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)

This is the second article in a series of review articles addressing biosemiotic terminology. The biosemiotic glossary project is designed to integrate views of members within the biosemiotic community based on a standard survey and related publications. The methodology section describes the format of the survey conducted July–August 2014 in preparation of the current review and targeted on Jakob von Uexküll’s term ‘Umwelt’. Next, we summarize denotation, synonyms and antonyms, with special emphasis on the denotation of this term in current (...) biosemiotic usage. The survey findings include ratings of eight citations defining or making use of the term Umwelt. We provide a summary of respondents’ own definitions and suggested term usage. Further sections address etymology, relevant contexts of use, and related terms in English and other languages. A section on the notion’s Uexküllian meaning and later biosemiotic meaning is followed by attempt at synthesis and conclusion. We conclude that the Umwelt is a centerpiece phenomenon, a phenomenon that other phenomena in the living realm are organized around. To sum up Uexküll’s view, we can characterize an Umwelt as the subjective world of an organism, enveloping a perceptual world and an effector world, which is always part of the organism itself and a key component of nature, which is held together by functional cycles connecting different Umwelten. In order to pay respect to Uexküll’s work, we must move from notion to model, from mention of Uexküll’s Umwelt term to actual application of it. (shrink)

Philosophical biologists have attempted to define the distinction between life and non-life to more adequately define what it is to be human. They are reacting against idealism, but idealism is their point of departure, and they have embraced the reaction by idealists against the mechanistic notion of humans developed by the scientific materialists. Theoretical biologists also have attempted to develop a more adequate conception of life, but their point of departure has been within science itself. In their case, it has (...) involved efforts to overcome the reductionism of scientific materialism to develop a form of science able to identify and explain the distinctive characteristics of living beings. So, while both philosophical biologists and theoretical biologists are struggling to overcome scientific materialism, they are approaching the question: What is Life? from different directions. Focussing on the work of Robert Rosen, I will try to show what revisions in our understanding of science theoretical biologists need to accept in order to do justice to the insights of the philosophical biologists. I will suggest that not only will this involve major revisions in what we understand science to be, but that scientists must accept that science is indissociable from natural philosophy, and that to properly comprehend life mathematics must ultimately be subordinated to stories. (shrink)

This article is interdisciplinary in its claims. Evolving around the ecological concept of affordance, it brings together pragmatics and ecological psychology. Starting from the theoretical writings of Peirce, Dewey and James, the biosemiotic claims of von Uexküll, Gibson’s ecological approach to perception and some empirical evidence from recent neurobiological research, it elaborates on the concepts of experiential and enactive cognition as applied to music. In order to provide an operational description of this approach, it introduces some conceptual tools from the (...) domain of cybernetics with a major focus on the concept of circularity, which links perception to action in a continuous process of sense-making and interaction with the environment. As such, it is closely related to some pragmatic, biosemiotic and ecosemiotic claims which can be subsumed under the general notion of functional significance. An attempt is made to apply this conceptual framework to the process of musical sense-making which involves the realisation of systemic cognition in the context of epistemic interactions that are grounded in our biology and possibilities for adaptive control. Central in this approach is the concept of coping with the environment, or, in musical terms, to perceive the sounding music in terms of what it affords for the consummation of musical behaviour. (shrink)

Although this study inspects context in general, it is even intended as a prerequisite for a meta-study of contextual time&space in zoo-communication. Moving the scope from linguistics to culture, communication, and semiotics may reveal new similarities between context-perceptions. Paradigmatic historical moves and critical context theories are inspected, asking whether there is aleast-common-multiplefor perceptions of context. The short answer is that context is relational – a bi-product of attention from a position, creating a focused object, and hence an obscured (back-)ground – (...) the attention’s context. A more comprehensive one is that when the focused phenomenon is culture, semiotics, or communication, context becomes embodied. This recognition triggers new questions: What is the relation between embodied, immanent context and this perception’s external, physical context (its surroundings)? If utterances are regarded as constituted by the triad form-content-actandthe dyadic chronotope time&space, what and where is then context? Which challenges will empirical (zoo-)communicational research face if context is split in internal and external versions of context? These questions raise some epistemological and methodological issues. These are discussed based on a framework that regards communication as a micro-macro interplay between utterance and genre. Genres are kinds of communication. More specifically animal genres related to their basic life-functions are calledlife-genres. A conclusion is that life-genres function as both mental and situational contexts. This complicates empirical research on communication in general, and zoo-communication in particular. The paper concludes that contexts’ relational and embodied nature and the ‘situational’ characteristics of life-genres challenge researchers to validate continuously, shifting between contextualising, decontextualising, and recontextualising. (shrink)

Principles of constructivism are used here to explore how organisms develop tools, subagents, scaffolds, signs, and adaptations. Here I discuss reasons why organisms have composite nature and include diverse subagents that interact in partially cooperating and partially conflicting ways. Such modularity is necessary for efficient and robust functionality, including mutual construction and adaptability at various time scales. Subagents interact via material and semiotic relations, some of which force or prescribe actions of partners. Other interactions, which I call “guiding”, do not (...) have immediate effects and do not disrupt the evolution and learning capacity of partner agents. However, they modify the extent of learning and evolutionary possibilities of partners via establishment of scaffolds and constraints. As a result, subagents construct reciprocal scaffolding for each other to rebalance their communal evolution and learning. As an example, I discuss guiding interactions between the body and mind of animals, where the pain system adjusts mind-based learning to the physical and physiological constraints of the body. Reciprocal effects of mind and behaviors on the development and evolution of the body includes the effects of Lamarck and Baldwin. (shrink)

In contrast to the traditional relational semiotics, biosemiotics decisively deviates towards dynamical aspects of signs at the evolutionary and developmental time scales. The analysis of sign dynamics requires constructivism to explain how new components such as subagents, sensors, effectors, and interpretation networks are produced by developing and evolving organisms. Semiotic networks that include signs, tools, and subagents are multilevel, and this feature supports the plasticity, robustness, and evolvability of organisms. The origin of life is described here as the emergence of (...) simple self-constructing semiotic networks that progressively increased the diversity of their components and relations. Primitive organisms have no capacity to classify and track objects; thus, we need to admit the existence of proto-signs that directly regulate activities of agents without being associated with objects. However, object recognition and handling became possible in eukaryotic species with the development of extensive rewritable epigenetic memory as well as sensorial and effector capacities. Semiotic networks are based on sequential and recursive construction, where each step produces components that are needed for the following steps of construction. Construction is not limited to repair and reproduction of what already exists or is unambiguously encoded, it also includes production of new components and behaviors via learning and evolution. A special case is the emergence of new levels of organization known as metasystem transition. Multilevel semiotic networks reshape the phenotype of organisms by combining a mosaic of features developed via learning and evolution of cooperating and/or conflicting subagents. (shrink)

The emerging epistemic community of ecosemioticians and the multidisciplinary field of inquiry known as ecosemiotics offer a radical and relevant approach to so-called global environmental crisis. There are no environmental fixes within the dominant code, since that code overdetermines the future, thereby perpetuating ecologically untenable cultural forms. The possibility of a sustainability transition (the attempt to overcome destitution and avoid ecocatastrophe) becomes real when mediated by and through ecosemiotics. In short, reflexive awareness of humankind's linguisticality is a necessary condition for (...) transforming ecologically maladaptive cultural forms. As a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary research program integrating the human and natural sciences, ecosemiotic inquiry closes the gap between biophysical ecology and human ecology. A provisional outline of a pragmatic theory of ecoserniotics attempts to describe the processes by which adaptive cultural changes might be facilitated and points toward substantive content areas that constitute sites for further research. Ecosemiotic inquiry frames cultural codes as these shape and reproduce the ongoing stream of individual and societal choices that shape distinctively human existence in a larger context of biophysical realities that drive natural selection. However, while ecosemiotics is a necessary condition for the sustainability transition, it is not a sufficient condition. (shrink)

The existence of embodied communication in humans places them among other living systems and helps to differentiate sign patterns that are common to all bioforms from those that are peculiarly human. Despite the fact that the biological roots of communication have been proven, the understanding of human forms of discourse is still far from being clarified. The main question remains: when and why did humans acquire the ability to exchange messages via speech? My thesis is that it became possible only (...) after humans made a shift from on-line to off-line interaction and learned to communicate in the interpersonal mode via externalized analog codes that constitute the various forms of human culture. (shrink)

Recent developments in cognitive science provide compelling leads that need to be interpreted and synthesized within the context of semiotic and biosemiotic principles. To this end, we examine the impact of the mind-body unity on the sorts of choices that an organism is predisposed to making from its Umwelt. In multicellular organisms with brains, the relationship that an organism has with its Umwelt impacts on neural plasticity, the functional specialisations that develop within the brain, and its behaviour. Clinical observations, such (...) as those recorded by Norman Doidge, as well as historical observations from outside the field of semiotics (Plato, Aristotle, Hume) shed further light on this process, and serve to further substantiate our semiotic and biosemiotic paradigm. Our analysis develops a rather limited associationism (with reference to Peirce’s categories) into a more general and robust interpretation that is applicable to all mind-bodies, whether they be neurons, paramecia and amoebae, or humans, cats and dogs. Biosemiotics is a more universal semiotics that takes us beyond the confines of anthropocentrism, because it recognizes the role of the body in shaping Mind. (shrink)

Space and time, which should properly be taken conjointly, are both communicatively produced and created with certain contextual perspectives—they are not independent physical entities. The standpoint of production makes the relationship between space and time comprehensible. They can either be mental-subjective, physical-objective, or social-intersubjective. Social and intersubjective (or E-series) spacetime might shed new light on biological thinking. For general readers, this paper provides a clue regarding an alternative conceptualization of spacetime based on biology.

We develop a semiotic scheme of time, in which time precipitates from the repeated succession of punctuating the progressive tense by the perfect tense. The underlying principle is communication among local participants. Time can thus be seen as a meaning-making, semiotic system in which different time codes are delineated, each having its own grammar and timekeeping. The four time codes discussed are the following: the subjective time having tense, the objective time without tense, the static time without timekeeping, and the (...) inter-subjective time of the E-series. Living organisms adopt a time code called the E-series, which emerges through the local synchronization among organisms or parts of organisms. The inter-subjective time is a new theoretical dimension resulting from the time-aligning activities of interacting agents. Such synchronization in natural settings consists of incessant mutual corrections and adjustments to one’s own punctuation, which is then constantly updated. Unlike the third-person observer keeping the objective time while sitting outside a clock, the second-person negotiators participate in forming the E-series time by punctuating and updating the interface through which different tenses meet at the moment of “now.” Although physics allows physicists to be the only interpreters, the semiotic perspective upends the physical perspective by letting local participants be involved in the interpretation of their mutual negotiations to precipitate that which is called time. (shrink)

RESUMO No segundo capítulo de "Word and Object", Quine procura mostrar o quanto da linguagem pode ser esclarecida em termos estimulantes, bem como a limitação da tradução a partir de diferentes esquemas conceituais. O autor apresenta a tese de indeterminação da tradução por meio de uma situação de tradução radical. O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar de que modo Quine desenvolve a tradução radical e destacar os conceitos de informações colaterais, significado estimulativo e esquema conceitual. Em seguida, procuraremos mostrar que (...) a teoria do significado de Jakob Von Uexküll é um caso exemplar da tese de indeterminação da tradução: os processos de significação entre diferentes organismos vivos correspondem a um processo de tradução radical que se depara com dificuldades semelhantes àquelas que levam à indeterminação da tradução segundo Quine. ABSTRACT In the second chapter of "Word and Object", Quine seeks to show how much of language can be elucidated in stimulatory terms as well as the limitation of translating from different conceptual schemas. He introduces the thesis of indeterminacy of translation by means of a radical translation situation. This paper aims to present the way in which Quine develops the radical translation and to point out the concepts of collateral information, stimulus meaning and conceptual schema. Following that, we will seek to show that Jakob von Uexküll's theory of meaning is an exemplary case of the thesis of indeterminacy of translation: the processes of meaning by different living organisms correspond to a radical translation process that faces the difficulties similar to those that lead to the indeterminacy of the translation, according to Quine. (shrink)