The Poetics of Purpose
Hackles have been raised in biosemiotic circles by T. L. Shorts assertion that semiosis, as defined by Peirce, entails acting for purposes and therefore is not found below the level of the organism (2007a:174177). This paper examines Shorts teleology and theory of purposeful behavior and offers a remedy to the disagreement. Remediation becomes possible when the issue is reframed in the terms of the complexity sciences, which allows intentionality to be understood as the interplay between local and global aspects of a system within a system. What is called acting for purposes is not itself a type of behavior so much as a relationship between a dynamic system that exists for a purpose and its microprocesses that serve purposes. The intentional object of philosophy is recast here as the holistic self-organized dynamics of a system, which exists for the purpose of self-maintenance, and that constrains the parts behaviors, which serve the purpose of forming the system. (A system can be any emergent, e.g. an abiotic form, an adapted species, a self, a conditioned response, thought, or a set of ideas.) The self-organized whole, which is represented to the parts in their own constrained behaviors, assumes the guiding function so long attributed to the mysterious intentional object. If emergent self-causation is not disallowed, creative originality, as well as directionality, becomes part of the definition of purposeful behavior. Thus, key tools used here, required for understanding emergence, come from poetics rather than semoitics. In the microprocesses of self-organization, I find what I call accidental indices and icons  which are poetic in the sense that they involve mere metonymic contiguity and metaphoric similarity  and which are preferentially selected under constrained conditions allowing radically new connections to habituate into an intentional self-organized system that, not coincidentally, has some of the emergent characteristics of a conventional symbolic system.
poetics biosemiotics t. l. short teleology complexity sciences emergence j. p. crutchfield