Biosemiotics

Opening remarks

Sebeok’s Razor and the Sign of Three: Hoffmeyer, Chomsky and Mandelbrot Paul Deshusses   This presentation will be based on historical archival research conducted at the Thomas Sebeok Archive in Bloomington Indiana, and will review four emblematic and revealing correspondence the researcher held. Sebeok’s three chosen interlocutors for this presentation are Jesper Hoffmeyer, Benoît Mandelbrot, […]

Wonder and Embodiment: On Hoffmeyer’s biosemiotic aesthetics Jamin Pelkey Among the many ideas earmarked for ongoing development in Jesper Hoffmeyer’s oeuvre, his sketches of a biosemiotic aesthetics are among the most promising for dispelling pernicious illusions of alienation between human consciousness and the natural world and for healing the untold trauma these illusions have caused. […]

The Concept of Umweb: On the Linkages between Umwelten Kalevi Kull Umwelt, the concept introduced by Jakob von Uexküll, has been commonly defined as the subjective world of organism. Once an organism can make distinctions, once it uses signs and can choose, there should also be its umwelt – its world with meanings. On a […]

Biosemiotic Bottom-Up Emergence in the Key of Teilhard de Chardin Yogi Hendlin & Daniel Kamp What are the cultural implications of understanding how evolutionary biological constraints gives rise to them? (Cobley 2016) Biosemiotic constraints through iterated interactions between individuals lead to a ‘pattern of variety-in-unity’ (Teilhard de Chardin 1961, p. 18). Biosemiotics from an evolutionary […]

Human Umwelten at the Crossroads of Biosemiotics, Biopower, Biopolitics and Self-Technology Lei Han The connection between biosemiotics, biopower and biopolitics has been a subject of debate among scholars, but there is still much scope for further research. With particular recourse to the biosemiotic concept of human Umwelten, this paper investigates this connection and further elaborates […]

Does Biosemiotics Need a Theory of Reading? Paul Cobley Central to biosemiotics is the process of interpretation, which takes place across all species of life. General semiotics has been enlivened by the concept of ‘the text’ and the concomitant act of ‘reading’ (Lotman 1964), with interpretation embedded in it. The term ‘reading’ clearly invokes a […]

Preliminary Connections with Semiotics in Linguistic Anthropology As a newcomer to the field of Biosemiotics, I find the Biosemiotics Glossary Project a fascinating example of intentional interdisciplinary and intercultural communication.  Linguists within anthropology have long worked on language contact, i.e. the emergence, maintenance, and evolution of new registers within their cultural contexts. The building of […]

Structures of Animal Utterances Seen as Aesthetics – and as Communication. Semiotic perspectives on functions of so-called animal beauty   Due to a dramatic increase of research in ethology and zoo-communication over the last decades biosemiotics has now access to an extensive amount of empirical studies of how and why animals structure their utterances. Research […]

Semiotics of potential meanings Because semiosis is coextensive with living and life-dependent semiotic agents, meanings (relations of entities to something else that is significant for agents) exist only on condition that semiotic agency exists capable of using/interpreting them. However, meanings can be actual or potential, depending on whether they are interpreted by semiotic agents at […]

Discursivity and semiotic complexity as driving the shape of animal choice and human freedom Biosemiotics, it seems, holds the key not only to understanding life but also to one of the more intractable issues that has been bewildering philosophy for a long while – the question of freedom. If we are to try and reconcile […]

Danger Modeling: Meaning-generation in Three Dimensions In the struggle for existence, any known species of organisms must avert danger to ensure survival. To do that, they need to identify—or model—it in ways that are specific to their species and actualized in concrete situations. This is an act of generating meaning that falls perfectly within the […]

An Evening with Jesper Hoffmeyer   In this half-hour video presentation, Jesper Hoffmeyer recounts his early days as a “positivist” biochemist, his involvement with the radical student movement in Denmark and Paris in 1968, and how he came to help initiate the current project of biosemiotics – as well as how he sees the future […]

In 2019, shortly after the death of our dear friend and colleague, Jesper Hoffmeyer, a number of us began making plans for a Memorial Conference in his honour to take place the following spring at the University of Copenhagen. The arrival of the COVID pandemic in March of that year put an end to that plan, as international travel […]