Exactly how do the sign/symbol/token systems of endo- and exo-biosemiosis differ from those of cognitive semiosis? Do the biological messages that integrate metabolism have conceptual meaning? Semantic information has two subsets: Descriptive and Prescriptive. Prescriptive information instructs or directly produces nontrivial function. In cognitive semiosis, prescriptive information requires anticipation and “choice with intent” at bona fide decision nodes. Prescriptive information either tells us what choices to make, or it is a recordation of wise choices already made. Symbol systems allow recordation (...) of deliberate choices and the transmission of linear digital prescriptive information. Formal symbol selection can be instantiated into physicality using physical symbol vehicles (tokens). Material symbol systems (MSS) formally assign representational meaning to physical objects. Even verbal semiosis instantiates meaning into physical sound waves using an MSS. Formal function can also be incorporated into physicality through the use of dynamically-inert (dynamically-incoherent or -decoupled) configurable switch-settings in conceptual circuits. This paper examines the degree to which biosemiosis conforms to the essential formal criteria of prescriptive semiosis and cybernetic management. (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)

It is a well-known fact that Ernst Cassirer was inspired by his colleague, the biologist Jakob von Uexkiill at the university of Hamburg. This paper claims this inspiration was double—affecting both Cassirer's philosophical anthropology and Cassirer's epistemology of biology, but in two rather different ways. Thus, the paper intends to shed light on a corner of the history of the development of German thought of the interwar period. It may also have an actual interest because both Cassirer and Uexkiill enjoy, (...) for the time being and each in their way, a renaissance, e.g. in the recent field of biosemiotics. (shrink)

This paper explains how recent changes in the ways we study other animals to better understand the human faculty of language are indicative of changing narratives concerning the intelligence of other animals. Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt as a species-specific model of the world is essential to understanding the semiotic abilities of all organisms, including humans. From this follows the view that human language is primarily a cognitive tool for making models of the world. This view is consistent with the basic (...) premises of cognitive linguistics. The rejection of behaviorism in linguistics represents a turning point in the history of animal studies. The resulting criticism of long-term studies with primates illustrates this shift concerning the study of wild animals within the language sciences and beyond. New insights in dog cognition and research on the processing of human language in canines are reflective of a change in focus away from anthropocentrism towards the species-specific semiotic abilities of animals in the twenty-first century. This new orientation away from comparing animal sign-systems to human language and the importance of studying intelligent wild animals in the wild instead of in captivity have lead to an important re-evaluation of our relationship with other animals and our views of their cognitive and semiotic profiles. This leads to questions such as what role non-human organisms can play in the language sciences, and what our limitations are of studying the sign systems of other animals. Recent research on the signifying abilities of wild dolphins, for instance, has identified a new set of characteristics by which to study intelligence in other species. (shrink)

In recent years a growing number of scholars in science studies and related fields are developing new ontologies to displace entrenched dualisms. These efforts often go together with a renewed interest in the roles played by symbolisms and tools in knowledge and being. This article brings Maurice Merleau-Ponty into these conversations, positioning him as a precursor of today’s innovative recastings of technoscience. While Merleau-Ponty is often invoked in relation to his early work on the body and embodiment, this article focuses (...) on his later work, where the investigation of perception is integrated with an ontological exploration. The resulting approach revolves around the highly original idea of the body as a standard of measurement. We further develop this idea by coining the term ‘the measuring body’, which to a greater extent than did Merleau-Ponty accentuates the relative autonomy of symbolisms and tools and their capacity to decentre the perceiving body. (shrink)

Natural mimicry is ubiquitous. Plants mimic animals, animals mimic plants, animals mimic each other and animals may even mimic counterfactual states that deceive or distract other animals. Almost all natural mimicry is based on iconicity which hence anchors it in real world resemblances. The vast majority of natural mimicry is done unconsciously but when humans mimic, they know what they are doing. As Merlin Donald suggest, mimicry may in fact have played a crucial role in the emergence of the human (...) condition, allowing new forms of cognition to emerge. Here it is suggested that the role played by mimicry may have involved the evolution of a capacity for metaphorical perception, where an object may not only be seen ‘as is’ but also ‘as if’ it was a functional mimic of something else. This new form of mimicry made possible new forms of communication, co-operation and creative engagement with the environment. Once these developed to the point where they produced symbolic systems and other cultural tools, the nature of human mimicry expanded radically. No longer anchored in resemblance, it became detached and qualitatively distinct from natural forms. The consequences of this detachment are now becoming clear. (shrink)

Like other sciences, biosemiotics also has its time-honoured archive, consisting of writings by those who have been invented and revered as ancestors of the discipline. One such example is Jakob von Uexküll. As to the people who ‘invented’ him, they are either, to paraphrase a French cliché, ‘agents du cosmopolitisme sémiotique’ like Thomas Sebeok, or de jure and de facto progenitor like Thure von Uexküll. In the archive is the special issue of Semiotica 42. 1 (1982) edited by the late (...) Sebeok and introduced by Thure von Uexküll. It is in the opening essay that Thure von UexküIl tries to restore Jakob von Uexküll’s role as a precursor of semiotics by negotiating the Elder with Saussure and the linguistics-oriented ‘semiology’ in his wake. However, semiotic mapping, in the strictly ‘disciplinary’ sense, of Jakob von Uexküll is no easy task because he ‘knew neither Peirce nor Saussure and did not use their terminology’ (Thure von Uexküll 1982,2). Because Thure prefers to call the Elder’s science ‘general semiotics’ (Thure von Uexküll 1982), this paper begins by assessing Thure von Uexküll’s semiotic configuration of Jakob, probe into the force and limits of the linguistic analogy, revisit the already time-honoured debate on the primary and secondary modelling systems, which was made famous by the Moscow-Tartu semioticians in the early 1970s, but severely criticized by Sebeok and his followers. The paper engages Sebeok from several fronts, directed first at his relegation of the Saussurian linguistic model, then at his critique of the Primary Modelling System, and finally at his reservation about evolutionism in light of the current debate on gene/meme co-evolution. (shrink)