Claus Emmeche

• B.A., M.Sc., Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at University of Copenhagen

This study looks at assessment of PhD theses from two perspectives: criteria in use in assessment reports at a science faculty and norms of science. Fifty assessment reports were analysed inductively, resulting in thirteen categories that examiners consider when assessing a thesis. These categories were compared with norms of science as described i...

Research in general, and research on friendship in particular, uses metaphors and analogies, and research itself can be seen in analogy with map making. This chapter takes us on a meandering walk along mono- and multidisciplinary inquiries into friendship as seen from many perspectives, like that of history and philosophy of science (that has analo...

In philosophy of science, the literature on abduction and the literature on styles of thinking have existed almost totally in parallel. Here, for the first time, we bring them together and explore their mutual relevance. What is the consequence of the existence of several styles of scientific thinking for abduction? Can abduction, as a general crea...

Review of Multiculturalism as Multimodal Communication: A Semiotic Perspective [Series Numanities – Arts and Humanities in Progress 9; Dario Martinelli, series ed.] by Alin Olteanu. Cham: Springer, 2019, xviii+140 pp.

This obituary about Jesper Hoffmeyer, thinker, scholar, science communicator, biochemist, biosemiotician, and saxophonist, gives a sketch of his intellectual biography, and provides a bibliography of the books he authored or edited.

Bohr filosoferede. For vildt, ville nogen synes. Som det fremgår af Peter Øhrstrøms artikel i Slagmark 5 prøvede Bohr at anvende sine indsigter fra fysikken og sit komplementaritetsprincip på områder, hvor det ikke umiddelbart hørte hjemme, på fænomener som bevidsthed og liv i biologisk forstand.

Claus Emmeche: “Do You Tell Me? Knowledge about Friendship in Literature and Scholarship” Friendship as an interpersonal relation is discussed through the perspective of history of knowledge as a historically contingent relation that can be modelled in fiction, literature, and different academic disciplines, like for instance philosophy, anthropolo...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between information and abductive reasoning in the context of problem-solving, focusing on non-human animals. Two questions guide our investigation: (1) What is the relation between information and abductive reasoning in the context of human and non-human animals? (2) Do non-human animals per...

The norms and values of Post-Normal Science (PNS) are instrumental in guiding science advice practices. In this article, we report work in progress to systematically investigate the norms and values of PNS through a structured review. An archive of 397 documents was collected, including documents that contribute to the endeavour of ameliorating sci...

IntroductionAs the long subtitle indicates, the book under review is concerned with the widespread challenges to universities in terms of increased political pressures to be governed according to a narrow set of measures of output efficiency and job creation effects, at the expense of their core purpose as institutions of higher education and resea...

The individual and social formation of a human self, from its emergence in early childhood through adolescence to adult life, has been described within philosophy, psychology and sociology as a product of developmental and social processes mediating a linguistic and social world. Semiotic scaffolding is a multi-level phenomenon. Focusing upon level...

Friendship is used here as a conceptual vehicle for framing questions about the distinctiveness of human cognition in relation to natural systems such as other animal species and to artificial systems such as robots. By exploring this very common form of a human interpersonal relationship, the author indicates that even though it is difficult to sa...

The heterogenic character of biological systems has as a consequence that calculations of their possible combinatorial constellations very soon run into numerical explosions. This means, that the resulting numbers—so-called immense numbers—exhibit orders of magnitude beyond any physical meaning. Such a high number of possibilities cause another pro...

Terms loaded with informational connotations are often employed to refer to genes and their dynamics. Indeed, genes are usually perceived by biologists as basically 'the carriers of hereditary information.' Nevertheless, a number of researchers consider such talk as inadequate and just metaphorical,' thus expressing a skepticism about the use of th...

This book presents programmatic texts on biosemiotics, written collectively by world leading scholars in the field (Deacon, Emmeche, Favareau, Hoffmeyer, Kull, Markoš, Pattee, Stjernfelt). In addition, the book includes chapters which focus closely on semiotic case studies (Bruni, Kotov, Maran, Neuman, Turovski). According to the central thesis of...

This paper comments upon some of the open problems in ar- tificial life (cf. Bedeau et al 2000) from the perspective of a philosophy of biology tradition called qualitative organi- cism, and more specifically the emerging field of biosemio- tics, the study of life processes as sign processes. Semiotics, in the sense of the pragmaticist philosopher...

This chapter introduces the very idea of a semiotic biology. Here, one needs to know what semiosis, the action of sign, is, and why semiotics, the study of signs processes, provides a strong conceptual toolbox to approach a more complete theoretical biology. Sebeok's thesis that living systems are constituted as sign systems is a key point of depar...

On June 11–14, 2007, the International Association for Semiotic Studies convened its Ninth World Congress, at the University of Helsinki. The theme of the conference was “Communication: Understand- ing and Misunderstanding”. In keeping with the conference theme, a roundtable panel discussion entitled “Understanding and Misunderstanding the Interdis...

Biosemiotics is a growing field that investigates semiotic processes in the living realm, addressing meaning, signification, communication, and habit formation in living systems, and the physicochemical conditions for sign action and interpretation. Scientific fields such as molecular biology, cognitive ethology, cognitive science, robotics, and ne...

The informational nature of biological organization, at levels from the genetic and epigenetic to the cognitive and linguistic. Information shapes biological organization in fundamental ways and at every organizational level. Because organisms use information—including DNA codes, gene expression, and chemical signaling—to construct, maintain, repai...

At the Ninth World Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in 2007, molecular biologist Jesper Hoffmeyer recalls the impetus leading to the founding of “biosemiotics” as a research agenda in Denmark by himself and Claus Emmeche in 1985 thusly:

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 signaction. An aim of the biosemiotic approach is to explain how life evolves through all varieties of forms of communication and signification...

This chapter briefly introduces biosemiotics, a new perspective on living systems based upon standard contemporary biology reinterpreted through a qualitative organicist tradition in biology inspired by Jakob von Uexkiill and Charles S. Peirce. To be emphasized is the difference between a living organism as a general semiotic system with vegetative...

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...

The Peircean semiotic approach to information that we developed in previous papers raises several new questions, and shows both similarities and differences with regard to other accounts of information. We do not intend to present here any exhaustive discussion about the relationships between our account and other approaches to information. Rather,...

It is argued in this paper that robots are just quasi-autonomous beings, which must be understood, within an emergent systems view, as intrinsically linked to and presupposing human beings as societal creatures within a technologically mediated world. Biosemiotics is introduced as a perspective on living systems that is based upon contemporary biol...

The evolutionary emergence of biological processes in organisms with inner, qualitative aspects has not been explained in any sufficient way by neurobiology, nor by the traditional neo-Darwinian paradigm — natural selection would appear to work just as well on insentient zombies (with the right behavioral input-output relations) as on real sentient...

A central aspect of the relation between biosemiotics and biology is investigated by asking: Is a biological concept of function intrinsically related to a biosemiotic concept of sign action, and vice versa? A biological notion of function (as some process or part that serves some purpose in the context of maintenance and repro- duction of the whol...

It is argued that the notion of Umwelt is relevant for contemporary discussions within theoretical biology, biosemiotics, the study of Artificial Life, Autonomous Systems Research and philosophy of biology. Focus is put on the question of whether an artificial creature can have a phenomenal world in the sense of the Umwelt notion of Jakob von Uexkl...

This article, shaped by the authorÕs interest in convergences between art and science, presents scientists and philosophers of science who explore that convergence. However, since their expertise lies in science, they each speak from a principally scientific point of view. In fact, a common ground that emerges among them is an overt interest in poi...

In this paper, we investigate some theoretical grounds for bridging the gap between an organism-centered biology and the chemical basis of biological explanation, as expressed in the prevailing molecular perspective in biological research. First, we present a brief survey of the role of the organism concept in biological thought. We advance the cla...

In this note some epistemological problems in general theories about living systems are considered; in particular, the question of hidden connections between different areas of experience, such as folk biology and scientific biology, and hidden connections between central concepts of theoretical biology, such as function, semiosis, closure and life...

S. Sarkar a critique l'utilisation du concept d'information en biologie moleculaire en soulignant que l'usage de termes inappropries peut conduire a des associations erronees, et a suggere d'abandonner les notions d'information et de code pour designer les interactions entre les cellules. Dans cet article, l'A. examine la portee de cette critique p...

The paper investigates a semiotic conception of life. As a notion or general idea of life it is seen as a member of a set of definitions bordering science proper and philosophy of nature, here called ontodefinitions. The received view of definitions in science (according to which definitions of life are virtually non-existent or meaningless to purs...

Emergence is a universal phenomenon that can be defined mathematically in a very general way. This is useful for the study of scientifically legitimate explanations of complex systems, here defined as hyperstructures. A requirement is that the observation mechanisms are considered within the general framework. Two notions of emergence are defined,...

The vitalism/reductionism debate in the life sciences shows that the idea of emergence as something principally unexplainable will often be falsified by the development of science. Nevertheless, the concept of emergence keeps reappearing in various sciences, and cannot easily be dispensed with in an evolutionary world-view. We argue that what is ne...

It is argued, that theory sf signs, especially in the tradition of the great philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) can inspire the study of central problems in the philosophy of biology. Three such problems are considered: (1) The nature of biology as a science, where a semiotically informed pluralistic approach to the theory of science is...

One version of the Artificial Life research programme presumes, that one can separate the logical form of an organism from its material basis of construction, and that its capacity to live and reproduce is a property of the form, not the matter. This seems to contradict the notion of a cell within contemporary molecular biology, according to which...

I det første nunmer af Niche påpegedes der en stigende interesse for videnskabsteori blandt biologer: "miljøkrisen" eller "økokrisen" slår igennem i biologien som "en krlse, som både er erkendelsesmaessig og samfundsmaessig". Et middel til at forstå, og dermed evt. at overvinde krisen, er at studere, hvordan de enkelte biologiske fagområder er voks...

Terms loaded with informational connotations are often employed to refer to genes and their dynamics. Indeed, genes are usually perceived by biolo-gists as basically 'the carriers of hereditary information.' Nevertheless, a number of researchers consider such talk as inadequate and 'just metaphor-ical,' thus expressing a skepticism about the use of...

Traducción de: The garden in the machine: the emerging science of artificial life Título en la cubierta: Vida simulada en el ordenador: la nueva ciencia de la inteligencia artificial