Kalevi Kull

• Prof. in Biosemiotics at University of Tartu

A mechanism of evolution that ensures adaptive changes without the obligatory role of natural selection is described. According to this mechanism, the first event is a plastic adaptive change (change of phenotype), followed by stochastic genetic change which makes the transformation irreversible. This mechanism is similar to the organic selection m...

Literary scholar, cultural theorist and semiotician Juri Lotman (1922–1993) established the Tartu (and Tartu-Moscow) school of semiotics in the 1960s. Besides his pioneering work in semiotics of culture, he also developed a theory of general semiotics. We attempt to extract some principles from Juri Lotman’s formulations that characterise the core...

Fundamental turns in biological understanding can be interpreted as replacements of deep models that organise the biological knowledge. Three deep models distinguished here are a holistic ladder model that sees all levels of nature being complete (from Aristotle to the 18th century), a modernist tree model that emphasises progress and evolution (fr...

This article characterizes briefly the central aims of the semiotic study of animal life. Semiotic sciences in general can be defined as approaches to the study of various forms of knowing (as different from physical sciences, which study various things in the world), considering that knowing is possible only due to semiosis. The semiosphere is the...

We present the results of a survey conducted among professional semioticians from around the world, who were asked to answer two questions: (A) what problems should semiotics solve in the near future? and (B) what are the most important publications on semiotics since 2000? The collection of 63 responses received provides a self-description of cont...

This chapter provides (1) a brief account of Peirce’s own statements on biological issues; (2) a short account of the usage of Peirce’s ideas in semiotic biology, (a) before 1990 and (b) after 1990; and (3) a brief review of points that have appeared in biosemiotic literature as critical on applications of some of Peirce’s concepts in biosemiotics....

The topics discussed in the interview cover the development and activities of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research as one of the most important theoretical biology centers in the world, the reasons for its inspiring atmosphere, as well as the development of the interests and research work of its longtime president Gerd B...

A unique exploration of teleonomy—also known as “evolved purposiveness”—as a major influence in evolution by a broad range of specialists in biology and the philosophy of science. The evolved purposiveness of living systems, termed “teleonomy” by chronobiologist Colin Pittendrigh, has been both a major outcome and causal factor in the history of li...

Naszym celem w niniejszym badaniu jest wykazanie wzajemnych relacji między klasami znaków, mechanizmami uczenia się i rodzajami umweltów. Jest to konieczne, aby opisać i zrozumieć zwierzęce sposoby tworzenia znaczeń w kontekście różnych form semiozy. Twierdzimy, że semioza występuje tylko w teraźniejszości, w subiektywnym Teraz. Prezentujemy powiąz...

This essay attempts to combine some recent theoretical results in (bio)semiotics on arbitrariness, semiotic fitting, umwelt, choice, and extended theory of evolution into a more coherent whole. The proposed model describes a living being through its subjectivity and the ability to create meaning, which are often overlooked in models based on replic...

How to develop semiotics: Paul Cobley

Approaches to Biosemiotics is the first issue in the Biosocial World collection, and contains a series of articles on what biosemiotics does, how it does it and what its long-term objectives may be. As a more specialized discipline in the boundaries of linguistics, the biosociology, the philosophy of biology and the sciences, we hope to offer a poi...

We briefly review the impact of Paul Cobley (born 1963) on biosemiotics and list his works on the topic. These have links to communication studies and integrationism. After Thomas Sebeok, John Deely, and several others, Cobley has been a leader of the general semiotics movement, according to which “semiotics’ project is most fully realized on a bio...

Bloomsbury Semiotics offers a state-of-the-art overview of the entire field of semiotics by revealing its influence on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. With four volumes spanning theory, method and practice across the disciplines, this definitive reference work emphasizes and strengthens common bonds shared across intellectual cultures, a...

Bloomsbury Semiotics offers a state-of-the-art overview of the entire field of semiotics by revealing its influence on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. With four volumes spanning theory, method and practice across the disciplines, this definitive reference work emphasizes and strengthens common bonds shared across intellectual cultures, a...

Doctoral dissertations in semiotics have been defended at the University of Tartu since 1999; since the year 2000, these theses have been published as the series Dissertationes Semioticae Universitatis Tartuensis. The present paper provides an up-to-date bibliography of the dissertations.

The article gives a brief overview of the publication of the journal Sign Systems Studies. Throughout its publication period that started in 1964 the journal has been edited by a group of Tartu semioticians; the publisher has been the University of Tartu Press. While the first 25 volumes mainly contained articles in Russian, the next 25 volumes hav...

Editors’ preface: Lotmaniana and semiotic publications from Tartu

We publish a worldwide list of 33 recent semiotics book series, and describe the volumes published in the Tartu Semiotics Library series that was established in 1998.

Translation of the article "On semiosis, umwelt, and semiosphere"

The following is a brief synopsis of the 2021 summer Semiosalong event titled "Funktionskreis and the biosemiotic signifieds", held at the Karl Ernst von Baer House, Tartu, Estonia, with presentations by the authors of this review. The included talks revolve around the idea of a 'second major turn in biosemiotics' following the more 'Peircean inspi...

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...

Neo-Darwinian biology has demonstrated that it is possible to construct a theory of life that excludes the role of organisms’ free choice. In a richer theory, the latter as a possibility needs to be taken into account. For that purpose, it is necessary to introduce the biological concept of choice, analyse its structure and roles, and consider some...

Tracing the emergence of biosemiotics, attention can be drawn to the very early usage of the term ‘biosemiotics’ (Biosemiotik) in the writings of Austrian chemist Vincenz Kletzinsky (1826–1882) that dates back to the 1850s. In the same decade, Kletzinsky also proved to be among the first to use the terms ‘biochemistry’ and ‘biophysics’.

We propose a model which argues that aesthetics is based on biosemiotic processes and introduces the non-anthropomorphic aesthetics. In parallel with habit-taking, which is responsible for generating semiotic regularities, there is another process, the semiotic fitting, which is responsible for generating aesthetic relations. Habit by itself is not...

The theory of organic evolution is incomplete until it can explain life's meaningmaking capacity and its role in the evolutionary processes, i.e. until semiosis is included. The extended synthesis theory of evolution has made a decisive step towards such an integrative theory, yet the explicit inclusion of semiotics of life is still to come. Here,...

In this paper, we reflect on the proposal to describe semiotic processes as universally organized by something that could be called the "border" or the "boundary", doing so from three perspectives: Juri Lotman's semiotics of culture, sociopolitical semiotics, and biosemiotics. We particularly focus on the work of De Luca Picione, Marsico, Tateo, an...

Jaan Kaplinski (1941–2021), Estonian poet, essayist and public intellectual, sadly passed away earlier this year. To commemorate him, we publish some excerpts from a conversation with him that was recorded in 2018 and in which, among other topics, we also talked about Kaplinski’s relationship with semiotics and his personal contacts with eminent sc...

The following interview, conducted with Franco Moretti in 2019 and 2020, begins by focusing on his experiences of working in various academic environments (Italy, USA, Switzerland), touching on the cultural differences in academic approaches more broadly. In the second part, we ask some questions concerning the quantitative approaches in humanities...

We briefly sketch some characteristics of Thomas A. Sebeok’s program to develop semiotics and relate them to the approaches in the Tartu circle. It is not a historical, but effectively a paradigmatic insight into research in contemporary Tartu semiotics, where we can see the inevitability of cooperation between the large branches of semiotics such...

After giving a brief review of different approaches related to biomimetics, we focus on the question of the general mechanisms of problem-solving and self-building in living systems. It is possible to develop a theory of biomimetics in connection with a semiotic approach to understand the workings of living systems. In this case we concentrate on t...

Demonstration of illusiveness of basic beliefs of the Modern Synthesis implies the existence of evolutionary mechanisms that do not require natural selection for the origin of adaptations. This requires adaptive changes that occur independently from replication, but can occasionally become heritable. Plastic self-organizational changes regulated by...

Juri Lotman (1922–1993), the Jewish-Russian-Estonian historian, literary scholar and semiotician, was one of the most original and important cultural theorists of the 20th century, as well as a co-founder of the well-known Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics. This is the first authoritative volume in any language to explore the main facets of Lotman’s...

Jakob von Uexküll’s (1864–1944) work was influential at the time of the biosemiotic turn in semiotics in the 1990s and, together with the hermeneutic and phenomenological approaches, laid the basis for a semiotic turn in biology without losing a connection to the morphology and physiology of organisms. His work appears to be attractive and promisin...

The concept of ‘semiotic fitting’ is what we provide as a model for the description and analysis of the diversity dynamics and nativeness in semiotic systems. One of its sources is the concept of ‘ecological fitting’ which was introduced by Daniel Janzen as the mechanism for the explanation of diversity in tropical ecosystems and which has been sho...

By Estonian theory we mean a local episteme-a territorialised web of epistemological associations and rules for making sense of the world that favours some premises while discouraging others. This article argues that from a territorial perspective a certain coherence and continuity can be identified in the Estonian cultural-theoretical tradition-a...

• One of the main problems of biosemiotics, i.e., the distinction between code-based artifacts and (meaning-making) life itself, does not seem to be resolved yet. Semiosis requires codes but it cannot be based on a single code. I sketch a model that demonstrates the role of codes in semiosis and helps to see correspondences between the models of Pe...

The interviews with one of the founders of the Moscow-Tartu school, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov (1929–2017) from August 2010 and from October 2012, describe V. V. Ivanov’s opinions on several scholars (Evgenij Polivanov, Mikhail Bakhtin, Andrej Kolmogorov, Nikolaj Marr etc.) and their work, on his relationships with his father Vsevolod Ivanov,...

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.

Here we publish an interview with Jesper Hoffmeyer, conducted in 2012–2014.

The main aim of this brief and purposely radical essay is to investigate further possibilities for empirical research in natural classification of semiosis (signs as wholes). Before introducing emon – a missing term in the taxonomy of signs – we make a distinction between the natural and artificial, and between the taxonomic and meronomic classific...

If all knowing comes from semiosis, more concepts should be added to the semiotic toolbox. However, semiotic concepts must be defined via other semiotic concepts. We observe an opportunity to advance the state-of-the-art in semiotics by defining concepts of cognitive processes and phenomena via semiotic terms. In particular, we focus on concepts of...

We examine the possibility of shifting the concept of choice to the centre of the semiotic theory of learning. Thus, we define sign process (meaning-making) through the concept of choice: semiosis is the process of making choices between simultaneously provided options. We define semiotic learning as leaving traces by choices, while these traces in...

The article provides a commentary on Umberto Eco's text "Giorgio Prodi and the lower threshold of semiotics". An annotated list of Prodi's English-language publications on semiotics is included.

The article provides a commentary on Umberto Eco's text "Animal language before Sebeok", and an annotated bibliography of various versions of the article on 'latratus canis' that Eco published together with Roberto Lambertini, Costantino Marmo, and Andrea Tabarroni.

In a series of interviews given in the early 1990s, Yuri Lotman contemplated the boundary between the human and the animal. Keenly interested in animals, the scholar stressed in his later work the need to include animal communication in the semiosphere. Lotman’s model holds that semiosis requires at least two languages between which instances of un...

The aim of this study is to demonstrate the mutual relationship between the classes of signs, mechanisms of learning, and types of umwelten. This framework is necessary in order to describe the animal ways of meaning-making in the context of various forms of semiosis. We state that semiosis only occurs in the internal present. An account of the lin...

The two interviews with Boris Uspenskij on history and the contemporary state of linguistics and semiotics discuss the necessity to elaborate a common terminology in semiotics, at the same time speaking about perspectives for interdisciplinary research, various research models, and the possibilities to produce proof in the humanities. Commenting up...

Umberto Eco and John Deely: What they shared

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...

The present article is framed within the biosemiotic glossary project as a way to address common terminology within biosemiotic research. The glossary integrates the view of the members of the biosemiotic community through a standard survey and a literature review. The concept of ‘semiotic threshold’ was first introduced by Umberto Eco, defining it...

Review of Consensus on Peirce’s Concept of Habit: Before and Beyond Consciousness . (Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics 31.) Donna E. West and Myrdene Anderson (eds.). Cham: Springer, 2016, 434 pp.

What kind of evolutionary biology suits cultural research?

Need for impressions: Zoosemiotics and zoosemiotics, by Aleksei Turovski

For decades, Translation Studies has been perceived not merely as a discipline but rather as an interdiscipline, a trans-disciplinary field operating across a number of boundaries. This has implied and still implies a considerable amount of interaction with other disciplines. There is often much more awareness of and attention to translation and Tr...

This essay speaks briefly about the main argument of John Deely’s book Four Ages of Understanding (2001), pointing to the importance of dialogue between the physical sciences and the semiotic sciences and the centrality of this discussion in the postmodern era as defined by Deely. A bibliography of the reviews of the book is also provided.

The red list has become a ubiquitous tool in the conservation of species. We analyzed contemporary trends in the threat levels of European orchids, in total 166 species characterized in 27 national red lists, in relation to their reproductive biology and growth form, distribution area, and land cover where they occur. We found that species in centr...

Alexandr Levich (1945–2016) and the Tartu–Moscow Biosemiotic Nexus.

Any biological species of biparental organisms necessarily includes, and is fundamentally dependent on, sign processes between individuals. In this case, the natural category of the species is based on family resemblances (in the Wittgensteinian sense), which is why a species is not a natural kind. We describe the mechanism that generates the famil...

This article argues that from a territorial perspective a certain coherence and continuity can be identified in the Estonian cultural-theoretical tradition – a discursive body based on common sources of influence and similar fundamental attitudes. We understand Estonian theory as a local episteme – a territorialized web of epistemological associati...

Animals are treated in philosophy dominantly as opposed to humans, without revealing their independent semiotic richness. This is a direct consequence of the common way of defining the uniqueness of humans. We analyze the concept of 'semiotic animal', proposed by John Deely as a definition of human specificity, according to which humans are semioti...

In order to estimate the current situation of teaching materials available in the field of semiotics, we are providing a comparative overview and a worldwide bibliography of introductions and textbooks on general semiotics published within last 50 years, i.e. since the beginning of institutionalization of semiotics. In this category, we have found...

Over the centuries mires have been considered to be mostly useless, even dangerous places. Adopting a landscape semiotic perspective the article delineates the current common perceptions of Estonian mires based upon 767 questionnaires. Today the mire is commonly perceived as undisturbed wilderness offering possibilities for various recreational as...

We develop here a semiotic model of evolution. We point out the role of confusion and choice as a condition for semiosis, which is a precondition for semiotic learning and semiotic adaptation. Semiosis itself as interpretation and decision-making between options requires phenomenal present. The body structure of the organism is largely a product of...

This chapter provides an introductory overview of biosemiotics the study of meaning-making mechanisms in the living world. Biosemiotics is a study of those types of sign processes that are not based on human language. We describe history of the field both before 1960 (focussing particularly on the work of Jakob von Uexkall), and after this date (in...

Since mostly human modes of action take on a symbolic aspect, and since there are many semiotic (meaning making) systems without any symbolic signs, the application of purely linguistic models in biology is mostly incongruent. However, there exist many common features between human language and other (non-human) sign systems, and even the developed...

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.

Without biosemiosis, there could be no human language. The volume presents international perspectives that have been inspired by this simple idea. The contributors open up new methods, directions and perspectives on both language in general and specific human languages. Many commonplace notions (language, dialect, syntax, sign, text, dialogue, disc...

An essay on 'Beyond Mechanism: Putting Life Back into Biology' (edited by Brian G. Henning and Adam C. Scarfe).

We analyze the concepts of semiotic catalysis (or semiocatalysis) and semiotic scaffolding (or semioscaffolding) in the framework of general semiotics. Semiotic catalysis (as different from chemical catalysis) concerns the qualitative aspects of catalysis. In this sense, signs are catalysts for sign processes or semiosis. Life is catalytically clos...

In this paper I formulate briefly the main principles of evolution of semiotic systems. The neo-Darwinian theory of evolution does not take into account the semiosic nature of the systems under study, therefore its applicability to languages and cultures (and also to biological species as communicative semiosic systems) should be rigorously questio...

In 1973, a collectively written manifesto titled Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures was penned under the leadership of Tartu scholar Juri Lotman together with his Moscow colleagues Vjacheslav Ivanov, Vladimir Toporov, Aleksandr Pjatigorskij, and Boris Uspenskij. The appearance of this work marked the birth of a new scholarly field of research...

Ecosemiotics studies the role of environmental perception and conceptual categorization in the design, construction, and transformation of environmental structures. This article provides a brief review of the history of ecosemiotics, and formulates eight core principles of the ecosemiotic approach. The ecosemiotic view understands humans as capable...

A bibliography of Juri Lotman’s texts that have appeared in English was published in Sign Systems Studies 39(2/4). Th e list included 109 entries that had been published from 1973 to 2011 (Kull 2011). Hereby, some additions are made to this list, including both new fi ndings from the period covered earlier, as well as publications that have appeare...

In this essay we argue for the possibility to describe the co-presence of species in a community as a consortium built by acoustic codes, using mainly the examples of bird choruses. In this particular case, the consortium is maintained via the sound-tope that different bird species create by singing in a chorus. More generally, the formation of aco...

This is an interview in which six questions formulated by J. Peng on the contemporary developments in semiotics at the University Tartu are addressed by K. Kull. The questions concern the role of Juri Lotman’s semiotics today, its relationship to the works of Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas A. Sebeok, the importance of the concepts semiosphere and umw...

Hereby we provide a list of all semiotic journals currently published in the world, which includes 53 titles. From among these, 42 are printed on paper (among them six international journals on general semiotics, 16 journals specializing in some branch of semiotics, and 20 regional semiotics journals), while 11 appear only as electronic publication...

莫斯科 － 塔尔图学派代表人物尤里·洛特曼在意指过程的模式化方面为符号学研究留下了丰富的遗产。本文简要介绍符号学家洛特曼提出的意指过程的一些基本原则，包 括: ( 1) 代 码复数原则; ( 2) 不相容或不可译原则; ( 3) 自我交际原则; ( 4) 符号继承原则; ( 5) 符号域原则。

In this article we review the biosemiotic art exhibition «Signs of life» (Livstegn), that was organized by the Danish installation artist Morten Skriver and the biosemiotician Jesper Hoffmeyer in 2011 at the Esbjerg Art Museum (Denmark). The exhibition presented five central (bio)semiotic concepts using artistic tools: the semiosphere, the sign, se...

This article provides a brief overview of the journal Sign Systems Studies, apparently the oldest journal of semiotics in the world. It was established by Juri Lotman in 1964, produced in Tartu and published by the University of Tartu Press. In addition, we provide a list of all semiotic journals currently published in the world, which includes 46...

Semiotics can be defined as the study of what can err, thus generalizing Umberto Eco’s definition. Introducing the fourth section on the Tartu School of semiotics for Chinese Semiotic Studies, the focus is put on the recent developments and the current state at the center of semiotics in Tartu.

Introducing the third column on Tartu Semiotics School for Chinese Semiotic Studies, the focus is put on recent research and activities of the Department of Semiotics of the University of Tartu. A brief account of the congress dedicated to Juri Lotman's 90th anniversary in February 2012 is given, together with the special issue of Sign Systems Stud...

With this issue, Chinese Semiotic Studies continues the column on the Tartu Semiotics School. These introductory notes specify some aspects of the current scope and tasks of semiotic research. A brief account of the Tartu Semiotics Summer School 2011 on the topic of semiotic modelling is added.