How Forests Think. Eduardo Kohn

like tsupu, and they are also completely dependent on iconicity at a variety of levels as well as on all sorts of pointing relationships among signs and between systems of signs and the things they represent. Symbolic reference, finally, like all semiosis, is also ultimately dependent on the more fundamental material, energetic, and self-organizing processes from which it emerges.

      Thinking of symbolic reference as emergent can help us understand how, via symbols, reference can become increasingly separated from the world but without ever fully losing the potential to be susceptible to the patterns, habits, forms, and events of the world.