A Biosemiotic Analysis of Braille
A unique aspect of human communication is the utilization of sets of well-delineated entities, the morphology of which is used to encode the letters of the alphabet. In this paper, we focus on Braille as an exemplar of this phenomenon. We take a Braille cell to be a physical artifact of the human environment, into the structure of which is encoded a representation of a letter of the alphabet. The specific issue we address in this paper concerns an examination of how the code that is embedded in the structure of a Braille cell is transferred with fidelity from the environment through the body and into the Braille readers brain. We describe four distinct encoding steps that enable this transfer to occur.
braille encoding biosemiotic systems neuronal groups somatosensory system