Recent decades have borne witness to the emergence of new frameworks in psychology (Chemero, 2009; Gibson, 1979), neuroscience (Eliasmith, 2005; Varela, 1996; Varela et al., 1991), anthropology (Deacon, 2011a), and philosophy (Thompson, 2010), each more committed than the last to explaining the cognitive feats of organisms from their own point of view. New mechanistic theories, drawing on dynamical systems theory and information theory, evince a growing interest in the study of the workings of meaning and signification. Previous theories had tended to approach living systems either from a detached, reductionist stance that disregarded conscious experience (Fodor, 1975; 1983; Watson, 1913) or–in contrast–from a purely subjective perspective, without much concern for the physical processes that underwrite our experience of a meaningful world (Ingold, 2000). The dual reality of living systems–as mechanistic, but also perspectival and capable of signification–increasingly drives research on sentient systems. It would be a mistake to think that adopting a mechanistic approach commits one to reductionism and to mindless conceptions of the living (Ramstead et al., 2018; Thompson, 2010). The terms “signification” and “meaning” are polysemic. Sometimes their referents seem elusive because the phenomena at play in attributions of significance are multilayered. We use the terms “signification” and “meaning” to refer to a specific kind of interpretive ability and its output, whereby an agent can make use of signs to convey specific meanings–or to interpret signs provided to them as