With the publication of this inaugural issue of the internationally peer-reviewed journal Biosemiotics, our still-developing young interdiscipline marks yet another milestone in its journey towards adulthood. For this occasion, the editors of Biosemiotics have asked me to provide for those readers who may be newcomers to our field a very brief overview of the history of biosemiotics, contextualizing it within and against the larger currents of philosophical and scientific thinking from which it has emerged. To explain the origins of this (...) most twenty-first century endeavour effectively, however, will require tracing—at least to the level of a thumbnail sketch—how the ‘sign’ concept appeared, was lost, and now must be painstakingly rediscovered and refined in science. To relate this long history, this article will appear in Biosemiotics in three instalments, examining, respectively: (1) The History of the Sign Concept in Pre-Modernist Science, (2) The History of the Sign Concept in Modernist Science, and (3) The Biosemiotic Attempt to Develop a More Useful Sign Concept for Contemporary Science. In this instalment, we begin our introductory ‘stroll through the woods of sciences and signs’ by following the development of the sign concept within the context of scientific inquiry, in necessarily broad outline, from the beginnings of such inquiry in sixth century BCE, through its long development in the Middle Ages, and up unto the onset of modernity. For only within this larger historical context can our contemporary attempt to develop a naturalistic understanding of sign relations be understood. (shrink)

As the accompanying articles in the Special Issue on Semiotic Scaffolding will attest, my colleagues in biosemiotics have done an exemplary job in showing us how to think about the critically generative role that semiotic scaffolding plays “vertically” – i.e., in evolutionary and developmental terms – by “allowing access to the upper floors” of biological complexity, cognition and evolution.In addition to such diachronic considerations of semiotic scaffolding, I wish to offer here a consideration of semiotic scaffolding’s synchronic power, as well (...) – and in particular the ability that it can afford its users to access new and other sign relations “horizontally” as a function of the way that multiple semiotically scaffolded relations intertwine to result in a “definite semantic topology that determines the ways that symbols modify each other’s referential functions in different combinations”.Taking up, in turn, Terrence Deacon’s later challenge that what the sciences of cognition – and biology more generally – needs to “come to grips with [is] the process of semiosis; the dynamic of interpretive activity by which semiotic relationships emerge from other semiotic relationships [as] intrinsically dynamic phases in a generative process”, I attempt here to show how Deacon’s own Peirce-inspired matrix of referential sign relations as presented in The Symbolic Species, when viewed as a semiotic scaffold of interactional constraints and possibility biases, provides the key to understanding the essentially thirdness-manifesting nature of symbol reference, formation and growth. (shrink)

Our research pays attention to the problem of the coverage of the realm of semiotic beings. This problem is raised by the meeting between the contemporary account of the human animal as a semiotic animal and the possible advent of a technological singularity, meaning a living technological being aware of semiosis. Apart from highlighting the prospective emergence of a complex phenomenon leading to evolutionary pressures on humans, we also pointed to a positive direction towards the development of a cooperative relationship (...) between the latter and a sustainable form of technological life: the furtherance of semiotics. To this end, we started by providing a few historical and philosophical references to help us better understand the problem at stake. Next, we described the way in which beings gain semiotic access to reality, the distinction between the realm of semiotic beings and of machines, and the infinite character of the study of semiotics. Finally, we concluded that the realm of semiotic beings is still, despite technological advances, exclusively human. (shrink)

Jean Baudrillard, the scholar and critic of postmodernity, struggled with questions of postmodern ontology: representation of the real through the semioticprocess of signification is threatened with the rise of simulacra, the simulated real. With this rise, seductive semiotic relationships between signs replace any traditional ontological representamen. This struggle has implications for environmentalism since the problems of contemporary environmental philosophy are rooted in problems with ontology. Hence the question of postmodern ecology: can the natural survive postmodern simulation? Baudrillard’s communicative analysis of (...) semiotic postmodernity can both support and extend ecosemiotic theses in response to these questions, questions that must be answered in order to explore our paradoxical understandings of the natural and confirm an understanding of environmentalism for postmodernity. In this paper I will argue for the merit of a semiotic understanding of postmodernity, develop the idea of ecology in this context, and then compare Baudrillard’s approach to the contemporary development of ecosemiotics. (shrink)

This paper is informed by Charles Sanders Peirce’s philosophy as semiotics or the doctrine of signs. The paper’s purpose is to explore Peirce’s category of abduction as not being limited to the inference to the best explanation. In the context of the logic of discovery, abduction is posited as a necessary although not sufficient condition for the production of meanings. The structure of a genuine sign is triadic and represents a synthesis between precognitive ideas and conceptual representations. The novel model (...) of reasoning is offered, based on the mathematical formalism borrowed from Gauss’ interpretation of the complex number. It is suggested that this model in a form of a diagram not only represents a semiotic process-structure but also overcomes the long-standing paradox of new knowledge. For Peirce, it is a diagram as a visual representation that may yield solutions to the otherwise unsolvable logical problems. What appears to us as a paradox is the very presence of abductive, or hypothetical, inference, as Peircean generic category of Firstness within the Thirdness of the total thought-process. Firstness , Secondness , and Thirdness together constitute a dynamic structure of experience. (shrink)

Eight different words are used to denote linen in the Old Testament: [šeš], [butz], [badim], [pištim],. [ketonet], [sadin], [etun], and [hur karpas]. In Jewish ancient rituals, linen clothes were known as ‘the robe of light’. The detailed analysis of the different words for linen in the Old Testament leads to the following conclusions: each different word for linen builds its own web of meanings in the Hebrew Biblical world view, serving the monotheistic mentality in the frame of the Old Testament. (...) Such mentality involves a requirement for harmony between spiritual and ritual purity obtained by wearing linen clothes. The monotheistic mentality as coded in the different words for linen in the Old Testament is drastically different from the polytheistic mentality and language of neighbouring peoples, albeit certain borrowed lexemes in Hebrew originate from these peoples’ languages and cultures. The different words for the fabric, which ‘the robe of light’ is made of, are subject to a special ideology and give rise to several symbolic chains, based on worldly, moral, and abstract ‘ritual purity’, as conveyed by the notion of ‘whiteness’. The different words for linen testify to the immense variety of transformations of the notion of light in the Old Testament. The text of the Old Testament is a declaration and an injunction for the initiated Israelite to see, cover, and handle the world through the ‘robe of light’ and not through the ‘robe of darkness’. (shrink)