Pratyabhijñā Apoha Theory, Shannon–Weaver Information, Saussurean Structure, and Peircean Interpretant Agency

Abstract

This paper builds upon my earlier studies in interpreting interculturally how the Kashmiri nondual Śaiva thinkers Upaladeva (c. 900–950 CE) and Abhinavagupta (c. 950–1020 CE) in their Pratyabhijñā philosophical theology respond to and reinterpret the Buddhist semantic theory of reference as the exclusion of the inapplicable (anyāpoha). It engages the issues in the Pratyabhijñā debate with the Buddhists, with the interrelations of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s theory of Information, Saussurean structuralist semiotics, and Peircean pragmatic semiotics.

• A “bit” of information is definable as a difference which makes a difference.
• Gregory Bateson (1972), Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 315
• We praise Śiva who, through his own intention [icchā], with the chisel of semantic exclusion [apohana], divides entities that are a compact mass not different from his own nature [and thereby] creates diverse forms.
Abhinavagupta, Benedictory verse to Īśvarapratyabhijñāvimarśinī, 1.6

1. Introduction

The two most well-known and important nondual Śaiva and tantric philosophers are Upaladeva (c. 900–950 CE) and Abhinavagupta (c. 950–1020 CE). Utpaladeva furthered the initiatives of his teacher Somānanda (c. 900–950 C.E.) in creating the originary verses and commentaries of the Pratyabhijñā system of philosophical theology. Abhinavagupta is famous for brilliant and extensive commentaries on Utpaladeva’s writings as well as for the creation of a vast corpus of philosophical hermeneutics, itself comprising both a poetics and an exegetics of tantric symbolism and ritual.

This paper builds upon my earlier studies in interpreting interculturally how the Pratyabhijñā thinkers respond to and reinterpret the Buddhist semantic theory of reference as the exclusion of the inapplicable (anyāpoha).

This article will not resolve all the philological puzzles in concepts of negation or exclusion (apoha) but suggest dialogical interpretations of basic Pratyabhijñā and Buddhist theories of it that elucidate aspects of and relations between alternative Western theories of difference in information, narrative, and semantics. I am not denying the integrity and complexity of the distinct contexts of the historical development of the various South Asian as well as Western traditions. Rather, I agree with Jonardon Ganeri’s revision of the historicism of Quentin Skinner that the historical context of each set of theories may also be identified in ongoing discussions of intellectual issues rather than only immediate socio-historical circumstances (see Ganeri 2008 and the discussion of philology in Lawrence 2011).

2. The Philosophical Reenactment of Nondual Śaiva Myth and Ritual

First, I provide a brief introduction to the Pratyabhijñā philosophy. In current scholarship, one of the most definitive characteristics of what is called “tantra” is the pursuit of power, the theological essence of which is the Goddess, Śakti, and the manifestations of which vary from limited siddhis, through royal power, to the saint’s omnipotent agency in assuming the divine cosmic acts.

In “nondual Śaivism”, Śakti is, as Alexis Sanderson would say, “overcoded” within the metaphysical essence of the God Śiva. Śiva is the śaktimān, “possessor of Śakti”, encompassing her within his androgynous nature as his integral power and consort. According to the predominant myth, Śiva out of a kind of play divides himself from Śakti and then in sexual union emanates, embodies himself within, and controls the universe through her.

The basic pattern of practice, which reflects the mythic-cum-historical appropriation of Śāktism by Śaivism, is the approach to Śiva through Śakti. One pursues identification with Śiva as the śaktimān by assuming his narrative agency in emanating and controlling the universe through Śakti. In the fashion typified by Eliade, the ritual of return recapitulates the cosmogony. (There are strong gender implications to this polarity also, as often the frequent transgression of cultural purity is associated with a feminine understanding of Power. These are implied in Sanderson 1985 and White 2003). The same mythico-ritual process is articulated in a great number of reciprocally encompassing codes, and codes of codes (if A = B and B = C, then A = C, and so on), in terms of the over-emphasized sexual ritual and other ritually transgressive practices and theosophical and philosophical contemplations, mantras, maṇḍalas, and so on (Lawrence 2008a, pp. 5–18).1

The Pratyabhijñā system replicates this modus operandi in śāstraic philosophical discourse as the disclosure that one has Śiva’s Śakti (śaktyāviṣkaraṇa) (see Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā [IPK] and Īśvarapratyabhijñāvimarśinī [IPV] 1.1.2 in Abhinavagupta 1986–1998, vol. 1, pp. 56–59); and IPK and IPV 2.3.17, [ibid., vol. 2, pp. 139–49]). Śakti is conceived as the reason in an inference-for-the-sake-of-others. I am Śiva because I have Śakti (Lawrence 1999, pp. 49–57).

To address a variety of problematics, the Pratyabhijñā thinkers interpret Śakti epistemologically as an idealistically constitutive self-recognition or recognitive synthesis (ahampratyavamarśa, pratyabhijñā, anusaṃdhāna), also identified with a principle of Supreme Speech (parāvāk) derived from the linguistic philosopher, Bhartṛhari. The philosophers interpret Śakti ontologically as universal first-person agency (uttamapuruṣa, kartṛtva, svātantrya), of the action (kriyā) that constitutes existence (sattā, Lawrence 1999, 2008b, 2014; Dupuche 2001; Baumer 2011).2 The student learns to participate in Śiva’s enjoyment of Śakti as self-recognition/Speech/agency/discursive agency by contemplating her as the reality underlying all immanent experiences, interlocutors, and objects of experience and discourse.

3. The Buddhist Theory of Apoha

The Yogācāra Buddhist logical-epistemological tradition developed in diverse ways by Dignāga (c. 480–540 CE), Dharmakīrti (c. 600–600 CE), and their followers, generally advocated a kind of phenomenalism somewhat analogous and perhaps even an intellectual background to the thought of David Hume. For this school, the only ultimately sound knowledge is the direct perception of evanescent, phenomenal unique particulars (svalakṣaṇa). Conceptual constructions (vikalpa) of enduring things and types of things (sāmānyalakṣaṇa) may have some value in provisional, practical life, but are ultimately erroneous.

Dignāga developed the apoha “exclusion” semantic theory out of reflections on the role of observed concomitances (anvaya) and noncomitances (vyatireka) in making inductions used in practical life. Dignāga makes clear that without specification regarding subject-object, characteristics, and so on, meaning is subject to doubt (saṃśaya) and indeterminate (see Dignāga 2015, and the reinterpretation of the same at Pind 2011; Katsura 2011; Yoshimizu 2018). There are also background ideas in Vedic ritualism and grammar of vikalpa that indicate practical options (see Olivelle 2016, pp. 34, 76–77, 84–86, 127, 134–35, 159, 178–80), and ideas of negation in the semantics of thinkers such as Vyāḍi. Dignāga and successors believed that because there are no enduring entities, provisionally successful inferences and speech or other sign references are based entirely on noncomitances.3

Dharmakīrti (along with followers such as Dharmottara and Śaṇkaranandana) was the most immediate opponent of the Pratyabhijñā system. Dharmakīrti placed Dignāga’s logical categories within a more complex metaphysical causal framework of explaining how and why erroneous and provisionally and ultimately sound cognitive experiences are generated. Building on Dignāga, people pursue purposeful action (arthakriyā) as motivated by beginningless mnemonic impressions (vāsanā) to attain their desires.4

Dharmakīrti also holds that the highest level of experience is indeterminate and beyond the belief in a dichotomy of the limited subject and limited object. Perhaps Dharmakīrti was at the highest level a nondual Vijñānavādin or even Mādhyamika (see Dunne 2004)?

As I understand it, Buddhism has undergone numerous controversies generated by the core doctrine of “dependent origination” (pratītyasamutpāda) since the Pali Sūtras through Abhidharma and the varieties of Mahāyāna. On the one hand, all reality is undermined, for example, as dependent origination refutes both existence and nonexistence; the Buddha refuses to answer Vaccha and others’ theoretical questions; and he asserts the three attributes of all things as temporary, suffering (duḥkha), and without substantial nature (anātman). On the other hand, dependent origination suggests a causal analysis explaining how things work as collocations of evanescent atomic factors (dharma, and so on).

Catherine Prueitt’s recent Ph.D. dissertation laudably supplements internal system analysis with the more focused study of external works of opponents. Prueitt is correct that the distinction between subject and object by apoha is central to the division of consciousness for the Pratyabhijñā. This distinction provides what we may identify as basic categories that are components of both Saussurean structure and the Peircean pragmatic polarities of interpretant agent and object, which complement signs. Prueitt interestingly speculates that the differentiation by apoha of subject and object may reflect a development in the post-Dharmakīrti Yogācāra, which is entirely possible, although it has roots in Dignāga (Prueitt 2016, pp. 260–61; see the discussion below).

Prueitt’s main effort is to demonstrate that Dharmakīrti and successors, in line with earlier Yogācāra, responded to a number of objections to defend the adequacy of mnemonic impressions or cognitive and psychological tendencies (vāsanās) to explain the diversity of consciousness. This forms the basis of a reiteration of the point made in the 1960s by scholars such as R.K. Kaw and K.C. Pandey that the Pratyabhijñā attempts to counter explanation by vāsanās with that in terms of the intentionality of nondual consciousness (Kaw 1967, pp. 135, 150; Pandey 1963, pp. 272–73; Pandey in IPV 1.5.5, vol. 3, p. 59; Prueitt 2016). I would identify this as ultimately the expression of the Icchā Śakti or svātantrya and so on. Well-established evidence of the Pratyabhijñā arguments about mnemonic impressions (vāsanā, saṃskāra, and so on) are found at IPK and IPV 1.5.5 as well as in the treatments of memory at IPK and IPV 1.2.3–6 (vol. 1, pp. 91–101) and 1.3–4 (vol. 1, pp. 121–92).5

I also observe as a digression that the Buddhist epistemologists are not unique among ancient philosophers in their focus on exclusion in semantics. The ancient Chinese text Zhuangzi also supported its own special kind of skepticism (Chien 1984) on the basis of all categories’ ostensible dependence on the negation of their opposites (Chuang Tzu 1964, pp. 34–35).

In previous publications, Mark Siderits (2011, p. 284), I (1999, p. 158), and perhaps others have separately argued that there is some affinity between the Buddhist theory and structuralist and poststructuralist accounts of the determination of linguistic or semiotic value through difference. Robert Magliola has advocated a lot of engagements of Jacques Derrida with Mādhyamika Buddhism (for example, see Magliola 1984). Derrida endeavored to undermine the lingering realistic assumptions of Saussure by radicalizing in a reductionistic manner the ideas of linguistic value as arbitrary and based on distinctions (Derrida 1976).

The main difference is that, whereas Derrida claimed that we remain embedded in textuality, such as in his interpretation of Peirce on the “deferral” of signifiers to one another, the Pratyabhijñā philosophers’ Buddhist opponents, such as Dharmakīrti and Dharmottara, endeavored to separate signs from the objects as supposedly experienced in meditation. This is what has been described, again in Peircean terms, as comprising the Buddhists’ ostensibly signless reality (D’Amato 2003). Janet Gyatso (1992), a bit more “magically” but to the same point, described meditative dhāraṇīs as Peircean icons of emptiness.6 The Buddhists are not concerned with an entirely syntactic theory of semiotic systems, but are rather oriented towards their own combinations of spiritual realization, nominalism, pragmatics, and causal explanation.

4. The Śaivas, like the Realists, Accept Apoha as an Important Feature of Vikalpa

Now, in line with their peculiar axiologies and soteriologies, the Brahmanic traditions of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika and Mīmāṃsā espousing direct realism, rejected exclusion as an adequate account of semantics, but generally accepted that constructions negate irrelevant options, while identifying substantial concomitances about enduring entities, qualities, and processes.7 The Pratyabhijñā, as an idealistic and religious system, does not share the problem of explaining the relationship between raw sense data and construction. However, like the realists, it concurs that exclusion is integral to the meaning of conceptual constructions in ordinary experience. In his explanation, Abhinavagupta hearkens back to old conceptions of limiting optionality:

When a pot is seen, it is also possible that there could be, in the place of the pot, a non-pot, such as a cloth, etc. [Such a non-pot would like the pot also] naturally have a location believed to be suitable; it would produce cognition [of itself as object], and would be brought to its location by its own causes.8 Since the manifestations of both the pot and the non-pot are possible, there is an opportunity for a superimposition [in which one wrongly takes a pot to be a non-pot]. Since there is the [possibility of the] superimposition of a non-pot, there is the operation of exclusion, which is characterized by negation. Thus the ascertainment [niścaya] “pot” has the nature of conceptual construction that is animated by that [exclusion].

(IPV 1.6.2, vol. 1, p. 306)9

Generally, the Śaiva program for philosophical explanation is a “Śakti ex machina”. If something needs explanation, invoke a modality of Śakti for it, in this case the Apohana Śakti, although of course, the Pratyabhijñā theorists also do attempt to give a substantive philosophical account for her operation.

5. Cosmic Role of the Exclusion Śakti

The Śaivas analyze a broad Cognition (jñāna) modality of Śakti into three subordinate Śaktis, appropriating the triad of three epistemic functions Kṛṣṇa ascribes to himself in Bhagavad Gītā 15.15, that is, jñāna, cognition or perceptual cognition in a more limited sense, smṛti (memory), and apohana.10 While apohana in this context is often translated as “reasoning” or some kind of obscuration of Kṛṣṇa’s nature, R.C. Zaehner recurs to old associations of overcoming confusing optionality in translating it as the “dispelling of doubt” (Zaehner 1975).11

As illustrated by Abhinava’s epigraph to the apoha chapter in the IPV, which I have also used in this article, the Pratyabhijñā philosophers in the fullest perspective conceive of exclusion as a mode of Śiva’s fragmentation of his primordial unity. Because of apoha’s role in fragmenting what is really one, its description leads into issues of illusion.12 The capacity for producing illusion is explained theodicially as the Māyā Śakti, the Power of Magic Illusion, which forms the basis of ordinary life:

In the condition without conceptual construction [avikalpa], the pot has the essential nature of consciousness [cit], and just like consciousness [cit], has the nature of everything [viśvaśarīra] and is perfect [pūrna]. However, there is no worldly activity with that [pot that has the nature of everything and is perfect]. Therefore, [the knower], manifesting the operation of Māyā, causes the thing, even though perfect [pūrna], to be fragmented. By means of that, is created semantic exclusion [apohana], having the form of negation of the non-pot, such as the self, cloth, and so on. On the basis of that very exclusion [vyapohana], there is said to be the ascertainment [niścaya] of the pot. The meaning of “only” [eva] in [the ascertainment] “only the pot” is the negation of other things that are supposed to be possible. Therefore, there is this complete distinction, by distinction all around, like cutting.

(IPV 1.6.3, vol. 1, pp. 309–10)13

6. Overcoding with Chief Frameworks of Recognition and Agency

The Pratyabhijñā theorists recur to their primary codes to explain the philosophical import of the Exclusion Śakti as the divine Self’s comparative synthesis, or recognition, of what does and does not fit into categories. Abhinava introduces Utpaladeva’s main argument in IPK 1.6.3 with a rhetorical inquiry:

There may be this doubt: The pot is perceived as confined to its own form. How can a conceptual construction [vikalpa], as pertaining to the cognition of the pot, effect the negation of the non-pot? For not even the name of non-pot has been apprehended by anyone. How can the mental impression of the non-pot be awakened when the pot is seen? [This reasoning is accepted by the Śaivas:] True. [However,] the Buddhist is to be censured in this way, and not us.

(IPV 1.6.3, vol. 1, p. 308)14

Since the Buddhists cannot even account for exclusion, because of their understanding of cognition as an evanescent phenomenal stream, it would be impossible for them to posit that as the sole basis of reference.

Dignāga himself sometimes rather ironically invoked his source Bhartṛḥari’s concept of semantic intuition (pratibhā). However, Utpaladeva is not ironic in taking such intuition as pertaining to the ultimate nonduality of words and objects, one of the integral components of the Śaiva self-recognition. Utpaladeva asserts:

The determinate ascertainment [niścaya] of “that” results from the exclusion of the “not-that” by the knower who experiences the semantic intuition [pratibhā] of both the “that” and the “not-that.” This [determinate ascertainment] is explained to be conceptual construction [vikalpa] [as is expressed]: “This is a ‘pot’”.

(IPK 1.6.3, vol. 1, p. 309)15

Again, later in the text, Abhinava quotes a “preceptor”, who is perhaps Utpaladeva or some other predecessor, on how exclusion involves the application of categories in (either a priori or a posteriori) memory to present experience:

That is the knower’s mnemonic impression [saṃskāra] of the previous experience by which the previous experience persists even at the time of semantic exclusion [apohana].

(quoted at IPV 2.2.3, vol. 2, p. 45)16

I point out that the Pratyabhijñā philosophers have not only made the common argument that a negation relies upon recognitions of the similar things to be negated, but have rather paradoxically explained that difference is a kind of recognized similarity.17

Abhinavagupta also explains the knower (pramātṛ) of exclusion, referred to by Utpaladeva in IPK 1.6.3, with his favorite ontological category of agency:

Here, it has been demonstrated that what is called the knower [pramātṛ] is different than the means of knowledge [pramāṇa], and to be an autonomous [svantantra] agent [kartṛ] with respect to cognitions [pramā] by bringing about their conjunction and disjunction. There is the manifestation [avabhāsa] of all objects within the knower [pramātṛ].

(IPV 1.6.3, vol. 1, p. 309)18

One of the main themes of the chapter on apoha is that in its highest nature the Lord’s self-recognition that generates exclusion is ultimately unfragmented or nondual,19 a “transcendental synthesis of fragmentation”. Through the proper understanding of this one comes to participate in it.20

7. Information as Differentiation from Entropy and the Development of Systematic Sign Usage

An early Western theorist of the mathematical theory of information is actually not Claude Shannon but Plato in his Timaeus. Timaeus therein explains the fragmentation of the nondual God, Good or Ideal form, known through the exercise of reason that he called knowledge and later came to be called a priori truth, into the realm of quotidian a posteriori cognition, which he called “opinion.” This occurs precisely through the Creator’s mixture of the unchanging with the principle of difference (Plato 1989, p. 1161).21 A couple pages later, he explains the origin of the Soul and subsequent creation in terms of extremely obscure mathematics and cosmology (Plato 1989, pp. 1165–66).22 I leave to other scholars the task of translating all this to Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s mathematical theory of information.

Also, a lot of the Western theories of the narrative quality of experience, humans as homo narrans, and the correlative ethic and epistemic theory of pragmatism, though ultimately also traceable to Plato, such as in the account of God’s creation of the world, have their direct source in Aristotle. It has already been suggested that, though Kenneth Burke attempted to derive his “narrativism” with its ostensible grammatical scheme of “motives” of grammar from Aristotle’s poetics and four causes of action (Burke 1945)—act itself from the formal cause, the agent from the efficient cause, the scene from the material cause, the agency (i.e., instrument) from an unspecified cause, and the purpose from the final cause—they may actually reflect the Indo-European verbal action and cases: respectively, the action itself (kriyā in Pāṇini), nominative (correlated with kartṛ in Pāṇini), locative-cum-accusative (adhikaraṇa-cum-karman), instrumental (karaṇa), and dative (sampradāna).

Ludwig Bertalanffy also acknowledged the roots of general systems theory in Aristotle’s organicism and teleology (Bertalanffy 1972). I believe that Aristotle is the ultimate inspiration of Peirce’s pragmatism, and perhaps the Indo-European cases are also reflected in Peirce’s elaborate sets of triadic categories. Those cases are interpreted in the advertence of Sanskrit grammars and philosophy to accounts of the relation of action to what Pāṇini understood as the mythico-ritual, syntactio-semantic “factors” (kāraka) of action. Of course, Aristotle and subsequent Thomism have their own complex theory of act and potency, but that need not concern us here.

Claude E. Shannon, in his classic Mathematical Theory of Communication, described information as any statistical differentiation from maximum randomness, noncorrelatedness, or taking a model from thermodynamics, what is called the entropy of a communication medium (Shannon and Weaver 1998; Pierce 1980). Shannon was especially concerned with the engineering relationship of signals to noise or entropy in telegraphic lines. As apoha excludes optionality and doubt in vikalpa, John. R. Pierce explains that information theory

provides, in the bit, a universal measure of an amount of information in terms of choice or uncertainty. Specifying or learning the choice between equally probable alternatives, which might be messages or numbers to be transmitted, involves one bit of information.

(Pierce 1980, p. 8)

Bit is actually a technical term for “binary digit” (Pierce 1980, p. 98).

Already from the beginning, Shannon’s classic interpreter Warren Weaver attempted to distinguish and relate the engineering of information to the semantics and pragmatics of information (Warren Weaver, “Some Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Information”, in Shannon and Weaver 1998, pp. 1–28). Dignāga was himself already cognizant that the intentional dichotomy of subject and object emerges from the primordial nonspecificity of meaning. Dignāga explains the intentional context of the noncomitance of apoha:

The denotation of the referent is also by means of joint absence, like, for instance, [the technical term] karman denotes what the agent (kartuḥ) most wants to obtain (īpstamam) [by his action].

(Pramāṇasamuccayavṛtti V. 54 in Dignāga 2015, p. 147)

This passage, which quotes the Pāṇiṇian definition of the karma, is closely followed by Utpaladeva’s statement of the idealistic and pragmatic significance of the kāraka:

Otherness of the Self does not result from the differentiation of the recognitive apprehension [parāmarśa] of the condition of “I”, and so on, because there is the creation of it only as the object of the recognitive apprehension of I [ahammṛśyatā], like the direct object [karman] expressed by the conjugational ending [tiṅ].

(IPK 1.5.17)

From the Śaiva perspective, Dignāga should have more greatly attended to the idealistic and pragmatic context of the direct object described above.

The Peircean pragmatic semantics of meaning in biosemiotics “overcodes” general systems theory of the evolution of life as self-organizing systems. The Peircian biosemiotician, Terrence W. Deacon, brings the notion of information back to the thermodynamic context. In this scheme, self-organizing living systems, while utilizing resources and increasing overall entropy, paradoxically maintain themselves in a state of informational difference contrary to entropy (Deacon 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012). Deacon maintains that this Shannon information is homologous and nested within thermodynamic conceptions of past and potential work as constraints on Ludwig Boltzmann’s formulation of entropy, and, also, Darwinian broadly “pragmatic” conceptions of the survival of the fittest, or the nonsurvival of the nonadaptive.23

Life (and its associated semiosis) evolves through what systems theorist Ilya Prigrogine called order through fluctuation (see account in Jantsch 1992). The process of evolution itself evolved (Deacon 2012; Hoffmeyer 2008a). From the simplest organism through human consciousness, a self-organizing system’s semiosis has an intrinsically “pragmatic” or “narrative” character (Deacon 2007, 2008, 2012). The Peircean theorists variously explain that when there is information as counter-entropy, there is either a nonanthropomorphic or recognizable precursory form of agency, intentionality, and action, which Deacon encompasses with the notion of teleodynamics.24

While at all levels, self-organization as information based on difference25 along with its elaborations in narrative, living systems evolve from using more iconic and indexical signs with minimal differentiation from environmental objects to what Hoffmeyer would describe as the more elaborately differential, “conventional” “digital codes” of DNA, and finally innate and learned cognitive schema, and the linguistic and cultural differential structures of symbols as conceived by Saussure in linguistics and semiotics, Claude Levi-Strauss in anthropology, Jean Piaget in developmental cognitive psychology, and so on (Hoffmeyer 2008a).26 These codes are generated through some kind of complex statistical derivation of the root binary operations defining information.27

These “binary” oppositions defining information and counter-entropic systems, as stressed in information theory, are elaborated in the conventional “digital” codes of structuralism. This pertains to Gregory Bateson’s definition of a bit of information as a “difference that makes a difference.” The comparative priority of information, structuralism and pragmatic semiotics becomes a question like that of which came first, the chicken or the egg. I believe it can be proven that the chicken came first, as life in self-organizing systems existed before the evolution of sexualized reproduction. Likewise, the fact of binary difference should be slightly prior or temporally simultaneous with initial structural difference, inasmuch as one binary difference likely precedes a whole system. I think, however, that a practical impetus would have a temporal or at least some kind of metaphysical priority to those differences defining the systems of Saussurian structuralism. There is both temporal and causal priority in the thought experiment of imagining two people in the pragmatic situation of living together, with no common languages, developing their own rough system of communication.

Anyway, we are here reminded of Charles Morris’s efforts to situate broadly conceived syntax within semantics and pragmatics (Morris 1938, pp. 7, 13–21) as well as Karl Otto Apel’s further efforts to situate Saussurian within Peircean semiotics (see “Trancendental Philosophy as First Philosophy” in Apel 1994, pp. 112–31). The same contextualization would apply to Derridean poststructuralism, which we might call “reflexively deconstructive structuralism”. Langue is defined within the symbolic action of parole: an agent applying memory to recognize and enact interpretations in experience for self and perhaps others for the accomplishment of its intentions.28 This is illustrated by Apel in a simple manner:

.

(From Apel 1994, p. 238)

Moreover, substantiating the Pratyabhijña’s transindividual first-person, agent-centered syntax as well as cognitive science accounts of the religious detection of, and conversion as acquiescing to, a higher executive agency (Boyer 2001; McNamara 2014), the biosemiotician Hoffmeyer has argued that in both physical and cultural evolution there is evidence of a natural teleology towards what he calls “semiotic freedom”: more semantically rich and practically efficacious interpretations of the world (Hoffmeyer 2008a, 2010b).

In conclusion, I believe the Pratyabhijñā situation of negation within what may be called a broadly absolute idealistic context of agency, intentionality, and narrative provides greater accordance with an optimal semiotic account of the inductive scientific data.