Modern biology has not yet come to terms with the presence of many organic codes in Nature, despite the fact that we can prove their existence. As a result, it has not yet accepted the idea that the great events of macroevolution were associated with the origin of new organic codes, despite the fact that this is the most parsimonious and logical explanation of those events. This is probably due to the fact that the existence of organic codes in all (...) fundamental processes of life, and in all major transitions in the history of life, has enormous theoretical implications. It requires nothing less than a new theoretical framework, and that kind of change is inevitably slow. There are too many facts to reconsider, too many bits of history to weave together in a new mosaic. But this is what science is about, and the purpose of the present paper is to show that it can be done. More precisely, it is shown that the whole natural history of the brain can be revisited in the light of the organic codes. What is described here is only a bird’s-eye view of brain macroevolution, but it is hoped that the extraordinary potential of the organic codes can nevertheless come through. The paper contains also another message. The organic codes prove that life is based on semiosis, and are in fact the components of organic semiosis, the first and the most diffused form of semiosis on Earth, but not the only one. It will be shown that the evolution of the brain was accompanied by the development of two new types of sign processes. More precisely, it gave origin first to interpretive semiosis, mostly in vertebrates, and then to cultural semiosis, in our species. (shrink)

Upshot: In our response we focus on five questions that point to important common themes in the commentaries: why start in wicked problems, what kind of system is a scientific perspective, what is the nature of second-order research processes, what does this mean for understanding interdisciplinary work, and how may polyocular research help make real-world decisions.

Intersemiotic translation (IT) was defined by Roman Jakobson (The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, London, p. 114, 2000) as “transmutation of signs”—“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” Despite its theoretical relevance, and in spite of the frequency in which it is practiced, the phenomenon remains virtually unexplored in terms of conceptual modeling, especially from a semiotic perspective. Our approach is based on two premises: (i) IT is fundamentally a semiotic operation process (semiosis) and (ii) (...) IT is a deeply iconic-dependent process. We exemplify our approach by means of literature to dance IT and we explore some implications for the development of a general model of IT. (shrink)

This edited volume provides a biosemiotic analysis of the ecological relationship between food and medicine. Drawing on the origins of semiotics in medicine, this collection proposes innovative ways of considering aliments and treatments. Considering the ever-evolving character of our understanding of meaning-making in biology, and considering the keen popular interest in issues relating to food and medicines - fueled by an increasing body of interdisciplinary knowledge - the contributions here provide diverse insights and arguments into the larger ecology of organisms’ (...) engagement with and transformation through taking in matter. Bodies interpret molecules, enzymes, and alkaloids they intentionally and unintentionally come in contact with according to their pre-existing receptors. But their receptors are also changed by the experience. Once the body has identified a particular substance, it responds by initiating semiotic sequences and negotiations that fulfill vital functions for the organism at macro-, meso-, and micro-scales. -/- Human abilities to distill and extract the living world into highly refined foods and medicines, however, have created substances far more potent than their counterparts in our historical evolution. Many of these substances also lack certain accompanying proteins, enzymes, and alkaloids that otherwise aid digestion or protect against side-effects in active extracted chemicals. Human biology has yet to catch up with human inventions such as supernormal foods and medicines that may flood receptors, overwhelming the body’s normal satiation mechanisms. This volume discusses how biosemioticians can come to terms with these networks of meaning, providing a valuable and provocative compendium for semioticians, medical researchers and practitioners, sociologists, cultural theorists, bioethicists and scholars investigating the interdisciplinary questions stemming from food and medicine. (shrink)

According to David Chalmers, the hard problem of consciousness consists of explaining how and why qualitative experience arises from physical states. Moreover, Chalmers argues that materialist and reductive explanations of mentality are incapable of addressing the hard problem. In this chapter, I suggest that Chalmers’ hard problem can be usefully distinguished into a ‘how question’ and ‘why question,’ and I argue that evolutionary biology has the resources to address the question of why qualitative experience arises from brain states. From this (...) perspective, I discuss the different kinds of evolutionary explanations (e.g., adaptationist, exaptationist, spandrel) that can explain the origins of the qualitative aspects of various conscious states. This argument is intended to clarify which parts of Chalmers’ hard problem are amenable to scientific analysis. (shrink)

Biosemiotics argues that “sign” and “meaning” are two essential concepts for the explanation of life. Peircean biosemiotics, founded by Tomas Sebeok from Peirce’s semiotics and Jacob von Uexkül’s studies on animal communication, today makes up the mainstream of this discipline. Marcello Barbieri has developed an alternative account of meaning in biology based on the concept of code. Barbieri rejects Peircean biosemiotics on the grounds that this discipline opens the door to nonscientific approaches to biology through its use of the concept (...) of “interpretation.” In this article, it is noted that Barbieri does not adequately distinguish among Peirce’s semiotics, Peircean biosemiotics, and “interpretation-based” biosemiotics. Two key arguments of Barbieri are criticized: his limited view of science and his rejection of “interpretation-based” biosemiotics. My argument is based on tools taken from a different approach: Robert Rosen’s relational biology. Instead of “signs” and “meanings,” the study begins in this case from the “components” and “functions” of the organism. Rosen pursues a new definition of a law of nature, introduces the anticipatory nature of organisms, and defines the living being as a system closed to efficient cause. It is shown that Code Biosemiotics and Peircean biosemiotics can share a common field of study. Additionally, some proposals are suggested to carry out a reading of Rosen’s biology as a biosemiotic theory. (shrink)

Recalling the title of Yoxen’s classical paper on the influence of Schrödinger’s book, I analyze the role that the work of H. Pattee might have played, if any, in the development of Biosemiotics. I take his 1969 paper “How does a molecule become a message?” (Developmental Biology Supplement) as a first target due to several circumstances that make it especially salient. On the one hand, even if Pattee has obviously developed further his ideas on later papers, the significance of this (...) one springs out right from the title, the journal and date of publication and, of course, its content. On the other, this paper in particular has been somehow rediscovered recently and not only within the frame of biosemiotics (eg, in history and philosophy of biology by E.F. Keller). Following the parallelism with Yoxen’s perspective, I contend that Pattee’s work was relatively influential with respect to a good amount of attempts to rethink living systems within theoretical biology around the 70s. This influence diminished together with the decay or even collapse of those attempts under the impact of molecular biology as it was being developed those years. Eventually, Pattee’s work has been taken up again. Notwithstanding, it is quite clear that Pattee himself was not intending to contribute specifically to Biosemiotics and that he was probably unaware of any such discipline, at least until recently. Then, we should as well ask (as Yoxen wonders with respect to Schrödinger) to which extent Pattee’s influence has been a direct one or rather an indication of the relevance of his ideas and the resonance of his hypotheses with those of biosemiotics. For this task I will sketch a few points of convergence and divergence and examine the work of some authors who either address directly this issue or have contributed significantly to build up the history of Biosemiotics. (shrink)

What role does environmental change play in Jakob von Uexküll’s thought? And what role can it play in a up-to-date Uexküllian framework? Admittedly, in hindsight it appears that the Umwelt theory suffers from its reliance on Uexküll’s false premise that the environment (including its mixture of species) is generally stable. In this article, the Umwelt theory of Uexküll is reviewed in light of modern findings related to environmental change, especially from macroevolution. Uexküll’s thought is interpreted as a distinctive theory of (...) phenomenology—an ‘Uexküllian phenomenology’—characterized by an assumption of the (in the realm of life) universal existence of a genuine first person perspective, i.e., of experienced worlds. It is suggested that acknowledging this distinctiveness is critical for eco-phenomenology as well as for biosemiotics; the latter of which can only thus thrive as a true ‘semiotics of being’, rather than a mere ‘semiotics of functioning’. (shrink)

The paper introduces mathematical encoding for subjective experience and meaning in natural cognition. The code is based on a quantum-theoretic qubit structure supplementing classical bit with circular dimension, functioning as a process-causal template for representation of contexts relative to the basis decision. The qubit state space is demarcated in categories of emotional experience of animals and humans. Features of the resulting spherical map align with major theoreties in cognitive and emotion science, modeling of natural language, and semiotics, suggesting several generalizations (...) and improvements. The developed model bridges psychological, quantum-theoretic, and semiotic perspectives, allowing for an integrative account of subjectivity, agency, and meaning in living Nature.Graphical abstract. (shrink)

A new approach to landscape ecology involves the application of the eco-field hypothesis and the General Theory of Resources. In this study, we describe the putative eco-field of bark beetles as a spatial configuration with a specific meaning-carrier for every organism-resource interaction. Bark beetles are insects with key roles in matter and energy cycles in coniferous forests, which cause significant changes to forestry landscapes when outbreaks occur. Bark beetles are guided towards host trees by the recognition of semiotic signals using (...) a specific eco-field. These signals mainly comprise a group of scents, which are called the odourtope. Their interactions with other organisms occur by sharing relevant information from the eco-field networks in the forest ecosystem. The eco-field networks modulate the expansion of the realized semiotic niche of the bark beetle towards the potential semiotic niche. Moreover, the niche construction process can be initiated by interchanging signals among species living in the same place, where these signals allow the exploitation of the required resources. If different organisms are interdependent on signals in eco-field networks, then this process may result in the establishment of mutualistic relationships. This is an example of how evolutionary processes are initiated by the recognition of signals in a network of eco-fields. (shrink)

Timo Maran has defined “biosemiotic criticism” as the study of human culture with an emphasis on the recognition that all forms of life are organized by sign processes. That approach guides this investigation of the sonic devices and practices that have been used in encounters between birds and humans in agricultural spaces. “Bird-scaring” has been a long-standing component of the semiotic relationship between humans and birds in what I am calling the agricultural semiosphere. The struggle between humans and “pest” species (...) over the control of agricultural resources has spurred technological development, and an examination of the sonic tools that have been involved in bird-scaring practices, from wooden rattles to digital sound recordings, intersects with scholarship on sound technology and media studies. The field of ecoacoustics provides a conceptual framework for the sonic dynamics of the interspecies communication under examination. To the extent that the essay also explores the sign relations between humans and birds it has a place in the growing corpus of biosemiotic criticism. The historical account of bird-scaring practices is presented in three sections, demarcated by changes in technology as well as shifts in the mode of semiotic reference. Across the analysis, a historical approach to bird-scaring is interwoven with a discussion of biosemiotic and ecoacoustic themes and concepts. (shrink)

Biosemiotics and the analysis of biopower have not yet been explicitly brought together. This article attempts to find their connecting points from the perspective of biosemiotics. It uses the biosemiotic understanding of the different types of semiosis in order to approach the practices of biopower and biopolitics. The central concept of the paper is that of the ‘semiotic threshold’. We can speak of (1) the lower semiotic threshold, signifying the dividing line between non-semiosis and semiosis; and (2) the secondary semiotic (...) thresholds, signifying the borders between different types (iconic, indexical, symbolic) of semiosis. Speaking in terms of types of semiosis means speaking in terms of different capabilities for normativity, which is why the article uses the approaches of Michel Foucault on normalization in biopower and of Georges Canguilhem on organismic normativity. As an example on which biopolitics and biosemiotics could connect, the discourse of regenerative and anti-aging medicine is used. (shrink)

In this paper, we describe a semiotic programme that proposes an alternative conceptual framework to understand the moral positionalities that people have in socio-material space. The study amalgamates moral character and signs and signification through a discussion of moral choice and value acts in an existential semiotic framework, as laid out by Eero Tarasti. The programme was triggered by a lived experience in a non-place, yielding the concept of semiotic space awareness – i.e., the value acts that work as signs (...) of moral character in people’s socio-material space. It is the moral positioning of a subject in the socio-material and semiotic space in relation to other subjects. People’s positionalities primarily take place in the socio-material space, and the dimensions we discuss focus on how value acts are produced and interpreted in space and place. Our aim is to take the approach used in, e.g., proxemics to a universal metalevel in terms of its key, undivided semiotic ingredients irrespective of cultural variation. We then extrapolate by discussing how these value acts trigger potential tensions and conflicts that can be approached using semiotics as a foundation for analysis. More specifically, the moral character that people portray in their value acts is theorized and applied as an explanatory tool to understand the semiosis and its repercussions in Dasein. We also introduce affordance as an additional dimension in the interplay and modalizations between moral character and moral choice to understand value acts and semiotic space awareness in subjects’ Dasein and Umwelt. (shrink)

In the current debates about zoosemiotics its relations with the neighbouring disciplines are a relevant topic. The present article aims to analyse the complex relations between zoosemiotics and cognitive ethology with special attention to their establishers: Thomas A. Sebeok and Donald R. Griffin. It is argued that zoosemiotics and cognitive ethology have common roots in comparative studies of animal communication in the early 1960s. For supporting this claim Sebeok’s works are analysed, the classical and philosophical periods of his zoosemiotic views (...) are distinguished and the changing relations between zoosemiotics and cognitive ethology are described. The animal language controversy can be interpreted as the explicit point of divergence of the two paradigms, which, however, is a mere symptom of a deeper cleavage. The analysis brings out later critical differences between Sebeok’s and Griffin’s views on animal cognition and language. This disagreement has been the main reason for the critical reception and later neglect of Sebeok’s works in cognitive ethology. Sebeok’s position in this debate remains, however, paradigmatic, i.e. it proceeds from understanding of the contextualisation of semiotic processes that do not allow treating the animal mind as a distinct entity. As a peculiar parallel to Griffin’s metaphor of “animal mind”, Sebeok develops his understanding of “semiotic self” as a layered structure, characterised by an ability to make distinctions, foremost between itself and the surrounding environment. It appears that the history of zoosemiotics has two layers: in addition to the chronological history starting in 1963, when Sebeok proposed a name for the field, zoosemiotics is also philosophically rooted in Peircean semiotics and German biological philosophy. It is argued that the confrontation between zoosemiotics and cognitive ethology is related to different epistemological approaches and at least partly induced by underlying philosophical traditions. (shrink)

Theses on the semiotic study of life as presented here provide a collectively formulated set of statements on what biology needs to be focused on in order to describe life as a process based on semiosis, or sign action. An aim of the biosemiotic approach is to explain how life evolves through all varieties of forms of communication and signification (including cellular adaptive behavior, animal communication, and human intellect) and to provide tools for grounding sign theories. We introduce the concept (...) of semiotic threshold zone and analyze the concepts of semiosis, function, umwelt, and the like as the basic concepts for theoretical biology. (shrink)

This article compares the methodologies of two types of sciences (according to J. Locke) — semiotics, and physics — and attempts thereby to characterise the semiotic and non-semiotic approaches to the description of ecosystems. The principal difference between the physical and semiotic sciences is that there exists just a single physical reality that is studied by physics via repetitiveness, whereas there are many semiotic realities that are studied as unique individuals. Seventeen complementary definitions of the semiosphere are listed, among them, (...) semiosphere defined as the space of qualitative (incommensurable) diversity. It is stated that, paradoxically, diversity, being a creation of communication, can also be destroyed due to excessive communication. (shrink)

This paper examines the biosemiotic approach to the study of life processes by fashioning a series of questions that any worthwhile semiotic study of life should ask. These questions can be understood simultaneously as: (1) questions that distinguish a semiotic biology from a non-semiotic (i.e., reductionist–physicalist) one; (2) questions that any student in biosemiotics should ask when doing a case study; and (3) still currently unanswered questions of biosemiotics. In addition, some examples of previously undertaken biosemiotic case studies are examined (...) so as to suggest a broad picture of how such a biosemiotic approach to biology might be done. (shrink)

A sign is something that refers to something else. Signs, whether of natural or cultural origin, act by provoking a receptive system, human or nonhuman, to form an interpretant (a movement or a brain activity) that somehow relates the system to this "something else." Semiotics sees meaning as connected to the formation of interpretants. In a biosemiotic understanding living systems are basically engaged in semiotic interactions, that is, interpretative processes, and organic evolution exhibits an inherent tendency toward an increase in (...) semiotic freedom. Mammals generally are equipped with more semiotic freedom than are their reptilian ancestor species, and fishes are more semiotically sophisticated than are invertebrates. The evolutionary trend toward the production of life forms with an increasing interpretative capacity or semiotic freedom implies that the production of meaning has become an essential survival parameter in later stages of evolution. (shrink)

This paper advances the analysis of the concept of Umwelt in Jakob von Uexküll’s work, by examining its different formulations, and highlighting the successive redefinitions of its two components: the perception world and the effect world. Considering the significant impact that the concept of Umwelt had on continental philosophy, the purpose of this study is to reconstruct its meaning through a historical-conceptual analysis, to illuminate some aspects that are not usually thematized in literature—in particular, those related to the effect world.

This paper argues that the Extended Synthesis, ecological information, and biosemiotics are complementary approaches whose engagement will help us explain the organism-environment interaction at the cognitive level. The Extended Synthesis, through niche construction theory, can explain the organism-environment interaction at an evolutionary level because niche construction is a process guided by information. We believe that the best account that defines information at this level is the one offered by biosemiotics and, within all kinds of biosemiotic information available, we believe that (...) ecological information is the best candidate for making sense of the organism-environment relation at the cognitive level. This entanglement of biosemiotics, ecological information and the Extended Synthesis is promising for understanding the multidimensional character of the organism-environment reciprocity as well as the relation between evolution, cognition, and meaning. (shrink)

This paper analyses Bohr’s complementarity framework and applies it to biosemiotic studies by illustrating its application to three existing models of living systems: mechanistic biology, Barbieri’s version of biosemiotics in terms of his code biology and Markoš’s phenomenological version of hermeneutic biosemiotics. The contribution summarizes both Bohr’s philosophy of science crowned by his idea of complementarity and his conception of the phenomenon of the living. Bohr’s approach to the biological questions evolved – among other things – from the consequences of (...) an epistemological lesson of quantum theory and in light of complementarity of observer as a priori living creature and ex post scientific explanation of the living. In a manifestation of the phenomenon of the living, each model of living system and its description makes accessible – from its own presuppositions, contexts and concepts – some features which are not accessible from the others. Nevertheless, for a general understanding of that phenomenon, incompatible sophisticated approaches are equally necessary. Bohr’s epistemology of complementarity turns out to be a heuristic and methodical framework for testing the extent to which biosemiotics can become one of the special sciences or its potential as a cross-disciplinary branch of study. (shrink)

We apply molecular code theory to a rule-based model of the human inner kinetochore and study how complex formation in general can give rise to molecular codes. We analyze 105 reaction networks generated from the rule-based inner kinetochore model in two variants: with and without dissociation of complexes. Interestingly, we found codes only when some but not all complexes are allowed to dissociate. We show that this is due to the fact that in the kinetochore model proteins can only bind (...) at kinetochores by attaching to already attached proteins and cannot form complexes in free solution. Using a generalized linear mixed model we study which centromere protein can take which role in a molecular code . By this, associations between CENPs and code roles are found. We observed that CenpA is a major risk factor while CenpQ is a major protection factor . Finally we show, using an abstract model of copolymer formation, that molecular codes can also be realized solely by the formation of stable complexes, which do not dissociate. For example, with particular dimers as context a molecular code mapping from two different monomers to two particular trimers can be realized just by non-selective complex formation. We conclude that the formation of protein complexes can be utilized by the cell to implement molecular codes. Living cells thus facilitate a subsystem allowing for an enormous flexibility in the realization of mappings, which can be used for specific regulatory processes, e.g. via the context of a mapping. (shrink)

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)

Forty-five years ago, while still an undergraduate student at Western Washington University’s Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, Terrence Deacon produced as his honours thesis a programmatic manifesto for re-situating the semiotic logic of Charles Sanders Peirce “out of the realm of philosophy and [revealing instead] its necessary association with the information sciences and its close parallels with current systems theories”. Deacon’s project, then and now, has been to show how, within the context of naturally occurring physical processes, Peirce’s essential insight (...) regarding a “mode of being which consists in the fact that future facts of secondness will take on a determinate general character” can be, and is continuously, manifested in living systems. Considering this explication to be the “hard problem of biosemiotics”, I therefore read the current target article as a progress report, and an extremely encouraging one, of Deacon’s ongoing efforts to develop a “proof of principle” model for the naturalistic origin and biologically instantiated logic of this ‘causalis in futuro’ mediation process unique to living systems. (shrink)

The theoretical biology of Jakob von Uexküll has had significant conceptual and practical afterlives, in Continental philosophy, biosemiotics and elsewhere. This paper will examine the utilisation of Uexküll in twentieth-century zoo biology and its significance for relating to wildlife in hybrid environments. There is an important though rarely analysed line of inheritance from von Uexküll to Heini Hediger, the Swiss zoo director and animal psychologist. Hediger’s fundamental theoretical position began from the construction of the world from the animal’s point of (...) view, as determined by factors including species specific phylogeny, individual and group biography, and anthropogenic circumstance. He operationalised Uexküll’s approach to animal worlds in order to optimise the design of zoo enclosures, considered as both physical and psychological habitats, in which captive wildlife could flourish. This subjectivist and phenomenological perspective has often been sidelined in zoo biology by more objectivist and mechanising approaches. Nonetheless, Hediger’s work and thought, through its inheritance from Uexküll, has important implications for twenty-first century relations with wildlife. (shrink)

Since 2007, Tomás Saraceno has been developing a project that aims to break out of the anthropocentric understanding of communication and coexistence with other animal organisms. In this article, I point out the importance of using modern visualization technologies to analyze and investigate the structure of communication frameworks and their modalities in the animal world, specifically using the example of spiders. The visualization of what is normally invisible to the eye and inaudible to the ear rearticulates the realm of the (...) visible and the audible, which Saraceno then uses for art-critical purposes, with the aim of forming a new type of posthuman attunement to the environment and other animal species. The condition for outlining and articulating Saraceno’s artistic vision is the use of the latest technologies of visualization, which operate on the principle of digital and algorithmic code. They synthesize different planes of affectivity and transform, modulate, and combine the different modes of signs into a single technical-organic complex: they offer new ways of seeing and feeling the world. Thus, hybrid ecology in Saraceno’s case does not imply a return to primordial ways of life, but on the contrary, it forms a semiosphere attuned to a specific plane of consistency that enfolds distinct modes of signs and develops them into an expression of hitherto unsuspected variants of life. (shrink)

The basic premise of biosemiotics as a discipline is that there are elementary processes linking signifying strategies in all forms of animate life. Correspondingly, the discoveries of biosemiotics should, in principle, be capable of revealing new insights about human signification. In the present article, I show that this is in fact the case by constructing a biosemiotic model that links advertising strategies with corresponding structures in animal predation. The methodological framework for this model is the catastrophe theory of René Thom. (...) The end result is a revised understanding of an ostensibly cultural phenomenon that demonstrates its continuity with signalling processes conventionally associated with the natural world. (shrink)

Our hypothesis is that ecological transformation involves socio-environmental communities formed through joint action on a material environment, which can be set as a conjonction of practices between senses and meanings — giving birth to landscapes, life environments and matter of all kinds — analyzed in the context of solidarities — as well as conflicts of territoriality, in which human collectives associate with living matter and the environment to fight against other uses of space or to implement new ways of seeing (...) nature. The environment as a collective work then becomes a self-sustaining call to action, which enhances the skills and legitimacy of the actors (citizens, formal and informal collectives) and their role in socio-ecological transition. We thus witness emerging environmental citizenships of a new kind that deviate from political militancy and testify to civic engagement in ordinary practices, a collective environmentalism that contributes to public action and democracy. What we call ordinary environmentalism includes environmental alliances and socio-environmental communities (with cats and cockroaches, mushrooms and noise interpretation, narrating, creating music, etc.) that have hitherto been considered negligible and we emphasize their value in democratizing the co-production of everyday and ordinary environments. One way to do this is to admit – as many scholars in the field of biosemiotics have done – that nature is made up of « signs, interpretations and meanings » (Wheeler 2014: 375) and to increase our knowledge of an aesthetic experience related to nature. We will deploy these issues on a theoretical level through the conceptual expression of environmental forms and the concept of immunity. Based on an interdisciplinary research, the related fieldwork includes a hundred non-directive interviews and observations conducted in several French cities (Paris, Rennes, Lyon), in specific neighborhoods such as the public housing district of Blosne in Rennes and the Croix-Rousse district in Lyon, or with specific associations to reflect the role of public institutions in the socio-natural arrangements of groups of inhabitants in the cities of France. (shrink)

Marcello Barbieri has presented code biology as an alternative to the Peircean approach to biosemiotics. Some critics questioned the viability of code biology on grounds that Barbieri’s conception of science is limited. It has been argued that code biology’s mechanistic tendency is the cause of the allegedly limited conception of science. In this paper, I evaluate the scientific viability of the code model from the perspective of scientific realism in the philosophy of science. To be more precise, I draw on (...) resources of the mechanistic view in philosophy to argue that far from harbouring a limited conception of science, code biology could indeed improve the scientific prospects of biosemiotics. I show that the mechanistic and model-based tendency of the code model enhances its vigour as a full-blooded scientific approach to the study of meaning in living systems. To consolidate my claim, I draw on some recent debates in the mechanistic philosophy to argue that even relational approaches to understanding the meaning in living systems—such as an approach that is defended by Vega in a recent paper—could be underpinned by mechanistic processes at a foundational level. (shrink)

This article deals with the question of how self-organization in living organisms is realized. Self-organization may be observed in open systems that are out of equilibrium. Many disequilibria-conversion phenomena exist where free energy conversion occurs by spontaneously formed engines. However, how is self-organization realized in living entities? Living cells turn out to be self-organizing disequilibria-converting systems of a special kind. Disequilibrium conversion is realized in a typical way, through employing information specifying protein complexes acting as nano engines. The genetic code (...) enables processing of information—derived from coding DNA—to produce these molecular machines. Hence, information is at the core of living systems. Two promising approaches to explaining living cells containing sequences carrying information are mentioned. Also discussed is the question of whether a second concept of self-organization—namely, the Kantian concept—applies. (shrink)

In this article two questions are discussed with regard to semiosis in protein biosynthesis for nano engines. (1) What kind of semiosis is involved in the construction of these proteins? and (2) How can we explain the semiotic process observed? With regard to the first issue we draw attention to comparisons between semiosis in protein biosynthesis and human natural language. The notion of normativity appears to be of great importance for both. A comparison also demonstrates differences. Nevertheless, because of the (...) normative symbolic information processing in it, we suggest to employ the term symbolic reference (employed in linguistics as a distinguishing feature of human language) to indicate the semiotic processes in protein biosynthesis. With regard to explaining semiosis in protein synthesis we compare different approaches. We conclude that a Kantian approach should be preferred. In such an approach strengths of the mechanistic and organicist approaches can be combined, and the observed symbolic information processing acknowledged. (shrink)

The existence of different types of semiosis has been recognized, so far, in two ways. It has been pointed out that different semiotic features exist in different taxa and this has led to the distinction between zoosemiosis, phytosemiosis, mycosemiosis, bacterial semiosis and the like. Another type of diversity is due to the existence of different types of signs and has led to the distinction between iconic, indexical and symbolic semiosis. In all these cases, however, semiosis has been defined by the (...) Peirce model, i.e., by the idea that the basic structure is a triad of ‘sign, object and interpretant’, and that interpretation is an essential component of semiosis. This model is undoubtedly applicable to animals, since it was precisely the discovery that animals are capable of interpretation that allowed Thomas Sebeok to conclude that they are also capable of semiosis. Unfortunately, however, it is not clear how far the Peirce model can be extended beyond the animal kingdom, and we already know that we cannot apply it to the cell. The rules of the genetic code have been virtually the same in all living systems and in all environments ever since the origin of life, which clearly shows that they do not depend on interpretation. Luckily, it has been pointed out that semiosis is not necessarily based on interpretation and can be defined exclusively in terms of coding. According to the ‘code model’, a semiotic system is made of signs, meanings and coding rules, all produced by the same codemaker, and in this form it is immediately applicable to the cell. The code model, furthermore, allows us to recognize the existence of many organic codes in living systems, and to divide them into two main types that here are referred to as manufacturing semiosis and signalling semiosis. The genetic code and the splicing codes, for example, take part in processes that actually manufacture biological objects, whereas signal transduction codes and compartment codes organize existing objects into functioning supramolecular structures. The organic codes of single cells appeared in the first three billion years of the history of life and were involved either in manufacturing semiosis or in signalling semiosis. With the origin of animals, however, a third type of semiosis came into being, a type that can be referred to as interpretive semiosis because it became closely involved with interpretation. We realize in this way that the contribution of semiosis to life was far greater than that predicted by the Peirce model, where semiosis is always a means of interpreting the world. Life is essentially about three things: (1) it is about manufacturing objects, (2) it is about organizing objects into functioning systems, and (3) it is about interpreting the world. The idea that these are all semiotic processes, tells us that life depends on semiosis much more deeply and extensively than we thought. We realize in this way that there are three distinct types of semiosis in Nature, and that they gave very different contributions to the origin and the evolution of life. (shrink)

Thomas Sebeok and Noam Chomsky are the acknowledged founding fathers of two research fields which are known respectively as Biosemiotics and Biolinguistics and which have been developed in parallel during the past 50 years. Both fields claim that language has biological roots and must be studied as a natural phenomenon, thus bringing to an end the old divide between nature and culture. In addition to this common goal, there are many other important similarities between them. Their definitions of language, for (...) example, have much in common, despite the use of different terminologies. They both regard language as a faculty, or a modelling system, that appeared rapidly in the history of life and probably evolved as an exaptation from previous animal systems. Both accept that the fundamental characteristic of language is recursion, the ability to generate an unlimited number of structures from a finite set of elements (the property of ‘discrete infinity’). Both accept that human beings are born with a predisposition to acquire language in a few years and without apparent efforts (the innate component of language). In addition to similarities, however, there are also substantial differences between the two fields, and it is an historical fact that Sebeok and Chomsky made no attempt at resolving them. Biosemiotics and Biolinguistics have become two separate disciplines, and yet in the case of language they are studying the same phenomenon, so it should be possible to bring them together. Here it is shown that this is indeed the case. A convergence of the two fields does require a few basic readjustments in each of them, but leads to a unified framework that keeps the best of both disciplines and is in agreement with the experimental evidence. What is particularly important is that such a framework suggests immediately a new approach to the origin of language. More precisely, it suggests that the brain wiring processes that take place in all phases of human ontogenesis (embryonic, foetal, infant and child development) are based on organic codes, and it is the step-by-step appearance of these brain-wiring codes, in a condition that is referred to as cerebra bifida, that holds the key to the origin of language. (shrink)

The discovery of the genetic code has shown that the origin of life has also been the origin of semiosis, and the discovery of many other organic codes has indicated that organic semiosis has been the sole form of semiosis present on Earth in the first three thousand million years of evolution. With the origin of animals and the evolution of the brain, however, a new type of semiosis came into existence, a semiosis that is based on interpretation and is (...) commonly referred to as interpretive, or Peircean semiosis. This suggests that there are two distinct types of semiosis in Nature, one based on coding and one based on interpretation, and all the experimental evidence that we have does support this conclusion. Both in principle and in practice, therefore, there is no conflict between organic semiosis and Peircean semiosis, and yet they have been the object of a fierce controversy because it has been claimed that semiosis is always based on interpretation, even at the cellular level. Such a claim has recently been reproposed in a number of papers and it has become necessary therefore to reexamine it in the light of the proposed arguments. (shrink)

Biosemiotics is the synthesis of biology and semiotics, and its main purpose is to show that semiosis is a fundamental component of life, i.e., that signs and meaning exist in all living systems. This idea started circulating in the 1960s and was proposed independently from enquires taking place at both ends of the Scala Naturae. At the molecular end it was expressed by Howard Pattee’s analysis of the genetic code, whereas at the human end it took the form of Thomas (...) Sebeok’s investigation into the biological roots of culture. Other proposals appeared in the years that followed and gave origin to different theoretical frameworks, or different schools, of biosemiotics. They are: (1) the physical biosemiotics of Howard Pattee and its extension in Darwinian biosemiotics by Howard Pattee and by Terrence Deacon, (2) the zoosemiotics proposed by Thomas Sebeok and its extension in sign biosemiotics developed by Thomas Sebeok and by Jesper Hoffmeyer, (3) the code biosemiotics of Marcello Barbieri and (4) the hermeneutic biosemiotics of Anton Markoš. The differences that exist between the schools are a consequence of their different models of semiosis, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. In reality they go much deeper and concern the very nature of the new discipline. Is biosemiotics only a new way of looking at the known facts of biology or does it predict new facts? Does biosemiotics consist of testable hypotheses? Does it add anything to the history of life and to our understanding of evolution? These are the major issues of the young discipline, and the purpose of the present paper is to illustrate them by describing the origin and the historical development of its main schools. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to describe some parallels and theoretical affinities between biosemiotics and biolinguistics. In particular, this paper examines the importance of Uexküll's Umwelt and Peircean abduction as foundational concepts for Sebeok's biosemiotics and Chomsky's biolinguistic program. Other affinities touched upon in this paper include references to concepts articulated by Immanuel Kant, Konrad Lorenz, Marcel Florkin, François Jacob, C.H. Waddington, D'Arcy Thomson and Ernst Haeckel. While both programs share theoretical influences and historiographical parallels in their mid-century origins (...) continuing throughout the late twentieth century, recent articulations of biosemiotics and biolinguistics privilege different intellectual styles and methods of inquiry that define their future objectives as intellectual movements. The goal of this paper is to show that, in spite of the different scholarly agendas of biosemiotics and biolinguistics, both movements share a theoretical and philosophical core in Peirce and Uexküll. (shrink)

This paper provides an overview of the origins, vicissitudes, and abandonment of ‘metapsychology’, the psycho-biological scientific core of the Freudian opus, and introduces the authors’ key revisions. Although couched in the language of metaphor and analogy from 19th century physics, the conceptual foundations of Freud’s theories contained the seeds of a bio-semiotic theory of mind and of human nature in the natural world. Its updated, modernized, version opens the door to an inter-penetrative epistemology leading to universal principles of logical form, (...) applicable to all types of vital inter-action. (shrink)

This article develops a biosemiotic ´hyper-narrative model´ for the purposes of investigating emergent motor behaviors. It proposes to understand such behaviors in terms of the following associations: the organization of information acquired from the environment, focusing on narrative; the organizational dynamics of epigenetic mechanisms that underly the neural processes facilitating the processing of information; and the evolution of emergent motor behaviors that enable the informational acquisition. The article describes and explains these associations as part of a multi-ordered and multi-causal generative (...) principle of biological phenotype emergence that supersedes the theory of the arbitrary coding of life. Preceeding from narrative’s operations in a biological dimension, the article presents scientific research dealing with the associations of action-oriented organization of narrative information and underlying psychological and physiological dynamics and depicts the relations with a distributed multi-directional mapping dynamic. The article presents the explanatory implications of such a hyper-narrative dynamic model on an example of emergent motor behaviors – bruxism. Central to this discussion is the exploration of the possible mechanisms of emergence and etiopathogenesis of bruxism, based on its neurobiology. The article takes the perspective that complex systems dynamics themselves with a tendency to narrative form are found not to be underlain merely by arbitrary coded mechanisms but, rather, biological neural networks that render context-dependent bio-informational mapping analogous to that of the narrative possible. (shrink)

This book is a synthesis of more than three decades of research into the concept of time and its semiotic nature. If traditional philosophy – and philosophy of time should be no exception – in the shadow of advancing biology can be said to have reached an impasse, one important reason for this, in harmony with Wittgenstein’s vision, appears to have been its lack of appropriate tools for explicating language. The present theory of time proceeds, accordingly, from the exploration of (...) temporal expressions in language as an evolutionary fact. It derives in a hypothetical, coherent feedback process of hierarchically ordered distinctions the semantics of time from its biologically dictated perceptual and cognitive-pragmatic origins. The corresponding abductive-regulative model is anchored in the assumption of biological rhythmization as the very foundation of perception and mental/physical action. Understood to originate in space and spatial perspective, time reveals itself as an instrument for temporal perspective on motion (events and situations) in a process of analysis, i.e., discontinuation of chaos made divisible and continuous by the rhythmical screen. Whereas traditional philosophy of time paid attention almost exclusively to the temporal category of tense, the biopragmatic model sees strong evidence in the perspectival nature of time for ascribing the decisive, and probably universal, role in temporal analysis to the linguistic category of aspect. Aspect may, according to the present findings, be assumed to partake already of change-of-state and cause-effect analysis without which man’s adaptation to new situations – and precondition for survival – would be inconceivable. The proposed model of space/time cognition, inspired by Hegelian dialectics, Heidegger-Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle and Peircean logic, makes Kantian a priori superfluous and liberates time from its enigmatic appearance. For the first time in temporal studies it thus appears possible to derive hypothetically linguistic expressions of time all the way from pretemporal, homogeneous continuity effected by biological rhythmization, via pretemporal metonymic (Gestalt), chunk-wise partitioning – as a general precondition for the perception and, based on primary metaphorization, the cognition of things, space and motion – to temporal analysis/discontinuation proper, primarily by aspectual perspective, and the subsequent synthesized, heterogeneous continuity of temporally ordered events. The conception of time, so disastrous for modern temporal logic, i.e., as moving object assigned extension, divisible continuity (‛linearity’) and direction, can be shown to have emerged as a result of secondary metaphorization. (shrink)

Context: Society is faced with “wicked” problems of environmental sustainability, which are inherently multiperspectival, and there is a need for explicitly constructivist and perspectivist theories to address them. Problem: However, different constructivist theories construe the environment in different ways. The aim of this paper is to clarify the conceptions of environment in constructivist approaches, and thereby to assist the sciences of complex systems and complex environmental problems. Method: We describe the terms used for “the environment” in von Uexküll, Maturana & (...) Varela, and Luhmann, and analyse how their conceptions of environment are connected to differences of perspective and observation. Results: We show the need to distinguish between inside and outside perspectives on the environment, and identify two very different and complementary logics of observation, the logic of distinction and the logic of representation, in the three constructivist theories. Implications: Luhmann’s theory of social systems can be a helpful perspective on the wicked environmental problems of society if we consider carefully the theory’s own blind spots: that it confines itself to systems of communication, and that it is based fully on the conception of observation as indication by means of distinction. (shrink)

Both biosemiotics and evolutionary epistemology are concerned with how knowledge evolves. (Applied) Evolutionary Epistemology thereby focuses on identifying the units, levels, and mechanisms or processes that underlie the evolutionary development of knowing and knowledge, while biosemiotics places emphasis on the study of how signs underlie the development of meaning. We compare the two schools of thought and analyze how in delineating their research program, biosemiotics runs into several problems that are overcome by evolutionary epistemologists. For one, by emphasizing signs, biosemiotics (...) needs to delineate a semiotic threshold, which is a problem not encountered by evolutionary epistemologists. Instead, the latter recognizes that all organisms are knowers that evolve knowledge, which they recognize to extend toward phenomena produced by organisms such as behavior, cognition, language, culture, science, and technology. Secondly, biosemiotics attempts at continuing adaptationist notions on how organisms relate to their environment, while especially Applied Evolutionary Epistemology comes to redefine the nature of the organism–environment relationship in such a way that it recognizes the spatiotemporal boundedness of existence, which in turn makes adaptationist accounts obsolete. (shrink)

Context: The problems that are most in need of interdisciplinary collaboration are “wicked problems,” such as food crises, climate change mitigation, and sustainable development, with many relevant aspects, disagreement on what the problem is, and contradicting solutions. Such complex problems both require and challenge interdisciplinarity. Problem: The conventional methods of interdisciplinary research fall short in the case of wicked problems because they remain first-order science. Our aim is to present workable methods and research designs for doing second-order science in domains (...) where there are many different scientific knowledges on any complex problem. Method: We synthesize and elaborate a framework for second-order science in interdisciplinary research based on a number of earlier publications, experiences from large interdisciplinary research projects, and a perspectivist theory of science. Results: The second-order polyocular framework for interdisciplinary research is characterized by five principles. Second-order science of interdisciplinary research must: 1. draw on the observations of first-order perspectives, 2. address a shared dynamical object, 3. establish a shared problem, 4. rely on first-order perspectives to see themselves as perspectives, and 5. be based on other rules than first-order research. Implications: The perspectivist insights of second-order science provide a new way of understanding interdisciplinary research that leads to new polyocular methods and research designs. It also points to more reflexive ways of dealing with scientific expertise in democratic processes. The main challenge is that this is a paradigmatic shift, which demands that the involved disciplines, at least to some degree, subscribe to a perspectivist view. Constructivist content: Our perspectivist approach to science is based on the second-order cybernetics and systems theories of von Foerster, Maruyama, Maturana & Varela, and Luhmann, coupled with embodied theories of cognition and semiotics as a general theory of meaning from von Uexküll and Peirce. (shrink)