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"Biosemiotics" - an encyclopedia entry.

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Reference:Claus Emmeche (2003): "Biosemiotics", p. 63-64 in: J. Wentzel Vrede van Huyssteen (ed.): Encyclopedia of Scienceand Religion. New York: Macmillan Reference.

 

Biosemiotics is a growing field that studies the production, action and interpretation of signs (such as sounds,objects, smells, movements, but also signs on molecular scales normally not perceived by an organism) in thephysical and biologic realm, in an attempt to integrate the findings of biology and semiotics (the study of signs andsymbols). One goal of biosemiotics is to form a new view of life and meaning as immanent features of the naturalworld.

Early pioneers of biosemiotics include Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), Charles Morris (1901-1979), Jakob von Uexküll(1864-1944), Heini Hediger (1908-1992), Giorgio Prodi (1928-1987), T homas A. Sebeok (b.1920-2001), and Thure vonUexküll (b.1908). Contemporary scholars include the b iologists Jesper Hoffmeyer (b.1942), Kalevi Kull (b.1952), AlexeiSharov (b. 1954), and semioticeans Floyd Merrell (b.1937), John Deely (b. 1942), Winfried Nöth (b. 1944), and LuciaSantaella (b. 1944).

One of the central characteristics of living syst ems is the highly organized nature of their physical and chemicalprocesses. These processes are based, in part, on the informational and molecular properties of what came to beknown in the 1960s as the genetic code. Some biologists, such as Ernst Mayr, have viewed these properties asprocesses that distinguish life from anything else in the physical world, except, perhaps, computers. However,although the informational teleology (the goal-directedness based upon a stored informational code) of a computer programme is not an original form of teleology because the programme is designed by humans to achieve specificgoals, the teleology and informational characteristics of organisms are intrinsic, because they evolved naturallythrough evolutionary processes. Traditional biology (and philosophy of biology) regarded such processes as purelyphysical, adopting a restricted notion of the physical as having to do with only "efficient causation".

Biosemiotics attempts to use semiotic concepts (in the tradition of Peirce who founded semiotics as a logic andscientific study of dynamic sign action in human and non-human nature) to answer questions about the biologic andevo lutionary emergence of meaning, intentionality and a psychic world. Such questions are difficult to answer within apurely mechanist and physicalist framework. Biosemiotics see the evolution of life and the evolution of semioticsystems as two aspects of the same process. The scientific approach to the origin and evolution of life has given ushighly valuable accounts of the external aspects of the process, but has overlooked the inner qualitative aspects of sign action, leading to a reduced picture of causality.

Complex self-organized living systems are governed by formal and final causality. They are governed by formal causality in the sense of the "downward causation" from a whole structure (such as the organism) to its individualmolecules, constraining their action but also endowing them with functional meanings in relation to the wholemetabolism. They are governed by final causality in the sense of their tendency to take habits and to generate futureinterpretants of the present sign actions. In this sense, biosemiotics draws upon the insights of fields like systemstheory, theoretical biology and the physics of complex self-organized systems.

Particular scientific fields like molecular biology, cognitive ethology, cognitive science, robotics, and neurobiology

deal with information processes at various levels and thus spontaneously contribute to knowledge about biosemiosis(sign action in living systems). However, biosemiotics is not yet a specific disciplinary research programme, but ageneral perspective on life that attempts to integrate such findings, and to build a new foundation for biology. It mayhelp to resolve some forms of Cartesian dualism that are still haunting philosophers and scientists. By describing thecontinuity between matter and mind, biosemiotics may also help people to understand higher forms of mind and thevariety of religious experiences, although real interaction between biosemiotics and theology has yet to come.

Bibliography

Hoffmeyer, Jesper. (1996): Signs of Meaning in the Universe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. [special issue of Semiotica vol. 120 (no.3-4), 1998, includes 13 reviews of the book and a rejoinder by the author].

Kull, Kalevi, eds. (2001). Jakob von Uexküll: A Paradigm for Biology and Semiotics. Semiotica 134 (1/4)(2001), specialissue.

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Sebeok, T homas A., and Umiker-Sebeok, Jean, eds. (1992): Biosemiotics. The Semiotic Web 1991. Berlin and NewYork: Mouton de Gruyter.

Sebeok, Thomas A.; Hoffmeyer, Jesper; and Emmeche, Claus, eds. (1999). Biosemiotica. Semiotica 127 (1/4)(1999),special issue.

 

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