The Biosemiotic Turn

Abstract

With the publication of this inaugural issue of the internationally peerreviewed 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 overview of the history of biosemiotics, contextualizing it within and against the larger currents of philosophical and scientific thinking from which it has emerged. To explain the origins of this most twenty-first century endeavour effectively, however, will require tracing-at least to the level of a thumbnail sketch-how the 'sign' concept appeared, was lost, and now must be painstakingly rediscovered and refined in science. To relate this long history, this article will appear in Biosemiotics in three instalments, examining, respectively: (1) The History of the Sign Concept in Pre-Modernist Science, (2) The History of the Sign Concept in Modernist Science, and (3) The Biosemiotic Attempt to Develop a More Useful Sign Concept for Contemporary Science. In this instalment, we begin our introductory 'stroll through the woods of sciences and signs' by following the development of the sign concept within the context of scientific inquiry, in necessarily broad outline, from the beginnings of such inquiry in sixth century BCE, through its long development in the Middle Ages, and up unto the onset of modernity. For only within this larger historical context can our contemporary attempt to develop a naturalistic understanding of sign relations be understood.

Objects and processes: Two notions for understanding biological information

“…There have been some theoretical proposals that aim to deal with what we call process-information in a way that tries to account for their open-endedness, such as the innovative views of biosemiotics (see El-Hani et al, 2006;Favareau, 2008;Abel 2009;Barbieri, 2013). This relatively recent field centers fundamental analyses on the relationship between of three elements: an object, a signifying element and an interpretant.…”

On the embedded cognition of non-verbal narratives

“…Yet surprisingly there has been very little communication between the cognitive semiotics and the cognitive narratology communities, a link which we fi nd very natural to pursue. Analogously to cognitive narratology, the research agenda of cognitive semiotics entails the integration of methods and theories developed in the disciplines of cognitive science with methods and theories developed in semiotics and the humanities, with the ultimate aim of providing new insights into the realm of human meaning production.Th e dialogue could be extended to biosemiotics, which could also make a signifi cant contribution by providing more adequate notions of "representation" and "information" than classical cognitive sciences (Favareau 2008) and by helping to link the embedded levels of analysis in narrative cognition, from the physiological to the phenomenological. Moreover, the biosemiotic approach is highly congenial with a non-logocentric, nonverbal, non-(exclusively) symbolic or linguistic treatment of sign systems and meaning making, opening therefore possibilities for the exploration of the diff erent nonverbal narrative modalities.…”

Heterarchical Semiosis: From Signal Transduction to Narrative Intelligibility

“…In this sense, Donald Favareau' s Evolutionary History of Biosemiotics (Favareau 2007(Favareau , 2008(Favareau , 2009) could very well have been called "Evolutionary History of Bio-and Cognitive Semiotics" given that it eloquently (and very well philosophically informed) unfolds the history of the rise and fall of the negligence of "information," "sign relations," and "mind phenomena" in the study of the living world in Western tradition.…”