We now have a paradoxical situation where the place and status of stories is in decline within the humanities, while scientists are increasingly recognizing their importance. Here the attitude towards narratives of these scientists is defended. It is argued that stories play a primordial role in human self-creation, underpinning more abstract discourses such as mathematics, logic and science. To uphold the consistency of this claim, this thesis is defended by telling a story of the evolution of European culture from Ancient (...) Greece to the present, including an account of the rise of the notion of culture and its relation to the development of history, thereby showing how stories function to justify beliefs, situate people as agents within history and orient them to create the future. (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)

Traditional human-centred epistemologies have failed to adequately address the question, ‘How are cognition and knowledge possible?’ Naturalistic epistemologies, however, and in particular, evolutionary, biosemiotic, and autopoeitic approaches, have recognized that humans are not the only knowers, perceivers, cognizers and rememberers in nature, and thus ask instead, ‘How does nature make cognition and knowledge possible?’ thereby reconceiving epistemology as study of the cognition and experience of living, embodied, interacting and inter-signifying natural beings. Nonetheless, their insights into how nature makes knowledge possible, (...) while instructive, typically are incomplete – in most cases because key aspects of the peculiar physical/causal dynamics of cognitive processes and their causal/functional roles in the lives of organisms, are insufficiently considered. This paper seeks to redress this situation, to provide a clearer understanding of how nature makes knowledge possible. The argument draws upon insights of the approaches mentioned, and upon studies of biological hierarchy, natural emergence, complex causal dynamics and hierarchically structured causal processes, to show that nature’s “inventions” of non-linear causation and cybernetic process-modulation led to the emergence of novel systems whose sensitivity to ultra-low-energy signals radically enhances their viability by producing a non-linear hierarchically ordered cascade of adaptive activity peculiarly associated with the signal type. This is biosemiosis. It is argued that the unique causal character of biosemiotic processes is not only their physical “signature”, but is essential to subsequently emergent cognitive processes and achievements and their functions, and indeed to the biological functions of the organic processes that make life possible. This is a further reason for holding biosemiosis to be, ontologically, a natural kind. Indeed, an understanding of the distinctive causal/functional character of biosemiosis is the key to understanding how nature makes possible not only knowledge but also, by those semiotic means, life itself. (shrink)

Modern Process Philosophy began when Alfred North Whitehead realized that existence is primarily vibratory, not points but processes. Vibrations are best understood as sound waves, or through using auditory metaphors rather than visual ones. Our Universe is more like music than matter, but how does this help us better understand it? In this paper I use the example of the large ocean current oscillators that help drive our climate systems to reveal the more effective nature of auditory approaches. Through an (...) auditory approach, we can better understand the ways these oscillations constrain and interact with other levels of oscillations as well as how they might be destroyed by other levels. This can then lead to us extending our ethics to the conservation of these oscillations. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.