With the evolution of semiotic systems, new fields, tenors and modes speciate from previous lineages, creating new registers of meaning-making. This causes the more integrated ancient models that served the needs of very small communities to differentiate into parallel strands. Model speciation can be said to occur when one line of modelling breaks from the requirement of being consistent with a traditional lineage. A comparatively recent example of this occurred in Renaissance Europe when cosmological models construed from empirical data gradually ceased (to be required) to be consistent with ancient (experientially inconsistent) models sanctioned by religious authority.[1]
Some large-scale speciations can be understood in terms of whether ideational construals or interpersonal values are deemed the more textual relevance. For example, scientific models generally afford more textual salience to the consistency of ideational construals, whereas those of the Arts, especially since the emergence of the Sciences, generally afford more textual salience to the consistency of interpersonal values.[2] That is, in the long term, scientific works tend to be selected[3] on the basis of ideational consistency, whereas artistic works tend to be selected on the basis of interpersonal consistency.
Science is a systematic method that is intended to reduce uncertainty about the ideational truth of models of the categorisable: their self-consistency and their consistency with other models already held with high degrees of certainty. The Arts, on the other hand, are concerned with expressing such interpersonal meanings as the specific attitudes valued by a community: emotional values/truths (affect), æsthetic values/truths (appreciation) and ethical values/truths (judgement).[4]
Footnotes:
[1] The current Christian fundamentalist insistence that biological models conform to an ancient model that evolved millenia ago in the Middle East derives from seeing biological modelling as a strain within an all encompassing religious lineage.
[2] Perhaps the increasing salience of one strand of interpersonal meaning in Western Art is demonstrated by the increasing delicacy in depicting emotional states through facial expressions.
[3] The principle of Occam’s razor, which ordains simplicity as a selection principle for scientific models, is a variation on the theme of systems seeking out lowest energy states.
[4] In the religious pictorial art of Mediæval Europe, the size of the depiction of figures varied with the value/status afforded them by the religious institution, decreasing in size from God to angels to saints to clergy to laiety.