Founding a world biosemiotics institution: The International Society for Biosemiotic Studies

Founding a world biosemiotics institution: The International Society for Biosemiotic Studie

Beyond self and other: On the neurosemiotic emergence of intersubjectivity

The explosive growth over the last two decades of neuroscience, cognitive science, and “consciousness studies” as generally conceived, remains as yet unaccompanied by a corresponding development in the establishment of an explicitly semiotic understanding of how the relations of sign exchange at the neuronal level function in the larger network of psychologically accessible sign exchange. This article attempts a preliminary foray into the establishment of just such a neurosemiotic. It takes, as its test case and as its point of departure, recent discoveries from the neurobiological research on viuso-motor transformations and on the widespread cortical phenomena of selectively tuned, single-neuron response to argue for a vision of “intersubjectivity” whereby the ens rationis arising as a function of the neuronal semiosphere may be abstracted, constructed, and shared mutually across agents

How hand movements gain meaning in embodied interaction – An example from adult-child interaction

Kern F. How hand movements gain meaning in embodied interaction – An example from adult-child interaction. In: Favareau D, ed. Co-operative Engagements in Intertwined Semiosis. Essays in Honour of Charles Goodwin. Tatur semiotics library. Vol 19. Tartu: University of Tartu Press; 2018: 199-204

A more developed sign: interpreting the work of Jesper Hoffmeyer

For more than 40 years, Jesper Hoffmeyer has been committed to the idea of developing “a semiotics of nature, or biosemiotics as he chose to call this effort, that could intelligibly explain how all the phenomena of inherent meaning and signification in living nature – from the lowest level of sign processes in unicellular organisms to the cognitive and social behavior of animals – can emerge from a universe that was not so organized and meaningful from the very beginning” (Emmeche et al. 2002: 41). In this volume, over 80 world-class scholars from more than 20 countries select a short quotation taken from any of Jesper Hoffmeyer’s texts and provide their scholarly commentary upon that passage – whether in the form of an analytical explication, a critical disagreement or a conceptual extension – that as they feel asks the questions that need to be asked, proposes the ideas that need to be proposed, or that draws out the implications that need to be so explicitly drawn out, germane to the claims of the selected passage. At once a celebration and a serious academic development of the work of Jesper Hoffmeyer, this landmark volume marks the occasion of his 70th birthday on February 21, 2012

Biosemiotic questions

Abstract This paper examines the biosemiotic approach to the study of life processes by fashioning a series of questions that any worthwhile semiotic study of life should ask. These questions can be understood simultaneously as: (1) questions that distinguish a semiotic biology from a non-semiotic (i.e., reductionist–physicalist) one; (2) questions that any student in biosemiotics should ask when doing a case study; and (3) still currently unanswered questions of biosemiotics. In addition, some examples of previously undertaken biosemiotic case studies are examined so as to suggest a broad picture of how such a biosemiotic approach to biology might be done

A more developed sign: interpreting the work of Jesper Hoffmeyer

For more than 40 years, Jesper Hoffmeyer has been committed to the idea of developing “a semiotics of nature, or biosemiotics as he chose to call this effort, that could intelligibly explain how all the phenomena of inherent meaning and signification in living nature – from the lowest level of sign processes in unicellular organisms to the cognitive and social behavior of animals – can emerge from a universe that was not so organized and meaningful from the very beginning” (Emmeche et al. 2002: 41). In this volume, over 80 world-class scholars from more than 20 countries select a short quotation taken from any of Jesper Hoffmeyer’s texts and provide their scholarly commentary upon that passage – whether in the form of an analytical explication, a critical disagreement or a conceptual extension – that as they feel asks the questions that need to be asked, proposes the ideas that need to be proposed, or that draws out the implications that need to be so explicitly drawn out, germane to the claims of the selected passage. At once a celebration and a serious academic development of the work of Jesper Hoffmeyer, this landmark volume marks the occasion of his 70th birthday on February 21, 2012