Biosemiotics
Nature | Culture | Science | Semiosis
edited by Wendy Wheeler
Introduction
I’m pleased to be able to welcome readers to this Living Book titled Biosemiotics: Nature/Culture/Science/Semiosis. Biosemiotics – as its name suggests – is committed to science-humanities interdisciplinarity. As readers of these Living Books will doubtless know, this kind of interdisciplinarity is no mean task, but we have come a long way since C. P. Snow complained that humanities scholars knew nothing of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Snow, 1998: 15). The sciences of modernity developed their methodological strengths and practical successes on the basis of ‘objective’1 observation and measurement, drawing on forms of description (preferentially mathematical models) as far removed as possible (which may not be that far (Pimm, 1981: 47-50; Manin, 2007; Lakoff & Núñez, 2000)) from the poetic, metaphor-rich and intersubjective language and the hermeneutical assumptions of the humanities. Although natural and cultural evolution (and, in the latter, the arts and humanities and the sciences) equally depend on continuities as well as what Thomas Kuhn called ‘revolutionary’ alterations,2 in the end both the practice of science and judgments concerning radical revisions of theory belong (as Kuhn noted in his 1969 ‘Postscript’) to the relevant scientific community (Kuhn, 1996). (more...)
Readings
- Donald Favareau
- The Evolutionary History of Biosemiotics
- Thomas A. Sebeok
- Semiotics and the Biological Sciences: Initial Conditions
- Kalevi Kull
- Jakob von Uexküll: An Introduction
- Kalevi Kull
- Organism As a Self-Reading Text: Anticipation and Semiosis
- Kalevi Kull and Jesper Hoffmeyer
- Thure von Uexküll 1908-2004
- Jesper Hoffmeyer
- Epilogue to Semiotics: Biology Is Immature Biosemiotics
- Jesper Hoffmeyer
- Semiotic Freedom: An Emerging Force
- Kalevi Kull
- Biosemiotics: To Know, What Life Knows
- Kalevi Kull, Terrence Deacon, Claus Emmeche, Jesper Hoffmeyer, Frederik Stjernfelt
- Theses on Biosemiotics: Prolegomena to a Theoretical Biology
- Søren Brier
- Cybersemiotics: An Evolutionary World View Going Beyond Entropy and Information into the Question of Meaning
- Frederik Stjernfelt
- The Semiotic Body
- Günther Witzany
- Plant Communication from Biosemiotic Perspective: Differences in Abiotic and Biotic Signal Perception Determine Content Arrangement of Response Behavior. Context Determines Meaning of Meta-, Inter- and Intraorganismic Plant Signaling
- John Deely
- The Green Book: The Impact of Semiotics on Philosophy'
- John Deely
- A Dialogue: "A Sign is What!?" ("a sign is that which presupposes an object")
- John Deely : A Sign Is What? Original written dialogue
See also John Deely's Bibliography Dramatic Reading in Three Voices: 'A Sign is What?' - Terrence Deacon – Language and Complexity: Evolution Inside Out
- Gregory Bateson
- Chapters 2 and 3 of Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity
- Gregory Bateson and Mary Catherine Bateson
- Chapters 2 and 3 of Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred
- Peter Harries-Jones
- Bioentropy, Aesthetics and Meta-dualism: The Transdisciplinary Ecology of Gregory Bateson
- Paul Cobley
- Semioethics, Voluntarism and Anti-humanism
- Susan Petrilli
- Significs and Semioethics. Places of the Gift in Communication Today
- Wendy Wheeler
- Gregory Bateson and Biosemiotics: Transcendence and Animism in the 21st Century