Semiosis has been trapped within a semiological or linguistic and psychological definition which sets up a simple dyadic descriptive framework of a >this= substituting for a >that=. This nominalist understanding sees reality as Cartesian inanimates, made up of things and their associated images, which must be related to each other by the mechanical intervention of an external agent, who carries out this act of the representational substitution of one image with another image. This is a degenerate semiosis which locates information within an agential consciousness and sets up a framework confined to isomorphic descriptions which are therefore incapable of developing emergent or novel properties.

The genuine sign is a triadic process of mediative generative connections and as such is actually a logical sentence made up of noun(s), which are the spatiotemporal instantiations, and a predicate or relational process of mediation. The predicate is the transformational process of codification that links the noun(s) with other sign-sentences. Energy encoded in this triadic model is capable of informing on and about other forms of energy-as-information by relating its codes and their organizational properties to other forms of encoded energy-as-information.

A genuine semiosis is a generative process where the signs, activated within their predicates, seek out and develop pragmatic links with other semiotic sentences by means of which they interpret, expand and actually create their identities. The sign as a generative sentence is a speculative gaze that is focused on past networks, other networks and the future pragmatics of purely hypothetical and experimental networks. This semiosic sentence operates within all three cosmic realms, the physico-chemical, the biological and the socioconceptual and is the basis for all informational processes of energy.

Edwina Taborsky