Donald Favareau

• National University of Singapore

Within the discipline of semiotics, written text remains the primary mode of communication and analysis, despite the fact that, as all good semioticians know, signs occur in all modalities – which is why we think of artists and musicians, no less than novelists and poets, as applied semioticians par excellence. In 1997, Paul Cobley and Litza Jansz...

Having been intimately aligned with the research agenda of biosemiotics since his colleague Thomas Sebeok first started using the term in 1992, Paul Cobley has consistently argued against the idea that the primary aim of biosemiotics is to make an intervention in the discourse and epistemology of the life sciences. Instead, he argues for the potent...

“In actual existence,” notes John Deely “every substance and every accident is maintained by realities of circumstance and being other than itself” (2001: 228). Accordingly, all things - including and, perhaps most especially, organisms - arise and are maintained within a dense web of inextricably interwoven relationships. Thus the question for mod...

We comment here on a target article by Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg, which adds an interesting and important contribution to semiotic biology by their discussion of cognition and learning. In agreement with the aims and outlook of the authors, we offer a few observations about how the seminal biosemiotic concept of umwelt may be a critical tool...

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 asso...

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.

In 2014, Morten Tønnessen and the editors of Biosemiotics officially launched the Biosemiotic Glossary Project in the effort to: (1) solidify and detail established terminology being used in the field of Biosemiotics for the benefit of newcomers and outsiders; and to (2) by involving the entire biosemiotics community, to contribute innovatively in...

This essay – a collection of contributions from 10 scholars working in the field of biosemiotics and the humanities – considers nature in culture. It frames this by asking the question ‘Why does biosemiotics need the humanities?’. Each author writes from the background of their own disciplinary perspective in order to throw light upon their interdi...

At a time when strictly materialist reductionist explanations of life and its evolution have become increasingly incompatible with what biologists are now conceding is the complex, adaptive and non-linear nature of organization and interaction in the natural world, the conceptual work now taking place under the aegis of the ‘biosemiotic perspective...

As the accompanying articles in the Special Issue on Semiotic Scaffolding will attest, my colleagues in biosemiotics have done an exemplary job in showing us how to think about the critically generative role that semiotic scaffolding plays “vertically” – i.e., in evolutionary and developmental terms – by “allowing access to the upper floors” (Hoffm...

Biosemiotics is the study of meaning-making in biological systems. It argues that all organisms are biologically semiosic systems. This provides for linguistics a firm basis to ground the problem of the origin of meaning and to build upon the findings of this field.

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...

The present chapter is intended to provide an introductory overview to the history of biosemiotics, contextualizing that history within and against the larger currents of philosophical and scientific thinking from which it has emerged. Accordingly, to explain the origins of this most 21st century endeavour requires effectively tracing – at least to...

“Almost every German university hospital has a chair of psychosomatic medicine,” noted the obituary for pioneering clinical biosemiotician Thure von Uexküll upon the occasion of his death at age 96 in 2004. “German medical students are obliged to attend courses in medical psychology, sociology, and psychosomatic medicine, and more than 7,000 beds i...

Reviews - Peirce's Theory of Signs. By ShortT. L.. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 374, £48 - Volume 84 Issue 2 - Donald F. Favareau

I define a symbol in terms of its structure and function. First, a symbol can only exist in the context of a living organism or its artifacts. Life originated with symbolic memory, and symbols originated with life. I find it gratuitous to use the concept of symbol, even metaphorically, in physical systems where no function exists. Symbols do not ex...

For very many biosemioticians, and certainly for Thomas A. Sebeok – who would lay the foundations for what would become the contemporary project of biosemiotics in the 1970s – the lifelong investigation into “the logic of signs” undertaken by scientist and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce serves as a model for those wishing to begin the investiga...

Because of the broad nature of its purview – i.e., the examination into the role of sign-processes discoverable to be operative in and between living systems – biosemiotics is a interdisciplinary reservoir of research findings and ideas that is fed by many streams. Yet the trajectory of its historical development has been such that it has barely in...

By the time that Thomas A. Sebeok ventured into the Soviet-held city of Tartu, Estonia to meet with the émigré Russian semiotician Juri Lotman in 1970, a rich half-century’s worth of semiotic scholarship had been steadily accruing behind the Iron Curtain’ under conditions that would have been barely imaginable to Lotman’s academic counterparts in t...

Giorgio Prodi was a distinguished oncologist, poet, novelist and philosopher whose lifetime interest in understanding the connection between biology and epistemology Thomas A. Sebeok would repeatedly invoke as constituting, along with the work of Jakob von Uexküll and Heini Hediger, one of the three main precursor “iterations” of biosemiotics as a...

Appropriate as it was to conclude the last section with a forward-looking article by Sebeok and his collaborators it is fitting to begin this one with a backwards-glancing article by biosemiotician Kalevi Kull. Founder of the world’s first Ph.D. granting program in Biosemiotics, Kull bridges both biosemiotics’ Sebeokian past and its post-Sebeokian...

In an attempt to codify the tenets of logical positivism in a manifesto of the Vienna Circle, mathematician Hans Hahn (1879–1934), political economist Otto Neurath (1882–1945) and philosopher Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) proclaimed “We have characterised the scientific world-conception essentially by two features:

The recognition of systems of relata at the integrative molecular level indicates that biomolecular order is governed by systems of signification which we may consider in a structuralist (intensive)perspective, besides the thermodynamic viewpoint and the quantifying (extensive)viewpoint of information theory M. Florkin (1979: 13)

A prolific science writer and journalist, as well as a working university professor and molecular biologist, Jesper Hoffmeyer was born in Copenghagen, Denmark on Februrary 21, 1942. “Born during the second world war in occupied Denmark and to a family with strong anticlerical and moderate leftist persuasions,” recounts Hoffmeyer, “I was destined to...

Because the figure of Thomas A. Sebeok looms so large throughout this volume, cited far more here than any other thinker (except, perhaps, Charles Darwin), and because the story of his founding of the contemporary interdiscipline of biosemiotics is recounted in some detail in the introductory overview of biosemiotics that is Chapter one of this vol...

At the time of his attendance at the first annual Gatherings in Biosemiotics conference in 2001, experimental cellular physiologist and philosopher of science Anton Markoš had just completed a groundbreaking treatise entitled Readers of the Book of Life – a book that called for the development of a “biohermeneutic” understanding of sign processes i...

In 1866, the recently formed Societe Linguistique de Paris passed an official resolution banning the presentation of any further papers regarding the origins of human language. The nature of the inquiry itself, it was decided, lacked even the possibility of scientific certainty – and all work pertaining to it was likewise dismissed on the grounds o...

Musing upon the structural foundations of his biosemiotic worldview, biosemiotics founder Thomas A. Sebeok once remarked, more seriously than not, “I consider myself a Thomist – a René Thomist, that is” (1991: 157). Given that Sebeok – a self-described biologist manqué, a professional linguist, and a committed interdisciplinarian in many ways, but...

Swiss zoologist Heini K. P. Hediger (1908–1992), is the second historical figure named in Thomas A. Sebeok’s review of the “three successive 20th century iterations of biosemiotics” prior to the one that Sebeok himself initiated. “One of the sundry riddles that mar the gradual coming into view of modern biosemiotics,” writes Sebeok, “is the neglect...

Since the early 1970s, Italian embryologist and theoretical biologist Marcello Barbieri has been developing a biosemiotic framework for biology based on his analysis of the cell’s internal organic codes. Developing his theory of semantic biology in complete independence from the Sebeokian biosemioticians, but now widely recognized as a key figure i...

The elementary cybernetic system with its messages in circuit is, in fact, the simplest unit of mind; and the transform of a difference travelling in a circuit is the elementary idea. …The way to delineate the system is to draw the limiting line in such a way that you do not cut any of these pathways in ways which leave things inexplicable. G. Bate...

Semiotican Myrdene Anderson recalls that biosemiotics founder Thomas A. Sebeok would often identify certain prescient thinkers whose work was deeply involved in, and productive for, semiotic analysis without the thinker being aware of it as such (such as Jakob von Uexküll), as cryptosemioticans – while protosemioticians was the name that he would a...

As is well evidenced in the history of biosemiotics that opens this volume, the work of Estonian naturalist and experimental biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll occupies a singularly prominent position in the contemporary attempt to develop a biological science of signs. “When we talk about [Uexküll’s bio-analytical concept of] Umwelt,” writes histo...

Although neither a biologist nor a biologist manqué, visual artist and design analyst Martin Krampen is the author of one of the most seminal “turning-point” texts in biosemiotics. Phytosemiotics – the selection that is presented here – is invoked in almost every published overview or introduction to the field (e.g., Barbieri 2001, Deely 1990, Fava...

Synthesizing the findings from a wide range of disciplines – from biology and anthropology to philosophy and linguistics – the emerging field of Biosemiotics explores the highly complex phenomenon of sign processing in living systems. Seeking to advance a naturalistic understanding of the evolution and development of sign-dependent life processes,...

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...

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 over...

Devoted to an explication of how interacting agents mutually and micro-temporally provide for each other the grounds for immediate next action in the seemingly transparent give-and-take of ordinary conversation, empirical findings from the disciplines of Interaction Analysis suggest that “language” as it is actually realized in naturally occurring,...

Recent debates surrounding the teaching of biology divide participants into three camps based on how they explain the appearance of the human race: evolution, creationism, or intelligent design. Biosemiotics discovers an intriguing higher ground respecting those opposing theories by arguing that questions of meaning and experiential life can be int...

The study of linguistics is at an interesting juncture. The Chomskian claims about the Language Acquisition Device and Universal Grammar are essentially neurobiological claims and evolutionary biological claims. However, until recently our evolutionary and neurobiological knowledge was insufficient to directly address these areas. Now with what we...

While, as I continue to insist, all human beings — indeed, all living entities on our planet — modulate their environment by means of signs, only a handful grow up to be professional semioticians (and a good thing too). Thomas A. Sebeok (1920–2001) 2 In the late-life summation of his work in which the above quote appears, semiotician extraordinaire...

The explosive growth over the last two decades of neuroscience, cognitive science, and "consciousness studies" as generally conceived, remains as yet unaccompanied by a corresponding development in the es-tablishment of an explicitly semiotic understanding of how the relations of sign exchange at the neuronal level function in the larger network of...

Convergent evidence from research into the neurobiology of vision reveals that the visual image is not something received whole from the environment and then presented to the mind. Rather, the evolution of the eye itself rests upon the evolution of a cell that over eons of interaction has been tuned to re- spond selectively to a range of photon con...

Semiotics has itself thrived in a generative atmosphere of specialization and synthesis. Now, in an expanding intellectual universe, we converge with several other strains of scholarship. In this brief paper, we not only acknowledge this convergence and complementarity, but actively welcome the emerging rapprochement, which we interpret as represen...