This edited volume provides a biosemiotic analysis of the ecological relationship between food and medicine. Drawing on the origins of semiotics in medicine, this collection proposes innovative ways of considering aliments and treatments. Considering the ever-evolving character of our understanding of meaning-making in biology, and considering the keen popular interest in issues relating to food and medicines - fueled by an increasing body of interdisciplinary knowledge - the contributions here provide diverse insights and arguments into the larger ecology of organisms’ (...) engagement with and transformation through taking in matter. Bodies interpret molecules, enzymes, and alkaloids they intentionally and unintentionally come in contact with according to their pre-existing receptors. But their receptors are also changed by the experience. Once the body has identified a particular substance, it responds by initiating semiotic sequences and negotiations that fulfill vital functions for the organism at macro-, meso-, and micro-scales. -/- Human abilities to distill and extract the living world into highly refined foods and medicines, however, have created substances far more potent than their counterparts in our historical evolution. Many of these substances also lack certain accompanying proteins, enzymes, and alkaloids that otherwise aid digestion or protect against side-effects in active extracted chemicals. Human biology has yet to catch up with human inventions such as supernormal foods and medicines that may flood receptors, overwhelming the body’s normal satiation mechanisms. This volume discusses how biosemioticians can come to terms with these networks of meaning, providing a valuable and provocative compendium for semioticians, medical researchers and practitioners, sociologists, cultural theorists, bioethicists and scholars investigating the interdisciplinary questions stemming from food and medicine. (shrink)

How semiotic freedom emerges in the evolution and development of organisms through semiotic scaffolding is a core problem for biosemiotics. There is a paradox in explaining this semiotic emergence: reduction in (semiotic) freedom leads to the creation of new semiotic freedom. Semiotic emergence is a species of dynamic emergence. Accordingly, the paradox of semiotic emergence is a species of the paradox of dynamic emergence. The latter paradox claims that reducing lower-level freedom generates new freedom at a higher level. The solution (...) to the paradox lies in clarifying the ambiguity in the term freedom. The conceptual inconsistency in the paradox comes from confusing two types of freedom. One type of freedom means the possibility a system could have, while the other refers to the capacity of a system to access a specific (range of) state(s). There is an inverse relation between the two types of freedom. With the clarification, the conceptual inconsistency is explained away. This understanding of semiotic emergence may help us further understand core ideas in biosemiotics and provide a conceptual foundation for empirical studies of biosemiotics. (shrink)

There is renewed interest in questions of ontology in various fields, as there has been in biosemiotics. But for umwelt theory, ontology needs to be approached in particular ways, in order to avoid it from being yet another “philosophy of access”, part and parcel of the epistemology-ontology dyad, where “ontology” is the leftover of epistemology, or any sort of subjective constitution of things. The article engages in philosophical considerations about what kinds of assumptions and preliminary considerations should be made for (...) a semiosic ontology that was multiple, relational, and irreducible, with the principle goal being to engage with some terminological issues at the meeting point of ontology and umwelt theory. Ontography is proposed as a name for a low-key descriptive engagement with non-human umwelts considered as “worldings”, and maieutics as a particular attitude, or ethos, for the practical situation of direct inaccessibility of nonhuman umwelts. Parallels are drawn with the ontological turn in anthropology, which has also successfully engaged with alterity. A comparative study of umwelts should consider the ontological self-determination of the nonhuman other. (shrink)

Anticipatory acts or predictive behavior are prerequisites for living organisms to sustain their survival when escaping from a predator, catching prey, or schooling. For example, catching prey requires that the predator perform some procedures that are equivalent to estimating the directional movement of the prey, its speed and its distance relative to the predator. Underlying these procedures is time experience, which does not adhere to man-made mechanical clocks. Living organisms keep time based on the local activities of each participant and (...) form ecological clocks together. The timekeeping of ecological clocks has been called E-series time, which is interactive in character and consists of mutual alignment of timing that is co-adjusted to each other’s movements and rhythms. A main objective of our current work is to illustrate how E-series time is used for flows of anticipatory acts. To explain such predictive moves and their efforts based on how the perspective of the immediate future affects the present, we resort to the organismic activity of revising the preceding acts in retrospect and semiotic scaffolding that extends beyond simple linear causality. Special attention is paid to the construction of the notion of retrocausal scaffolding, which is a series of dialogical punctuations or mutual coordination of rhythms for the joint production of the present moment of now. Retrocausal scaffolding is synonymous with negotiated anticipation, which is a semiotic/communicative account of revising the preceding acts in the present moment. (shrink)

Investigations of iconicity in language, whereby interactants coordinate meaningful bodily actions to create resemblances, are prevalent across the human communication sciences. However, when it comes to analysing and comparing iconicity across different interactions and modes of communication, it is not always clear we are looking at the same thing. For example, tokens of spoken ideophones and manual depicting actions may both be analysed as iconic forms. Yet spoken ideophones may signal depictive and descriptive qualities via speech, while manual actions may (...) signal depictive, descriptive, and indexical qualities via the shape, movement, and placement of the hands in space. Furthermore, each may co-occur with other semiotics articulated with the face, hands, and body within composite utterances. The paradigm of iconicity as a single property is too broad and coarse for comparative semiotics, as important details necessary for understanding the range of human communicative potentialities may be masked. Here, we draw on semiotic approaches to language and communication, including the model of language as signalled via describing, indicating and/or depicting and the notion of non-referential indexicality, to illustrate the multidimensionality of iconicity in co-present interactions. This builds on our earlier proposal for analysing how different methods of semiotic signalling are combined in multimodal language use. We discuss some implications for the language and communication sciences and explain how this approach may inform a theory of biosemiotics. (shrink)

C. S. Peirce defined the sign as a means to communicate a form or habit embodied in the object to the interpretant, thus constraining (through a sign) the behavior of an interpreter to a limited series of effects. This is part of the process of “semiotic scaffolding” in which sign relations interlock and reinforce one another, providing directionality to the process. In biological evolutionary studies canalization is defined as the adjustment of developmental pathways by natural selection to bring about a (...) uniform result despite genetic and environmental variations. Establishing parallelism between the two concepts allows the possibility of understanding how semiotic processes introduce information from the environment resulting in canalization (and assimilation), determining “fixed” pathways to elaborate signal repertoires for particular species adapted to particular environments sensed by particular organs. This kind of sign action can produce an “encapsulation” process of the sign meaning, further affecting the meaning-making process developing in the receiver, a process affecting signal usage by animals, constraining agency of biological systems’ behavior towards a definite sequence of events or signals and providing a certain orientation of the process (“semiotic canalization”). Therefore, we can also say that signs could potentially be built by senders (i.e. by the sign-vehicle) in a sort of pre-determined way and not extracted by the receiver from a “neutral” sender. Semiotic canalization is seen as a part of a more general process of scaffolding during development, acting mainly during some information exchanges between communicating subjects, providing adaptive responses to some standard communicative situations. (shrink)

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 interdisciplinary engagement with biosemiotics. We start with Donald Favareau, whose originary disciplinary home is ethnomethodology and linguistics, and then move on to Paul Cobley’s contribution on (...) general semiotics and Kalevi Kull’s on biosemiotics. This is followed by Cobley with Frederick Stjernfelt who contribute on biosemiotics and learning, then Gerald Ostdiek from philosophy, and Morten Tønnessen focusing upon ethics in particular. Myrdene Anderson writes from anthropology, while Timo Maran and Louise Westling provide a view from literary study. The essay closes with Wendy Wheeler reflecting on the movement of biosemiotics as a challenge, often via the ecological humanities, to the kind of so-called ‘postmodern’ thinking that has dominated humanities critical thought in the universities for the past 40 years. Virtually all the matters gestured to in outline above are discussed in much more satisfying detail in the topics which follow. (shrink)

Thick description was originally proposed to overcome the limitations of quantitative research and ground anthropological observations in concrete people’s expectations, rather than in normative theories. The ultimate objective was to account for the emotional aspects of worldviews and value-orientations that would otherwise be left tacit or implicit by quantitative investigations. The present paper aimed at reviewing the _conceptual framework_ that has characterized this relational turn and has made possible a deeper understanding of the subjective experience. The primary objective is thus (...) to make explicit the assumptions upon which thick description relies and discuss how these renewed conditions allow meaning to emerge in interpersonal relationships. We argue that both these objectives would be theoretically attainable if primarily centered on the exploration of the _possibility space_ and on the patient’s experience as driven by the power of _counterfactual thinking_. Under these conditions, human subjects may be led to recognize the contextual and semiotic dimension of _boundaries_ and, in so doing, become aware of the beneficial effects of weaving past and new experiences in meaningful relationships. (shrink)

The thesis introduces and criticizes the discourse on technology, with a specific reference to the concept of AI. The discourse on AI is particularly saturated with reified metaphors which drive connotations and delimit understandings of technology in society. To better analyse the discourse on AI, the thesis proposes the concept of “Expected AI”, a composite signifier filled with historical and sociocultural connotations, and numerous referent objects. Relying on cultural semiotics, science and technology studies, and a diverse selection of heuristic concepts, (...) the thesis delves beneath the surface of AI discourse and demonstrates the hidden political, social, cultural, and ecological dangers of AI. The entanglement of the discourse(s) with (science) fiction, folklore, myth, and religion impacts how AI is perceived and received, as well as the expectations to AI-enabled technologies now and in the future. The thesis also proposes a more ethical and comprehensive ontological model for AI systems. The model describes AI systems as complex figurations, considering their socio-material organisation, global economic-material becoming, and impact on the environment, social institutions, and the semiosphere. The dissertation argues that AI should be understood not just as an object or sociotechnical system, but as its entire product chain encompassing people and cultures, as well as the used resources and impact (both material-ecological and semiotic) on a planetary scale. (shrink)

Regular physics is unsatisfactory in that it fails to take into consideration phenomena relating to mind and meaning, whereas on the other side of the cultural divide such constructs have been studied in detail. This paper discusses a possible synthesis of the two perspectives. Crucial is the way systems realising mental function can develop step by step on the basis of the scaffolding mechanisms of Hoffmeyer, in a way that can be clarified by consideration of the phenomenon of language. Taking (...) into account such constructs, aspects of which are apparent even with simple systems such as acoustically excited water (as with cymatics), potentially opens up a window into a world of mentality excluded from conventional physics as a result of the primary focus of the latter on the matter-like aspect of reality. (shrink)