), from which is spun out ultimately the S-DO-FI, the complex outcome in
which the telos (FI, Final Interpretant) of the DO (Dynamic Object, the reed-like
nature of the egret or the egret-like nature of the reeds) is realized as a twinned
natural and linguistic Object that can protect (Final Interpretant, FI) an egret from
predators.

Again, the “Axis of Objectivation”:

As Romanini writes, “[Objectivation] is the axis of the two objects of the sign
(immediate and dynamic), as well as the relations that the dynamic object
establishes throughout the process of semiosis.” The “relations” of which
Romanini are to be understood in the above example as the complex outcomes
following from which the telos (FI, Final Interpretant) of the DO (the Dynamic
Object, the reed-like nature of the egret or the egret-like nature of the reeds) is
realized as a twinned natural and linguistic Object that can metaphorically and
literally protect (the Final Interpretant, FI) an egret from predators.

Figure 6 illustrates diagrammatic model of another Dynamic Object (a fish called

the Rock Beauty [Holocanthus tricolor]) working out its semiotic potential along
axis 1, the axis of Objectivation. The head and tail of the Rock Beauty are bright
yellow Objects; they will also become, along the axis of Objectivation, indexical
Signs. As indexical Signs generally do, the yellow head and tail call attention to
themselves and also orient themselves (and any observer) spatially with respect to
some object with which it is connected—see Peirce's indexical “weathercock” (CP
2.286). In this case, the Immediate Object (IO) is the Rock Beauty's own large,
black midsection that breaks its body in two so as to appear to be in front of a
yellow fish. This midsection is itself iconic of the spherical surface of a rock or a
coral head (Dynamic Objects, DOs, in the Rock Beauty’s environment). The
boundary between the yellow indexical head of the Rock Beauty and its black
iconic body roughly describes an arc of some 90%; the arc itself is an index of both
the long-term effects of erosion, effects which produce spherically shaped rocks,
24

and the sphericality of coral heads, which heads often form on round boulders
anyway, providing a natural base for their spherical growth. Thus the yellow
indexical head and tail and the circular arc described by the boundary between head
and body are part of a single indexical and iconic Sign complex arising from the
IOs and DOs of the Rock Beauty and its environment. To predators of the Rock
Beauty, then, the yellow fish appears to be behind the dark rock or coral head; this
effect is heightened underwater when the Rock Beauty is seen against the dark
rocks and coral heads of a reef, a reef that contains innumerable nooks and crannies
into which prey species are frequently partially or fully withdrawn. In semiotic
terms, then, the indexical head and iconic body of the Rock Beauty are Signs (Ss)
that determine various Interpretants (II, DI, FI, i.e., behavioral and cognitive
reactions in the mind of a predator, to refer to the (imagined) all-yellow fish as if it
were behind an (imagined) rock (the DO); that is, the Interpretant (DI, FI) or
predator is determined to refer to Objects to which the indexical head and iconic
body of the Rock Beauty themselves refer. As Peirce writes, “A Sign is anything
which is related to a Second thing, its Object, in respect to a Quality, in such a way
as to bring a Third thing, its Interpretant, into relation to the same Object, and that
in such a way as to bring a Fourth into relation to that Object in the same form, ad
infinitum” (2.92). Given the feigned inaccessibility of the Rock Beauty (a fish that
is both Sign and in part its own Object), the Rock Beauty's predator or Interpretant
(say the barracuda) may itself be brought into this relation of inaccessibility and
move on to more accessible prey, of which there are many in a reef. Other
predatory fish, Fourths, may follow the barracuda's lead and move on as well. In
this sense the barracuda is a Peircean Interpretant not a generalized interpreter; its
moving on is itself a Sign (and so the barracuda may be modelled as “S-DO-DI 
S-DO-FI”) in a new web of primarily ecological signification that is a reef
community. The preceding semiotic narrative may be modeled, again, along the
“axis of Objectivation”:

2. The Axis of Interpretation:

This is the axis along which Interpretants drive semiosis (See Peirce’s “Universal
Rhetoric”), as happens when we give in to a philosophical mood or mode. For
example, as in the previous example, the Rock Beauty's predator could also solve
the complex visual puzzle presented by the Rock Beauty, effectively detaching
from their Objects (DOs) the Rock Beauty`s iconic and indexical Signs and
25

thereby changing the status of those Signs from motivated icons and indices to
unmotivated symbols (thus bringing about the “perception catastrophe” of which
Rene Thom [1990: 61] speaks). This detachment of icons and indices from their
objects and the resultant production of arbitrary symbols, consummate acts of
Interpretation, are at the heart of the evolution of syntax and predication. Models
of predation = models of predication. Of course, the iconicity of the rock-like
marking that appears on the body of the Rock Beauty is enshrined in its English
name, as is a judgment about its aesthetic value. Indeed, the protection of the
beautiful reef fish, as well as the substrate of the reef (its rocks and coral heads
[DOs]), is a function of this aesthetic coding—and so, as we detail later, DOs such
as rocks have gotten themselves written into biological, aesthetic, and legal codes.
Objects (rocks and rock beauties) have become Objectives (protect the reef made
of coral, rocks, and rock beauties) by means of the force of the Interpretant
function. As Michael Haley writes,
What keeps the Sign and Object from collapsing into one another (and yet
at the same time keeps them connected in ways that can be examined
critically) is the Interpretant. Thank Goodness we do not and cannot
‘think Objects’. We think about Objects with Signs, and it is for this very
reason that we can even think about thinking about Objects with Signs!
The part of Mind that permits this self-critical thinking about thinking (or
the part of Nature that enables an analogous form of evolutionary
checking on every event of re–presentation) is the Interpretant. (1999)
The “axis of Interpretation,” then, models this trajectory whereby Interpretants
determine new Signs, Dynamic Objects, and other Dynamic Interpretants,
primarily by detachment of Signs from Objects. Poet Theodore Roethke, in “The
Shape of Fire,” writes “A toad folds into a stone” (1975 [1948]: 61), transcribing a
preexisting biological “figure of sight,” one that serves to protect toads from
predatorial “interpreters,” into a poetic “figure of speech.” Just as the act of poetic
imagination collapses toad and stone, sign and object, into one another while at the
same time keeping the ontological separation of toad and stone / sign and object
always already in place (otherwise there is no “magical” poetic metaphor of a toad
escaping down the “rabbit hole” of a stone), a snake or raccoon, if if would eat,
must perceptually detach the stony-looking toad from a stone and producing the
“S-DO-DI” “lunch” or like a good reader of Theodore Roethke’s poem, who, by
learning to fold toad into stone and stone into toad creates for herself an ecological
AND aesthetic “S-DO-DI”: literary critical detachment. This process of
detachment, then, is what is modeled along the “axis of Interpretation,” and is
what keeps always communication open: As Romanini writes, “S-DO-DI” “is the
effect produced indeed by the triadic communion among sign, dynamic object and
dynamic interpretant, or the way of fluency of communication” (2006). (In the
26

“axis of Interpretation” as represented again immediately below, II = Immediate

Interpretant; see above for other abbreviations.)

3. The Axis of Signification:

This is the axis along which the Sign drives semiosis (See Peirce’s “Semeiotic
Grammar”). As Peirce writes, “a sign is not a sign unless it translates itself into
another sign in which it is more fully developed” (CP 5.594) (qtd. in Liszka 24).
The “axis of Signification” is modeled as follows:

Romanini writes, “It is the axis of the telic development of the sign towards the
final opinion.” While such telos is clear in conscious and intentional human
communication, this Peircean axis as represented by Romanini allows us to see
how for Peirce even nature is a signing agent, and so again I choose to illustrate
“the axes of semeiosis” using examples of how, in this case, natural signs can drive
the emergence of more developed signs.

The early metabolic process of fermentation produced a waste product (CO2). CO2
had at that time scant indexical or iconic value. Furthermore, chemists tell us that
when the "end product" of any process is inhibited (not enabled to react further),
that process will ultimately fail (end-product inhibition). (This is true of “the axes
of Semeiosis” as well.) In Raimo Anttila's and Peirce's terms, CO2 was a Sign (S)
in the process of becoming a "symbol"—a Sign that has lost its resemblance to
(iconicity) or real physical relationship to (indexicality) its signifying or ecological
context or environment—its Object. As Anttila writes, iconic indices "tend to
become independent from the environment (symbolic), particularly if the
environment is lost" (1992). However, photosynthesis reinvented CO2 as an iconic
and indexical Sign that is, photosynthesis evolved to use
the waste CO2, and so photosynthesis became the ecological and semiotic context
or environment of CO2; photosynthesis was, then, the biogeochemical icon of a
new environment for which the early fermentation is now merely symbol, the
original environment of the fermenters having been, in the main, lost. The waste-
product of photosynthesis, O2, was itself subsequently without an iconic or
indexical relationship to its signifying or ecological environment. Respiration,
however, evolved to use the waste O2, and so respiration became the enabling
context (or Interpretant) of O2. In other words, each new environment ("new"
because life has altered it chemically) is a new Interpretant/Sign that "determines"
27

the success of new biochemical configurations. The new biochemical

configurations then change the environment, so that the determiner is now the
determined. O2, the deadly environment for early life forms, becomes the
indexical wind of respiring organisms, which evolve as new icons of an oxygen-
rich rather than deadly environment. Living things create the challenges to which
they respond.

Broadly speaking, the evolution of life on earth may be seen in terms of the action
of signs (or semiosis, the signing action of nature)—and we may plot this
evolution on the “axis of Signification.” Perhaps the central event in history of
life’s attempt to establish itself as a viable, ongoing experiment was, as mentioned
above, the ecological displacement or reconfiguration by photosynthetic and
respiring organisms of those organisms that used fermentation as a metabolic
process, organisms that still exist but that have been, literally, reassigned. As is
widely known in the biological sciences, the evolution of photosynthesis was
based in part on the "stretching" or mutation (or dissipation) of the heme molecule:
chlorophyll is a mutated heme molecule. Indeed, as Anttila writes, "This is general
in evolution. Units adapt to their environments by indexical stretching to produce
an icon of the environment" (1992). This stretching is precisely what the “axis of
Signification” shows. Hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying molecule necessary for
respiration, is itself based on the heme molecule, which historical relationship is
encoded in the word “hemoglobin.” Indeed, the heme molecule is central to both
the evolution of photosynthesis (chlorophyll) and, later, respiration (hemoglobin);
in fact, without the evolution of the latter, the former would not have been
sustainable. And so, from a molecule’s point of view, life is a function of the
expressiveness of the heme molecule, of the heme molecule’s capacity to be
reinvented. As such, it is a “teleophor” (the S-DO-FI of the “axis of
signification,” the FI, Peirce’s Final Interpretant, indicating the teleological
dimension that special kind of metaphor (physical, chemical, biological, or
linguistic) that possesses (presumably, from its origin) a rich teleological potential
for ongoing, multiple re-interpretations, a potential that thus helps it to survive as
metaphor by allowing it to adapt its meanings continually to its changing cultural
environments.
More profoundly, the teleophor’s (S-DO-FI’s) inherent potential for multiple
meanings also helps to create those cultural environments. This inherency need
not be understood in essentialist terms; as we shall see, teleophors are Peircean
Dynamic Objects (DOs, that is, things after they have been picked up in semiosis
(that is, experienced or somehow further integrated into a diagram of revolving
relation) to the end that they become more and more real (reality grows along the
“axis of Signification) and more and more likely to be picked up within other
semiotic processes—though the separation of the thing from the experienced thing
28

(the object) and the separation of the concept of the thing (‘immediate object’)
from the experienced thing (the dynamic object) always remains.

The heme molecule, then, is a scheme-atic or diagram of the possible or probable

shapes of change. (Michael Shapiro's discussion [1991:48-91, passim] of the telos
of diagrammatization in linguistic change is relevant here.) Life, through a
strange-attractor-like recursivity, through the "stretching" of the heme molecule,
alters its environment to meet its needs and pulls itself up by its own boot straps.
This process whereby "natural systems," as Laszlo says, "create themselves in
response to the challenge of the environment" (1972:46) or whereby they "adapt
the environment to [their] needs" (Lovelock) is central to Charles Sanders Peirce's
sense of "final causation.”

The heme molecule and its various permutations, then, are alternately indices of
each other, and when (or if) the earlier environments are replaced by later ones (as
the composition of the oceans and atmosphere is altered by the evolving processes
of life), these indices, as I mentioned above, like linguistic units, "tend to become
independent from the environment (symbolic), particularly if the environment is
lost" (Anttila 1992). This diagrammatization of evolution through the agency of
the heme molecule (the Ur-Sign) is one way of giving an ecological and evolu-
tionary body to Peirce's sometimes enigmatic assertion from his Detailed
Classification of the Sciences":
All natural classification is then essentially, we may say, an attempt to find
out the true genesis of the objects classified. But by genesis must be
understood, not the efficient action which produces the whole by
producing the parts, but the final action which produces the parts because
they are needed to make the whole. It may be difficult to understand how
this is true in the biological world, though there is proof enough that it is
so. (Collected Papers 1902: 1.227)
Evolutionary biology, I believe, makes Peirce's notions of efficient and final
actions (or causes) less difficult to understand: indeed, evolution (Peirce's "final
action") "calls out its parts" (1902:1.220) in an inside-out manner as we have seen
with the heme molecule.

V. What it is that may be modeled?

29

In less theoretical terms, we may ask now, in an explicitly semiotic context, what it is that may
be modeled, “[g]iven the supposition that all models are iconic signs” (Houser 1991: 434)? I
posit the following: we may create models or icons of
 semiotics itself: both the structure of the field of study and its relationship to other fields
of study;
 sign-functions: the structure of the signifying units themselves within various
environmental and perceptual fields, what Nöth (1995) classifies as the “dyadic, triadic,
and other models of the relata” (83). Importantly, as an ever-present reminder of the
potential essentialisms and attendant fascisms that lurk behind attempts at modeling signs
and semiosis, Nöth writes in his Handbook of Semiotics: “A monadic view of the sign
which neglects to differentiate between sign vehicle and meaning occurs only outside of
the theory of signs. It is characteristic of magic and unreflective modes of sign
manipulation” (83)
 communication chains, circuits, and feedback loops.
 sign-fields: the environmental and perceptual fields within which and from out of which
signs may be said to emerge, fields understood as existing “at,” “below,” and “above” the
level of the sign itself.
 semiosis: the action of signs and sign-fields, what Myrdene Anderson and Floyd Merrell
call “the complementation, the provisionality, the counterfeit involved in open-ended
synergies” (1991: 4), and thus thought and behavior, social interaction, and
organizational development (anthroposemiosis); certain physical and chemical
phenomena that are presently categorized in terms of self-organization (physiosemiosis);
plant relationships and communication (phytosemiosis); and animal ethology and
communication (zoosemiosis). See Figure 6 for a Peircean model of semiosis that
combines Peircean synechism (the “doctrine of continuity” [Colapietro 1993]; the belief
that between any two supposed phenomena there is always a third, a belief that undercuts
essentialism) and tychism (the doctrine of absolute or objective chance” [Colapietro
1993]), thereby illustrating the intertwined emergence of Firstness (feeling), Secondness
(fact), and Thirdness (law) with the emergence of signs, objects (that which signs stand
for), and interpretants (the outcome of signs for someone or thing, outcomes that are
themselves signs, and so on). Figure 1 also models the emergence of the Dynamic Object
(DO, a thing or phenomenon as it is experienced and as it grows in response to
interpretations) (in this case a grasshopper’s locust self) within the Interpretant “shell” or
“field” of a to-a-large-extent self-engineered set of enabling influences or “affordances”
(in this case a pheromone secreted by a grasshopper when that grasshopper senses
overcrowding, a pheromone that causes the grasshopper egg to interpret its own DNA as
a “becoming locust”). Also, Figure 1 models how the DO (the emerging locust) becomes
more and more semiotically powerful (real) and comes to exert a top-down control over
various other dimensions of the unfolding sign process. The grasshopper in Figure 1 is a
30

type of the “evolutionary message” (Hoffmeyer 1996: 20-24) or hypothesis about itself
that characterizes most all signing structures (entities) involved in semiosis.
In more detail, we may model
 how signs relate to other signs both diachronically and synchronically
 how signs relate to signals, pulses, and “bumps” (that is, to “pre-signs” and “non-signs,”
to forces and things )
 how signs relate to or emerge from the fields or contexts (again, environmental and
perceptual) within which they are enmeshed
 how semiotics as a field fits within knowledge schema generally

VI. The Pragmaticist’s Guide to Using Models, Part 3. Models may be built according to
the convenient heuristic model of Particle-Wave-Field. Sections II and IV about dealt
with semiotic Particles and semiotic Waves respectively. In this section we look at
semiotic Fields, the larger contexts within which semiosis and semiotic modeling unfold.

Semiotic models may be understood as operating in at least four dimensional fields

within the field of the “semiophysics of graphical space.” We may understand

1. Diagrammatic Models as Egalitarian Agents of Liberation: As discussed above, the

Structuralist understanding of the common forms (structures / models) underlying all
human language and systems of thought removed any grounds for racism or sexism.
Indeed, the “semiotic self” as posited by the American Pragmatists undermined the
racialist theories of the social Darwinists.
2. Diagrammatic Models as Agents of Discovery: Models both order concepts and direct
think. The best models order concepts and direct thinking beyond themselves and the
intentions of their creators. Models are best understood as abductions that are
themselves then subject to environmental pressures with respect to their usefulness and
then if warranted are filled in with inductions and deductions.
3. Diagrammatic Models as Registers of the Habits of Space-Time Dimensionality; or
Diagrammatic Models as Agents of Their Own Transformative Making, indeed of
the Material Agency of Model and Matter: Models exploit the spatial and temporal
logical dimensions of their existence; that is, the best models unfold over time and in
space as do that which they model; indeed, this is what they in fact model. For example,
Coletta (1992) uses diagrammatic models to show how the ecological parts of the model
of ecosystem structure, function, and evolution are actually evolutionary steps. Parts =
steps in the most integrated and robust models. In fact, the process of creating a model
of the generalized structure of a functioning ecosystem (that is, attempting to represent
ecosystems in terms of their shared minimal parts) led to an insight that is best
understood as having been represented diagrammatically not intentionally as a register
of the nature of ecosystems themselves, again, that any attempt to represent the minimal
constitutive parts will necessarily end up in delineating the steps that lead to the
31

system’s constitution, as natural systems evolve by having each diachronic

representation of the system represent a re-presentation of how it got that way: parts =
steps. This is a habitual equivalence that nature has come to acquire in its evolving
efficacy. Steps, in nature or in models of nature, that do not ultimately become parts are
of a different order, having not yet acquired the “proper” habits.

Einstein writes (1919), “The geometrical behavior of bodies . . . depend on gravitational

fields, which in their turn are produced by matter.” Matter, then, produces the conditions
for its own mattering, what Einstein calls “the behavior of bodies” and “the motion of
clocks” (emphasis added) and for which he uses the phrase “which in their turn.” This
relativistic separation and unity, i.e., matter’s independence from and dependence on
itself—that is, matter’s in/dependence being a function of the in/dependencies that it
itself produces and imposes—is fundamental to semiosis and serves to ground semiosis
in the physical constitution of the universe. Gravity, then, is the Ur-interpretant; that is,
gravity is the original field phenomenon within which objects create the very fields
which then influence and determine (more or less) the trajectories of those objects. In
the preceding statement, we find very much the same syntax that we find in Michael
Cabot Haley’s definition (1999) of the Peircean interpretant as “the proper significate
outcome of any Sign-action, which thereby mediates (ratifies or validates) the Sign–
Object relation, revealing it for what it is (i.e., a significant relation) and contributing to
the actual emergence or unfolding of its potential meaning.” Gravity, likewise, is the Ur-
interpretant in that it represents a framework of in/dependence created by the very matter
that is dependent on the framework. Gravity also keeps mass and weight (like sign and
object) open to productive difference, which difference is the material instantiation of the
distinction between a representamen and a sign, a thing and an experienced thing (a
Peircean object). In this (what I call) “material irony”—that is, in matter’s unity with
and separation from itself (the “with/from function”), in matter’s being in effect always
already part of a Sign (at least of itself)-Object relation, that is, in its being a determinate
sign of itself through its creation of a field of influence within which it may actualize its
potential as an object—is the very origin of the possibility of semiosis.

Peirce’s definition (model) of the sign combines the causal language of physics with a
theory of information (semiotics) and so recovers the matter-energy-information triad that
has traditionally been squeezed out of the matter-energy binary obsession/opposition of
the physical sciences. Such a recovery is fundamental to an understanding of
physiosemiosis. As mentioned, “physiosemiosis,” a term coined by John Deely (1990), is
a name for the process whereby the physical universe organizes itself by making itself
capable, through the action of signs, of recording and then taking advantage of its own
history. The most robust semiotic models must, then, represent semiosis as both registers
32

of the habits of space-time dimensionality and as agents of their own transformative

making, indeed of the material agency of model and matter.
4. Diagrammatic Models as Registers of the Causality of the Non- and Pre-existent:
“Diagrammatic logic” and “existential” graphs actually exploit the physical logic of
material relation in the world and even serve to represent the ways in which “possibility”
is “modally real” (see Corrington 1993: 56). For example, concerning the necessity,
sufficiency, and reality of Peircean triadic logic and semiosis, Michael Cabot Haley
(1999), writing on the “Realty of Abstraction,” articulates the logical underpinning
Peirce’s “Existential Graphs,” which graphs Peirce understood as “governed by a system
of representation founded upon the idea that the sheet upon which it is written, as well as
every portion of that sheet, represents one recognized universe” (1958 [1903] CP 4.421).

Haley demonstrates here, in clear Peircean terms, what we can only call the causality of
the non- and pre-existent, the underlying logic of limitation and symbolic growth in the
universe. Peirce thus presents us with a vision of the universe that we might call the
“virtureal.” Modelers need to work within the Peircean logic of the virtureal, of his
existential graphs, when developing their models.
33

MST (Modeling Systems Theory, Sebeok and Danesi 2000) represents a vision that also breaks
down the false distinctions between the “actual” and the virtual; Niels Bohr represents physics as
representative of a similar vision: “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out
how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature” (qtd. in Peterson 1963).
Modeling can tell us not what nature is but what we can say about it.

According to MST (Sebeok and Danesi 2000), the four broad types of forms or models are
“singularized, composite, cohesive, connective,” in more familiar terms, sign, text, code,
metaphor. “From this axiom six principles follow,” write Sebeok and Danesi,

 “The modeling principle”: There is no representation without modeling;

 “The representational principle”: “Knowledge is indistinguishable from how it is

represented” (2000: 11);

 “The dimensionality principle”: “Modeling unfolds on three levels or dimensions”

(2000: 11); iconicity and indexicality “are prior developmentally and cognitively to
symbolicity” (2000: 11);

 “The extensionality principle”: “Models and their meanings are derivatives of simpler
(more concrete) ones” (2000: 11);

 “The interconnectedness principle”: “Models and their meanings are interconnected to

each other” (2000: 11); and

 “The structuralist principle”: “All models display the same pattern of structural
properties” (2000: 11).

These principles of Modeling Systems Theory (MST) collapse the distinction between writing
about the world and writing the world, between models of the world and the world as model.

In conclusion, one good litmus test for the robustness of a semiotic model, that is, for its internal
logical consistency, for its descriptive power, for its ability to enact a world, and for its
intertextual relations with other models is the extent to which the six principles of MST may be
said to hold for it.
34

References

Several good primers exist on semiotic and scientific modeling:

1991 Myrdene Anderson and Floyd Merrell, eds., On Semiotic Modeling.

1995 Winfried Nöth, Handbook of Semiotics. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP: pgs.
79-91, 174-220.
1997 Krampen, M. “Models of semiosis.” In R. Posner, K. Robering & T. A. Sebeok
(Eds.) Semiotics: A Handbook on the Sign-Theoretic Foundations of Nature and
Culture, vol.1 (pp. 247–287). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

2000 Thomas Sebeok and Marcel Danesi, The Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory
and Semiotic Analysis.
2006 Frias and Queiroz, “Images, Diagrams, and Metaphors: Hypoicons in the context of
Peirce’s sixty-six fold classification of signs,” Semiotica 1 / 4.

2012 “Models in Science,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006)

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