Codes and coding: Sebeok’s zoosemiotics and the dismantling of the fixed-code fallacy

The concept of code has a long and varied history across the sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. In the interdisciplinary field of biosemiotics it has been foundational through the idea of code duality (Hoffmeyer and Emmeche 1991); yet it has not been free from controversy and questions of definition (see, for example, Barbieri 2010). One reason why code has been so central to modern semiotics is not simply a matter of the linguistic heritage of semiology and the work of Jakobson who straddled both semiology and semiotics. Rather, it has been the programmatic reconceptualization of code which is woven through the work of modern semiotics’ founder, the father of both biosemiotics and zoosemiotics, Thomas A. Sebeok. A biologist manqué, a communication theorist influenced by cybernetics and a semiotician deriving from the ‘major tradition’ of Peirce, arguably Sebeok’s most systematic considerations of code were offered in his essays on zoosemiotics, largely from his 1963 coining of the term onwards. This article principally revisits the 1972 collection of Sebeok’s zoosemiotic essays and suggests that his particular observations in respect of analogue and digital codes and their relation to evolution in the world of animals harbours an opportunity to rethink and potentially resolve, through an ethological lens, current controversies regarding the status of code

Peirce in contemporary semiotics

This essay traces the fortunes of Peirce in contemporary semiotics. Although many accounts of the development of semiotics refer to both Peirce and Saussure as founding fathers of modern sign study, the tangled history of semiotics in the contemporary academy is far less straightforward. Furthermore, general Peirce scholarship has taken routes that do not always converge with those of semiotics. The essay therefore evaluates the shortcomings and successes of Peircean endeavour in semiotics. In appraising the place of Peirce in contemporary semiotics, close attention is paid to the 69-page review of Short's book, Peirce's Theory of Signs, by John Deely (2006) as an example of what is at stake in respect of the issues covered in the essay

“Who goes there?” Reflections on signs and personhood in Christopher Hutton’s Integrationism and the Self

Review of Integrationism and the Self: Reflections on the Legal Personhood of Animals [Series Routledge Advances in Communication and Linguistic Theory] by Christopher Hutton. London: Routledge, 2019, 190 pp.    &nbsp

Specialization, semiosis, semiotics: the 33rd annual meeting of the Semiotic Society of America

Specialization, semiosis, semiotics: the 33rd annual meeting of the Semiotic Society of Americ

Second-order thinking, first-class reasoning

Review article of Brier, S. (2008) Cybersemiotics: Why Information is Not Enough!, Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press

Sign, object, thing: an eternal golden braid

This review argues that The Human Use of Signs (Deely, 1994) is both pivotal and exceptional in the oeuvre of John Deely. It argues that the volume is exceptional because of its unusual explicatory structure and that it is pivotal because of its extended focus on issues arising from the distinction of ‘sign’, ‘object’, and ‘thing’. Among these issues are the idea of the postmodern, objectivity, relation, and the semiotic animal