Biosemiotics, politics and Th.A. Sebeok’s move from linguistics to semiotics (original) (raw)
Related papers
This paper traces the philosophical origin of a biosemiotic perspective in linguistics through the parallel development of phylogenetic thinking in linguistics and biology in the 19 th century. The parallel conception of LANGUAGES and SPECIES as historical entities developed from a philosophical current that originated with philosophies of nature deriving predominantly from Kant, Goethe and Schelling. Following the epistemological and metaphysical trajectory of German Naturphilosophie, this paper explains how Jakob von Uexküll carried this biosemiotic approach to biology into the 20 th century. While the field of linguistics fragmented into its many subfields, whose center gravitated away from biology towards psychology and the social sciences, the work of Sebeok and Chomsky is characterized as a continuation of the biosemiotic perspective on language.
Biosemiotics, 2009
The purpose of this paper is to describe some parallels and theoretical affinities between biosemiotics and biolinguistics. In particular, this paper examines the importance of Uexküll's Umwelt and Peircean abduction as foundational concepts for Sebeok's biosemiotics and Chomsky's biolinguistic program. Other affinities touched upon in this paper include references to concepts articulated by Immanuel Kant, Konrad Lorenz, Marcel Florkin, François Jacob, C.H. Waddington, D'Arcy Thomson and Ernst Haeckel. While both programs share theoretical influences and historiographical parallels in their mid-century origins continuing throughout the late twentieth century, recent articulations of biosemiotics and biolinguistics privilege different intellectual styles and methods of inquiry that define their future objectives as intellectual movements. The goal of this paper is to show that, in spite of the different scholarly agendas of biosemiotics and biolinguistics, both movements share a theoretical and philosophical core in Peirce and Uexküll.
11 Uexküll, Peirce, and other Affinities between Biosemiotics and Biolinguistics (Article)
While both programs share theoretical influences and historiographical parallels in their mid-century origins continuing throughout the late twentieth century, recent articulations of biosemiotics and biolinguistics privilege different intellectual styles and methods of inquiry that define their future objectives as intellectual movements. The goal of this paper is to show that, in spite of the different scholarly agendas of biosemiotics and biolinguistics, both movements share a theoretical and philosophical core in Peirce and Uexküll.
Rivista italiana di filosofia del linguaggio
The thesis of this paper is that " biopolitics " in fact means biolinguistics. More specifically, the thesis is that biopolitics – defined as the grip of political power on the human body and life – is but a consequence of the main biological character of Homo sapiens: language. Politics (economics) and religion are but consequences of the basic anthropological fact that human beings are primarily speaking beings, that is, the animals of language. Therefore, from an anthropological perspective the intrinsically biolinguistic nature of human animals is the ground of biopolitics. Every form of dualism (body on one side, psyche, Power, and God on the other) derives from the original dualistic structure of language. In the last part of this paper, an analysis of Agamben's thought about language will argue in favor of this thesis.
Biosemiotic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics
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, discourse, etc.) have to be rethought once due attention is given to the living roots of languages. Accordingly, the contributors unite “eternal” problems of the humanities (such as language and thought, origin of language, prelinguistic meaning- making, borders of human language and “marginal” linguistic phenomena) with new inspirations drawing from natural science. They do so with respect to issues such as: how biolinguistics relates to biosemiotics, the history and value of general linguistic and (bio)semiotic models, and how empirical work can link the study of language with biosemiotic phenomena. The volume thus begins to unify perspectives on language(s) and living systems. Biosemiotics connects the sciences with the humanities while offering a new challenge to autonomous linguistics by pointing towards new kinds of interdisciplinary fusion.
Meaning comes first: languaging and biosemiotics
rivista italiana di filosofia del linguaggio, 2021
In linking evolution, biosemiotics and languaging, analysis of meaning is extended by investigation of natural innovation. Rather than ascribe it to internal or external content, meaning comes first. Ecological, evolutionary and developmental flux defy content/ vehicle distinctions. In the eco-evo-devo frame, I present the papers of the Special Issue, pose questions, and identify a direction of travel. Above all, meaning connects older views of semiosis with recent work on ecosystemic living. Whilst aesthetics and languaging can refer to evolving semiotic objects, nature uses bio-signals, judging experience, and how culture (and Languages) can condition free-living agents. Further, science changes its status when meaning takes priority. While semiotics shows the narrowness of laws and recurrent regularity, function brings semiotic properties to causal aspects of natural innovation. By drawing on languaging one can clarify, for example, how brains and prostheses can serve human cyborgs. Indeed, given a multiscalar nexus of meaning, biosemiotics becomes a powerful epistemic tool. Accordingly, I close with a model of how observers can use languaging to track both how selffabricated living systems co-modulate and also how judging (and thinking) shapes understanding of changing 'worlds.' In certain scales, each 'whole' agent acts on its own behalf as it uses epigenetic history and adjusts to flux by engaging with an ecosystem.
Subject and Substance: The Limits of Biopolitics and the Status of Critique
We are in the academic twentieth century no longer. The scholarship that emerged in the first few years of the new century seemed merely to carry on with the forms of linguistic constructivism and cultural critique that were central to most work done in the humanities in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Indeed, the work of the cultural and linguistic turns seemed so routinized, that no less an advocate of academic theory thanTerry Eagleton declared the end of theory or at least of its "golden age."i In retrospect, from our own moment ten or so years further on, Eagleton's ambivalent (and somewhat self-serving) declaration did not so much herald the death of theory in general but rather the attenuation of a certain theoretical trajectory: that which, to resort to the overused, and necessarily reductive, but effectively descriptive language of turns, fell under the banners of the cultural or linguistic turns. Oddly, although appropriately enough, this also signaled the attenuation, or at least the final banalization, of one of Eagleton's great theoretical bêtes noires: postmodernism. From our own moment, it is clear that while postmodernism and the linguistic turn have, to borrow Bruno Latour's phrase, "run out of steam," the humanities and social sciences are alive with new and paradigm-challenging theoretical approaches, from the emergence of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (000) in continental philosophy, to the work being done under the rubrics of the new materialisms, animal studies, cognitive studies, posthumanism, communism, systems theory, and biopolitics in a range of different disciplines.2 What most, if not all, of these new approaches have in common Is the desire to move beyond the language-and culture-centered limits of theoretical postmodernism and what the object-oriented ontologist and speculative realists have termed correlationism, which Quentin Meillassoux defines as "the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other."3 Meillassoux's critique of correlationism and its extension in the work of objectoriented ontologists such as Levi Bryant and Graham Harman has had the effect of demonstrating the subterranean affinity of philosophical and theoretical positions that up until the present moment were assumed to exist in opposition to each other: Kantian and post-Kantian transcendentalism on the one hand and poststructuralist forms of language-English Language Notes 51.2 Fall /Winter 2013 46 ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES 5 1.2 FALL / WINTER 2013 centered theoretical critique on the other.^What both approaches share, despite the latter's
Language and biosemiosis: Towards unity?
SEMIOTICA-LA HAYE THEN BERLIN-, 2006
Although many pay lip-service to the view that signs are common to culture and biology, it remains unclear how such a unity could emerge. Indeed, while those working with culture usually ignore biology, biologists rarely consider how their observations bear on issues of meaning. So, when sign-making is studied, its outcomes are usually interpreted either against a cultural surround or models of how semiosis is represented in the brain. Often it is implied that the only alternative is a biolinguistic view where syntactic computations are used to claim that (internal) language has its basis in molecular biology (Jenkins, 2000). In what follows, I challenge the view that verbal language are, on any such view, entirely separable from persons, neural processes and the sensorium. Building on Eerdmans, Prevignano and Thibault’s (2003) overview of what Gumperz’s opus offers to the ‘theory and practice of communication analysis’ (2003: vii), I consider how to naturalize contextualization cues. I argue that, since much contextualizing is independent of ‘meaning potential’, we can turn to how indexical sense-making is grounded in biosemiosis. Sketching such a model, I link Barbieri’s (2002) approach to semantic coding with Damasio’s (1999) view of core consciousness to show how human judgements can use the feeling-of-what-happens. During talk sensitivity to the feel of biosemiosis prompts us both to adjust to each other in real-time and to make verbal judgements about how they sound and act.
12 A Biosemiotic Perspective on Language (Chapter)
This paper traces the philosophical origin of a biosemiotic perspective in linguistics through the parallel development of phylogenetic thinking in linguistics and biology in the 19 th century. The parallel conception of LANGUAGES and SPECIES as historical entities developed from a philosophical current that originated with philosophies of nature deriving predominantly from Kant, Goethe and Schelling. Following the epistemological and metaphysical trajectory of German Naturphilosophie, this paper explains how Jakob von Uexküll carried this biosemiotic approach to biology into the 20 th century. While the field of linguistics fragmented into its many subfields, whose center gravitated away from biology towards psychology and the social sciences, the work of Sebeok and Chomsky is characterized as a continuation of the biosemiotic perspective on language.
Gatherings in Biosemiotics XX., 2020
Biosemiotics is the study of semiosis in the biological realm. Or, as it was written in the introduction to the 17th Gatherings in Biosemiotics in Lausanne, “biosemiotics is [...] the study of meaning-making and its consequences in living systems, and much of its focus is on investigating and understanding pre-linguistic sign processes in both humans and other organisms”. Biology, on the one hand, has an important and impressive history of studying the systematicity of nature, as it is exhibited in the analyses of the genetic, physiological and morphogenetic processes of living systems. Yet biology, at the same time, must also certainly recognize that it is likewise the study of the systematicity of freedom, in as much as its object of study is the phenomenon of life itself. And so biology, understood as biosemiotics, studies life’s capacity for aboutness, for establishing mediated and arbitrary relationships that result in the creation of novelty, for making choices, and for the ongoing exploration of possibility. The world meetings on biosemiotics – Gatherings in Biosemiotics – have been taking place annually since 2001. The first twelve years of these conferences was described in a volume of 2012, while the current volume covers the meetings from 2012 to 2020. In addition to the accounts and programs of these events, and including over sixty contributions to the twentieth meeting, the current volume includes review articles, evaluating the work done thus far, and predicting future developments. The history and philosophy of Czech biosemiotics, in particular, receives a detailed account, and many other new ideas in biosemiotics are also discussed in this book.