Neo-semiotics: Introducing zeroness into Peircean semiotics may bridge the knowable and the unknowable

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Introduction

The Irish author McCann recently wrote as quoted above in his “Letters to a Young Writer” (McCann, 2017). Creative writing differs from scientific writing in that scientists are expected to write what they know. However, scientists and creative writers share a common motivation – the desire to know and write what is yet unknown but knowable. The main purpose of this article is to present a scientific theory that addresses not only the unknown but also the unknowable. Traditionally, writing about the unknowable has been regarded as belonging to metaphysics, art, religions, or the spiritual science. I, as a chemist-turned-theoretical cell biologist, was ‘forced’ to address the unknowable around 2013 (Ji, 2013) as a logical consequence of extending the semiotics (the science of signs) and metaphysics of Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) to include the new category called “Zeroness” (and its associated sign referred to as ‘Signless’ or ‘Nilsign’). This new category (which goes beyond Peirce's famous categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness) was inferred to exist based on the so-called ‘quark model of Peircean signs’ proposed in 2004 (Ji, 2004; 2017b, Section 6.6). To me, a natural scientist, the notions of the “Zeroness” and the “Nilsign” so derived immediately reminded me of the Unknowable of Hinduism (Hindu beliefs include a god who is ultimate but unknowable…), the Ineffable of the Daoist philosophy (Cleary, 2017), and the unknowables in quantum physics (e.g., the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle), mathematics (e.g., the Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem) and complexity theory (Boxer, 1998).

The theory of everything to be described in this paper is referred to as the neo-semiotics whose novel feature is the notion of Zeronesss or Zero (as an extension of Peirce's semiotics), from which everything is thought to have originated as outlined in Fig. 1, in agreement with the Zero Totality Theory of Rowlands (2007). The notion of complementarity as first articulated by N. Bohr (1885–1962) (Plotnitsky, 2013) and later generalized as complementarism and applied to biology in (Ji, 2012c, Ji, 1993, Ji, 1995b) plays a prominent role in the diagram, since it appears in the diagram three times – (i) the Zero as the complementary union of the knowable and the unknowable, (ii) the knowable as the complementary union of the matter and form, and (iii) the matter as the complementary union of particles and waves. These three different levels of complementarity embedded in Fig. 1 may be viewed as an example of the irreducible triadic relation (ITR) that characterizes the semiotics and metaphysics of Peirce (see 1ns, 2ns and 3ns in the center of Fig. 1) (Sheriff, 1994) and has been suggested to be a universal principle manifested in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, philosophy, semiotics, and religions (Ji, 2017a, Ji, 2017b, Chapter 9). This may be referred to as the “trichotomy of complementarities” in analogy to the “trichotomy of trichotomies” (see Table 5). In this sense, the concepts of trichotomy is common to both Peirce's semiotics and Bohr's complementarity (and hence to complementarism (Ji, 1995a)). An anonymous reviewer raised a provocative question:

“… whether the principle of the irreducible triadic relation (ITR) is a principle related to the description of phenomena, or whether it applies directly to the phenomena, irrespective of their description in a theoretical model.”

One possible answer to this question is suggested by ITR itself:

“The principle of Irrreducible Triadic Relation (ITR) is irreducibly triadic in that it cannot be reduced to a sign (i.e., ITR, a means of description), or an object (i.e., the physical principle intrinsic to the phenomenon or reality), or an interpretant (i.e., the regularity perceived by the human brain), since these are all the different aspects of the same entity, ITR.”

My intellectual journey starting from chemistry in 1970 and arriving at the theory of everything that admits of the existence of the unknowable around 2013, after passing through various disciplines in the intervening years, is schematically outlined in Fig. 2. Probably the most unusual feature of Fig. 2 is Step 5 which was added in order to ensure the closure of the scheme. If Step 5 is interpreted based on the same semantics of the arrows of the other steps, we are led to conclude that “Without the unknowable, no knowable” or that “The knowable and the unknowable are the complementary aspects of the ultimate reality, which is consistent with the structure of the diagram shown in Fig. 1.

Section snippets

The Peircean theory of signs

The American chemist, logician and philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce, is widely recognized as one of the greatest philosophers ever to emerge in North America. His theory of signs (Buchler, 1955, Goudge, 1969, Hausman, 1997, de Waal, 2001, Sheriff, 1994, Feibleman, 1946) has been attracting the interest of molecular biologists in recent decades (Ji et al., 2001, Hoffmeyer, 2008, Pattee et al., 1996, Umerez, 2001, Stjernfelt, 2014, Brier, 2011).

The quark model of the peircean sign (Ji, 2004)

There is a striking family resemblance between particle physics and Peircean semiotics. There are at least 11 instances in physics where the number 3 plays an essential role as in Peircean semiotics, as pointed out by Christiansen (2003):

  • (1)

    3 generations of elementary particles -- quarks (2nd row in Table 4) and leptons (3rd row). The electric charges of the elementary particles are given on the left-hand side of the first column, which applies to the second and the third columns as well. The mass

The derivation of 'nilsign' and its associated category called 'zeroness' based on the quark model of the Peircean sign

According to Sheriff (1994a),Legisignis“asignwhichwouldlosethecharacterwhichrendersitasigniftherewerenointerpretant.”Sinsignis“asignwhichwould,atonce,losethecharacterwhichmakesitasignifitsobjectwereremoved,butwouldnotlosethatcharacteriftherewerenointerpretant.”Qualisign“canonlybeanicon.”

It is based on Statement (18) that I regard sinsign as 'interpretant-less sign', meaning that it can be a sign without its interpretant. We can represent this idea algebraically thus:Si,j,ki=0Sj,k=Sinsign

The neo-semiotics and the possible meanings of zeroness

The version of the Peircean semiotics that is extended to encompass Zeroness and its associated nilsign as described in Section 4 will be referred to as the neo-semiotics for convenience, as already alluded to. The Zeroness embodied in the neo-semiotics appears to belong to the Z World in the model of the Universe depicted in Fig. 6 (Ji, 1995b, Ji, 1995a) This figure was updated on September 24, 2016, by adding the Zero as a part of the Invisible World to reflect the Zeroness discussed in

Conclusions

By representing the 10 classes of Peircean signs algebraically as Si,j,k, with three subindexes, i, j, and k, assuming the numerical values ranging from 0 to 3 obeying the so-called the Peircean selection rule, (16), it can be logically inferred that a new category of sign exists here called Nilsign or Signless with its associated category referred to as Zeroness. The Zeroness is thought to be the complementary union of the Knowable and the Unknowable and postulated to be the ontological type

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