Morten Tønnessen

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• PhD
• Professor at University of Stavanger

Even in the most egalitarian societies, hierarchies of power and status shape social life. However, power and received status are not synonymous—individuals in positions of power may or may not be accorded the respect corresponding to their role. Using a cooperatively collected dataset from 18,096 participants across 70 cultures, we investigate, th...

Mars has long been a source of inspiration, imagination and, lately, aspiration for many. It has generated a breadth of beliefs and ideas, as well as hope for a bright future there. However, the red planet will never offer a fresh start: we would carry with us some of our culture and our politics. Our future there would remain connected to Earth’s...

If early crewed outposts on Mars can develop adequate habitats and in-situ resource utilization capabilities, they may evolve into small permanent settlements. Their main aims would likely remain scientific exploration, as well as work required for the settlement to grow further and become (nearly) self-sustained. Even if the latter work is success...

The concept of terraforming Mars has been popularized in pop culture and recently by Elon Musk. The objective is to transform Mars into a planet suitable for habitation by living organisms and humans. Conceptually, this may be achieved in different steps: firstly, by increasing the atmospheric pressure of the whole planet to allow human beings to p...

Even though Jakob von Uexküll’s umwelt theory has inspired biosemioticians and phenomenologists alike, most contemporary phenomenological methods are applicable only to studies of human phenomena. In this article I discuss how umwelt theory can be made use of in the contexts of phenomenological triangulation and descriptive phenomenology. This resu...

This introduction to the special issue “Umwelt Theory and Phenomenology” is composed of a brief theoretical introduction to phenomenology seen as a key attitude of philosophical research, an investigation of the possibilities offered by a combined application of phenomenology and biosemiotics, and an overview of the articles that are included in th...

This chapter presents a biosemiotic perspective on the basic situation for human beings and that of other organisms, with an emphasis on the subjective experience of sentient animals, and the sign use of all lifeforms. The human condition is portrayed as traditionally conceived, and then revisited in the new context of the current environmental cri...

Ecological semiotics, or ecosemiotics, is the study of sign use by organisms in an ecological context. This chapter provides an outline of semiotic phenomena in ecology and sign processes at different levels of biological organization and explains how complexity can be understood in semiotic terms. It presents the basic theoretical outlook of ecolo...

Whether or to what extent Gross Domestic Product (GDP) can measure human development is disputed. This article develops a notion of “wasted GDP”, with a case study on the performance of the USA based on analysis of Human Development Index (HDI) data. Like Herman Daly´s notion of ´uneconomic growth´, the perspective of wasted GDP addresses the benef...

The Annual Biosemiotic Achievement Award was established at the annual meeting of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies (ISBS) in 2014, in conjunction with Springer and Biosemiotics. It seeks to recognize papers published in the journal that present novel and potentially important contributions to biosemiotic research, its scientific im...

Semiotic concepts such as ‘sign’ and ‘symptom’ have been applied in medicine since ancient Greece. Against this background, a semiotic perspective on nosology may be relevant and informative, particularly regarding the recognition of diseases. This chapter provides an overview of key works in semiotics on the study of medicine in general and nosolo...

In this article I detail how past Umwelten can be studied by applying Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory and informed by contemporary science. I argue that the methodological challenges raised by the lack of present organisms available for realtime observations and whole-body physiological studies can be partly overcome by making qualified assumptio...

This is a call for papers for a special issue of Biosemiotics, on Umwelt theory and phenomenology. Abstracts are due by June 15th 2023.

This paper is divided into five parts. The introduction presents some implications of the relational nature of human beings as well as other living beings, and establishes a connection between biosemiotics and existentialist thinking. The second part indicates key points of a “semiotics of being” as a genuine outlook within semiotics. In “Universal...

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...

Although Jakob von Uexküll´s Umwelt theory is not mentioned in Jablonka and Ginsburg´s Target article, von Uexküll´s theory is clearly relevant in the context of the article, with the authors´ emphasis on the origin of “subjective experiencing”. I relate some of Jablonka and Ginsburg´s main claims to an evolutionary perspective on Umwelt theory. As...

Providing recreational activities is an important aspect of the intervention at residential care. We explore adolescents’ experience of outdoor recreational activities organized by the care workers in the context of friluftsliv (literally: free-air-life). Giorgi’s descriptive phenomenological method is used to analyze eight interviews with adolesce...

Semiogenesis is the emergence of new or modified sign relations in agents. New sign relations emerge by way of the interpretive activities of agents and subagents in adaptive evolution, development , physiology, and behavior . The gene-centric concept of evolution needs to be replaced by an agency-centric concept . The genome may change passively a...

Sammendrag Ideen om karbonfangst som klimaløsning forutsetter lagring av CO2 i geologiske formasjoner over flere tusen år. Med dette tidsperspektivet står karbonfangst i en særstilling blant aktuelle klimatiltak. Dette gjør spørsmål om intergenerasjonell rettferdighet spesielt relevante i vurderingen av karbonfangst. En storstilt satsning på karbon...

The Annual Biosemiotic Achievement Award was established at the annual meeting of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies (ISBS) in 2014, in conjunction with Springer and Biosemiotics . It seeks to recognize papers published in the journal that present novel and potentially important contributions to biosemiotic research, its scientific i...

This article introduces an ecosemiotic approach to the two great challenges facing humanity in the 21st century: solving an escalating environmental crisis, while also safeguarding and further improving human living conditions. An ecosemiotic framework for the study of societal transformations is presented and political and other normative aspects...

Noble rightly emphasizes that some modern evolutionary biologists´neglect of agency is consequential with regard to our understanding of the natural world and real-world ecological developments. I elaborate on biosemiotic ideas on semiotic agency and explain how organisms can change the environment by way of semiotic causation. I also comment on th...

Here we explore the development of the notion of agency within natural philosophy, modern philosophy and science. Ancient philosophy is represented by Aristotle’s theories on causation, the soul, and ethics. Enlightenment philosophy was inspired by the Cartesian mind-body dualism and includes the a priori knowledge conceptualized by Kant. Evolution...

Sign is a semiotic tool, whose form is meaningful for certain agents. Agents use signs to regulate their activities, communicate with others, and accumulate knowledge in the form of heredity, memory , perception , representation , and cognition. Sign processes, collectively known as semiosis, vary in their complexity and function , and their types...

We call the science on semiotic agency in all its forms ‘agentology’, adopting the term coined by Tomáš Šalamon. The establishment of this new discipline is justified by the fact that the class of all agents is easily distinguishable from other things in the universe by empirical studies. In our perspective, agentology is inspired by and can draw f...

A precondition for understanding current ecology is to understand how human agency influences ecology . In this chapter we describe the world-changing effects of human agency. A key notion in this context is the ‘Anthropocene’, the geological epoch in which human agency predominates as a causal factor. Drawing on Umwelt theory, we explain how human...

In this chapter we discuss the phenomenological tradition within philosophy with emphasis on representative phenomenological positions on subjectivity, sentience, consciousness and self-consciousness, and make the argument that giving phenomenology a biosemiotic grounding will make it more comprehensive. Even though both Husserl and Heidegger, two...

The origin of life involves a transition from a merely physical world into the world of semiotic agency . Attempts to explain the origin of life by synthesis of such organic molecules as peptides or nucleic acids is baseless, because amino acids and nucleotides are products of the evolving life rather than parts from which the first living system w...

This chapter opens the discussion of agency in organisms by starting with human agency, which is a bundle of adaptive processes with different time and spatial scales that integrate the past and future of Homo sapiens organisms via autonomy and goal-directedness. Despite of the common belief that each human being is a singular decision-making unit,...

Semiotic agency is not restricted to humans; it is a natural phenomenon that is found in all living organisms. However, there are many levels of semiotic competence, and these are typically separated by qualitative evolutionary transitions, such as the origin of the eukaryotic cell, multicellular eukaryotes, the nervous system, learning, thinking,...

In this chapter we argue that the multiplicity of subagents is a typical feature of agency which is necessary for a higher-level agent’s reliable self-construction, robustness, and adaptability. The composite organization allows for a dialectic balance between interests and functions of the whole and its parts. We argue that subagents are semi-auto...

Here we present a systematic analysis of the phenomenon of semiotic agency : a capacity for acting purposefully and using signs to make informed choices. Semiotic agents have an extended ontological status because their existence depends on past purposeful activity of their own and/or ancestral agents, and also supports future purposeful activities...

This book invites readers to embark on a journey into the world of agency encompassing humans, other organisms, cells, intracellular molecular agents, colonies, populations, ecological systems, and artificial autonomous systems. We combine mechanistic and non-mechanistic approaches in the analysis of the function and evolution of organisms, their s...

Umwelt theory is an expression of von Uexküll’s subjective biology and as such usually applied in analysis of individual animals, yet it is fundamentally relational and therefore also suitable for analysis of more complex wholes. Since the birth of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s, there has been growing scientific and political ackno...

Recent efforts to go beyond gross domestic product as a measure of economic performance raise important questions about the nature of the economy, including: what is the best measure of a sound, flourishing economy, and what is the purpose of ‘doing well’ in economic terms? One possible measure of the soundness of an economy is the extent to which...

Despite societal concerns about the welfare of commercial laying hens, little attention has been paid to the welfare implications of the choices made by the genetics companies involved with their breeding. These choices regarding trait selection and other aspects of breeding significantly affect living conditions for the more than 7 billion laying...

This article addresses Umwelt futurology, the study of future Umwelten: i.e., subjective, semiotic lifeworlds. Umwelt futurology as I describe it is an interdisciplinary enterprise founded on Umwelt theory but also drawing on work done in other academic studies of future developments. It complements Hiltunen’s semiotic work in futures studies on we...

English: This article provides an overview and analysis of human development, inequality and people´s perception of social and economic risks in Latin America and the Nordic countries. While Nordic countries rank very highly on the UN´s Human Development Index (HDI) and are known for their ‘Nordic welfare model’, Latin American countries have been...

English: This article provides an overview and analysis of human development, inequality and people´s perception of social and economic risks in Latin America and the Nordic countries. While Nordic countries rank very highly on the UN´s Human Development Index (HDI) and are known for their 'Nordic welfare model', Latin American countries have been...

Zoosemiotics as a field of semiotic scholarship has been around now for more than half a century. This discipline as a semiotic study of animals, is a research field that is situated between the biological sciences and the humanities. Zoosemiotics has been specified as “the study of signification, communication and representation within and across...

Call for papers for the 11th conference of the Nordic Association for semiotic studies, "Anticipation and change" (University of Stavanger June 13-15th 2019). Abstract deadline December 10th 2018.

Obituary for the American philosopher and semiotician John Deely (1942–2017).

The Journal of Comparative Social Work invites you to submit a paper to a special issue on the following topic: “Welfare in Latin America and the Nordic countries.” The issue will appear as Vol. 14, No. 1 (2019). Special issue editors: Morten Tønnessen (University of Stavanger), Angela Peña (University of Havana), Sarah Hean (University of Stavang...

This paper is divided into five parts. The introduction presents some implications of the relational nature of human beings as well as other living beings, and establishes a connection between biosemiotics and existentialist thinking. The second part indicates key points of a “semiotics of being” as a genuine outlook within semiotics. In “Universal...

In this paper, it is argued that Jakob von Uexküll's "search image" notion, the original version of this notion within ethology, is still of use. A search image, in Uexküll's sense, is an imagined object that an organism has in mind when it searches for something. Uexküll's conception of the search image is useful both for understanding the theoret...

In this introduction to the special issue on Biosemiotic Ethics, we introduce major concepts and themes corresponding to the topic. With reference to Ivar Puura’s notion of “semiocide”, we ask: what are the ethical responsibilities that attention to semiotics carries? We argue that if life is fundamentally semiotic, then biosemiotics and moral theo...

Licensed under the CC-BY 4.0 International license. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14464/zsem.v37i3-4 In this essay we examine a fundamental question in biosemiotic ethics: why think that semiosis is a morally relevant property, or a property that supports the moral value of living beings or systems that possess it? We argue that biosemiotic particula-ri...

Licensed under the CC-BY 4.0 International license. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14464/zsem.v37i3-4

In this interview, Wendy Wheeler, London Metropolitan University Emerita Professor of English Literature and Cultural Inquiry, discusses her thoughts on biosemiotics and its relevance for ethics. In Wheeler’s perspective, biosemiotics can ground ethics because it offers an alternative and fitting ontology of relations. She shares her thoughts on Pe...

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...

“Animal Umwelten in a Changing World. Zoosemiotic Perspectives” raises semiotic questions of human-animal relations: what is the semiotic character of different species, how humans endow animals with meaning, and how animal sign exchange and communication has coped with environmental change. The book takes a zoosemiotic approach and considers diffe...

This is the second article in a series of review articles addressing biosemiotic terminology. The biosemiotic glossary project is designed to integrate views of members within the biosemiotic community based on a standard survey and related publications. The methodology section describes the format of the survey conducted July–August 2014 in prepar...

Wolves and sheep go together—at least in the public mind. In terms of ecological range, they are among the most widespread mammals of wild and domesticated species respectively. While the wolf is in several countries the most controversial large carnivore, it is also, and not coincidentally, the most symbolically laden western carnivore. The wolf i...

This introductory chapter has three main purposes. The first is to present the book The Discovery of the Umwelt, emphasizing its specificity in the context of the international publications dedicated to Uexküll. The second aim is to describe the reception of Uexküll in Norwegian ecophilosophy, and particularly by Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899–1990) and...

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...

A key feature of biosemiotics is, in contrast with traditional semiotics, that it considers the dynamics of semiosis at multiple time scales, and emphasizes the active role organisms have in reshaping sign relations.

More info: http://www.uis.no/research-and-phd-studies/research-areas/society-culture-and-religion/animals-in-changing-environments/

Keynote speakers, with preliminary titles: — Almo Farina (University of Urbino, Italy): " Animals in a noisy world " — Gisela Kaplan (University of New England, Australia): " Don Quixote's windmills: technology, conservation and animal cognition " — Dominique Lestel (École normale supérieure, Paris, France): " Animality after animality: Challenge o...

Uexkullian phenomenology is derived from the Umwelt theory of the Baltic-German biologist Jakob von Uexkull. Its basic premise is that we can assume the universal existence, in the realm of life, of a genuine first person perspective, i.e., of experienced worlds. This assumption characterises Uexkullian phenomenology and makes it a genuine perspect...

The journal Biosemiotics was envisioned by its founding editor, Marcello Barbieri, as a major periodical for interdisciplinary papers that integrate biology and semiotics. Since 2008 the journal has published 21 issues, including special issues on crucial problems such as the semiotics of perception, origins of mind, code biology, biohermeneutics,...

The current article is the first in a series of review articles addressing biosemiotic terminology. The biosemiotic glossary project is inclusive and designed to integrate views of a representative group of members within the biosemiotic community based on a standard survey and related publications. The methodology section describes the format of t...

It is often asserted that the existence of human language sets us apart from non-humans, and makes us incomparably special. And indeed human language does make our Umwelt (Jakob von Uexküll), our lifeworld, uniquely open-ended. However, by committing what I term the anthropocentric mistake, i.e. falsely assuming that all true reality is linguistic,...

This article, which envelops a case study and development of umwelt theory, addresses four research questions: At what point does the human umwelt emerge? What umwelt transitions can be identified in the ontogenesis of the early human umwelt? What is characteristic of the umwelt trajectory of human embryos/ foetuses/infants? How are umwelt objects...

Menneskedyret og dets plass i verden 1 Morten Tønnessen Innledning Er mennesket noe helt saeregent, eller et dyr på linje med andre dyr? Dette spørsmålet er det denne artikkelen skal munne ut i å forsøke å besvare. Men før vi kan svare på dette spørsmålet, må vi forstå det, og for å kunne forstå det må vi ta oss gjennom noen forberedende refleksjon...

An Umwelt trajectory can be characterized as the course through evolutionary (or cultural) time taken by the Umwelt of a creature, as defined by its changing relations with the Umwelten of other creatures. The Umwelt trajectory of a creature is thus the historical path of its perceptual and behavioral dispositions considered from an ecological and...

Uexküll’s 1917 critique of what he calls the “English morality”, written during World War I, points the contemporary reader toward important implications of the translation of descriptive scientific models to normative ethical theories. A key figure motivating biosemiotics, Uexküll presents here a darker side: one where his Umwelt theory seems to m...

This claim has been put forward from many sides: People of different nations should learn to know each other, then any discord would end because each peopleUexkull’s term here is “Volk”, referring to the people of a society as a coherent group rather than to society itself: something more like “particular cultural group”. We translate this term as...

For Dyreetikkonferansen 2013 Inspirert av metoder utviklet og benyttet i Stibbe, Arran. 2012. Animals Erased: Discourse, Ecology, and Reconnection with the Natural World. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. Oversikt over programmer inkludert i analysen Arbeiderpartiets program 2013-2017 Fremskrittspartiets handlingsprogram for 2013-...

For the full introduction chapter and the book's front matter, see http://www.tyk.ee/admin/upload/files/raamatud/1396353948.pdf.

German-Baltic biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) did not regard himself as a phenomenologist. Neither did he conceive of himself as a semiotician. Nevertheless, his Umwelt terminology has of late been utilized and further developed within the framework of semiotics and various other disciplines – and, as I will argue, essential points in his w...

Visjon 2040 Fra overlagt rovdrift til Utopi Buane Det er noe som stinker i kongeriket Norge. Ett land, ett folk, har tilsynelatende delt seg i to leirer. Sau eller ulv? Valget er ditt, det er visst bare å velge side. Hva kan forene dette splittede, langstrakte land? Det er tid for å løfte blikket, og tenke på å inngå nye allianser. En allianse for...

The general topic of this contribution is semioethics, widely regarded as one of the most significant developments in semiotics after the turn of the 21st century, and along with the existential semiotics of Eero Tarasti (2000) a sign of an ethical turn within semiotics. The term semioethics, which signifies not least the emergence of a sense of gl...

The following points, which represent a path to a semiotics of being, are pertinent to various sub-fields at the conjunction of semiotics of nature (biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, zoosemiotics) and semiotics of culture—semioethics and existential semiotics included. 1) Semiotics of being entails inquiry at all levels of biological organization, albeit...

This special issue on the semiotics of perception originates from two workshops arranged in Tartu, Estonia, in February 2009. We are located at the junction of nature and culture, and of semiotics and phenomenology. Can they be reconciled? More particularly, can subfields such as biosemiotics and ecophenomenology be mutually enriching? The authors...

Wolf land is in the context of the present article to be considered as an ambiguous term referring to “the land of the wolf” from the wolf’s perspective as well as from a human perspective. I start out by presenting the general circumstances of the Scandinavian wolf population, then turn to the Norwegian wolf controversy in particular. The latter h...

On various levels, zoosemiotics is encyclopedic in its form, but not systematically so in its content. More often than not, it is highly informative. The broad project of the book, however, is undermined by a poor selection of references to zoosemioticians and an apparent bias for anthropoid animals. Nevertheless, Dario Martinelli's academic spotli...

The phenomenon of colonialism is in this article treated with reference to our stepwise establishment throughout history of something akin to a global colonial organism. The concept of 'global species', which conditions is introduced for the first time, applies not only to the human species but furthermore to several of our affiliated species. Due...

Play behaviour is notorious for constituting a much debated, yet little clarified field of research. In this article, attempts are made to reach conclusions on the relation between human play and the play of other animals (especially cat play), as well as on the very character of play. The concept of Umwelt is reviewed, as are definitions of animal...

What role does environmental change play in Jakob von Uexküll’s thought? And what role can it play in a up-to-date Uexküllian framework? Admittedly, in hindsight it appears that the Umwelt theory suffers from its reliance on Uexküll’s false premise that the environment (including its mixture of species) is generally stable. In this article, the Umw...

This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.

This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.

In this article I paint a concise portrait of world economic and population history. Key factors include the world population and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The role of technology in relation to the environmental impact of economic activity is represented by an Environmental Efficiency Factor (EEF). It is asserted that any modern political theor...

In this article I paint a concise portrait of world economic and population history. Key factors include the world population and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The role of technology in relation to the environmental impact of economic activity is represented by an Environmental Efficiency Factor (EEF). It is asserted that any modern political theor...

In this paper I will sketch an Umwelt ethics, i.e., an ethics that rests heavily on fundamental features of Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory. In the course of an interpretation of the Umwelt theory, a number of concepts are introduced. These include ontological niche, common-Umwelt, total Umwelt and bio-ontological monad . I then present an Uexkü...

Traditionally, ontology, or at least western ontology, bas been an anthropocentric enterprise, that takes only human experiences into account. In this paper I argue that a prolific biocentric ontology can be based on UexkülI's Umwelt theory. UexkülI offers the basis of an ontology according to which the study of experiences is a much wider field th...