Conventional framing
Semiosis is typically defined as the process by which signs are produced, transmitted, and interpreted. In classical semiotics (e.g. Charles Sanders Peirce), it involves a triadic relation between a sign, its object, and an interpretant. In biology, semiosis has often been extended metaphorically to describe signalling, communication, or information processing within organisms.
APS reframing
In APS, semiosis is not fundamentally a symbolic or representational process but a biological activity grounded in viability-oriented organisation. It refers to the way living systems differentiate and respond to conditions in terms of their consequences for continued viability.
Semiosis arises wherever differences make a difference to persistence. A system exhibits semiosis when it modulates its activity in response to distinctions that matter for maintaining its own organisation. These distinctions need not be represented internally or encoded symbolically; they are enacted through constraint-modifying activity within a constraint-closed system.
In this sense, semiosis is coextensive with biological normativity. It expresses the system’s capacity to register and act upon the asymmetry between what sustains and what undermines its viability. The “meaning” of a condition is therefore not assigned or interpreted in a mental or symbolic sense, but realised in the system’s differential response to that condition.
Semiosis is thus a basal layer of biological organisation, present wherever viability-oriented activity is modulated by environmentally coupled differences. It does not require cognition, representation, or consciousness. Instead, it provides the functional ground from which more complex forms of cognition may emerge, including representational and symbolic processes in certain systems.
Key Point
In APS, semiosis is the enactment of viability-relevant difference: meaning is not represented but lived in the differential persistence of the system.