Brian Khumalo

The integration of nomothetic (generalist) and idiographic (specialist/localized) approaches in knowledge production represents a crucial endeavor, particularly within the realms of ethnography and ethnology. Despite this, enduring skepticism stemming from contemporary anthropological perspectives influenced by postmodernism persists regarding the utility of nomothetic propositions. Historically, cultural materialism has advocated for a generalist approach to understanding human cognition, behavior, society, and culture, yet faced application challenges in light of empirical evidence highlighting the dual influence of both material conditions and ideational factors on human behavior. Karl Popper's three-worlds model offers a recursive mechanism for sociocultural transformation, bridging the gap between materialist and ideational perspectives. Using Popper’s model, we propose a synthesis between materialism and mentalism, which we call Semio-Materialism. By combining anthropological semiotics, cultural materialism, and a sensitivity to cybernetic advancements, this paper promotes an interdisciplinary dialogue that accommodates various theoretical frameworks, thereby advancing theory-building in anthropology.

Recently, the relationship between evolutionary ecology and perceptual science has received renewed attention under perception-mediated selection, a mode of natural selection linking perceptual saliency, rather than veridicality, to fitness. The Interface Theory of Perception (ITP) has been especially prominent in claiming that an organism’s perceptual interface is populated by icons, which arise as a function of evolved, species-specific perceptual interfaces that produce approximations of organisms’ environments through fitness-tuned perceptions. According to perception-mediated selection, perception and behavior calibrate one another as organisms’ capacities to experience and know the objects and properties of their environments lead to responses highlighting certain environmental features selected for survival. We argue this occurs via the Umwelt/Umgebung distinction in ethology, demonstrating that organisms interact with their external environments (Umgebung) through constructed perceptual schema (Umwelt) that produce constrained representations of environmental objects and their properties. Following Peircean semiotics, we claim that ITP’s focus on icons as saliency-simplified markers corresponds to biosemiotics’ understanding of perceptual representations, which manifest as iconic (resembling objects), indexical (referring), or symbolic (arbitrary) modalities, which provide for organisms’ semiotic scaffolding. We argue that ITP provides the computational evidence for biosemiotics’ notion of iconicity, while biosemiotics provides explanation within ITP for how iconicity can build up into indices and symbols. The common contention of these separate frameworks that the process of perception tracks saliency rather than veridicality suggests that digital/dyadic perceptual strategies will be outcompeted by their semiotic/triadic counterparts. This carries implications for evolutionary theory as well as theories of cognition.