Forty-five years ago, while still an undergraduate student at Western Washington University's Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, Terrence Deacon produced as his honours thesis a programmatic manifesto for re-situating the semiotic logic of Charles Sanders Peirce "out of the realm of philosophy and [revealing instead] its necessary association with the information sciences and its close parallels with current systems theories" (Deacon, 1976:10). Deacon's project, then and now, has been to show how, within the context of naturally occurring physical processes, Peirce's essential insight regarding a "mode of being which consists in the fact that future facts of secondness will take on a determinate general character" (CP 1.26) can be, and is continuously, manifested in living systems. Considering this explication to be the "hard problem of biosemiotics", I therefore read the current target article as a progress report, and an extremely encouraging one, of Deacon's ongoing efforts to develop a "proof of principle" model for the naturalistic origin and biologically instantiated logic of this 'causalis in futuro' mediation process unique to living systems.
