What Can the Philosophical Framework be for a Transdisciplinary Theory of Embodied Interactive Meaning-making Participatory Behavior?

This paper is a discussion of the philosophical and communicative theoretical presumptions, necessary for producing a transdisciplinary ecological and embodied theory of semiotic-linguistic meaningful embodied interaction. Embodiment has both a biological and a phenomenological aspect presenting us philosophically with a dualism that neither biology nor phenomenology in their present received views contain or can accept (the body-body problem). It also has a third linguistic-social aspect that is not easy to integrate with the other two either. Not even Husserl’s phenomenology or Gadamer’s hermeneutics produce a theoretically integrated paradigm, though Merleau-Ponty did some work to integrate them through his theory of the embodied mind. However, an ecological and evolutionary theory integrating biology and meaning is still needed. Today biological brains sciences are still struggling to find a way to integrate a phenomenological aspect of brain and behavior (Damasio 2018) as well as the ecological aspect of the cognitive and communicative behavior of living systems in order to understand The Ecology of the Brain (Fuchs 2018). What we call “the brain” is in fact just a physiological model and a part of the wholeness of biological as well as phenomenological embodiment. A more fruitful framework for development of a theory of embodied interacted meaning, integrating the physical, the biological, the psychological, and the social aspects of reality in order to support teaching and human development issuggested. It has the forms of a non-dual processes philosophical framework based on cybernetics, systems theory, and Peircean triadic biosemiotics (Cobley 2016, Brier 2017). Informationalism , behaviorism and some types of interactionalism are difficult to integrate with phenomenology and social hermeneutics when one wants to promote “the ecological view of language as a tool for behavioral and social coordination” (Transmundi & Vork Steffensen 2016). This discussion has already started in (Cowley 2018), where I agree when he writes, “Linguists say surprisingly little about either meaningful experience or acts of meaning. “ Like Cowley I am interested in discussing “the parallels and contrasts between a semiotic and an ecological-enactive view of languaging.” Coming from second-order cybernetics I posit that the difference between Maturana and Peirce is that Peirce actually has a semiotics and that it is grounded not only in ecological interactivity but also in a phenomenological view. Thus, the Cybersemiotic view attempts to integrate them both on the Peircean pragmaticist grounding.