What is Biosemiotics? Explained.

 Contents

1. Introduction
2. Definition
3. Main branches
4. History
5. References

Introduction

Biosemiotics is a discipline of semiotics and biology that investigates prelinguistic meaning-making, or the production and interpretation of signs and codes in the biological realm, as well as their communication.
Biosemiotics combines biological and semiotic data to suggest a paradigm change in the scientific perspective of life, in which semiosis (sign process, including meaning and interpretation) is one of its immanent and intrinsic aspects. Friedrich S. Rothschild coined the word biosemiotic in 1962, but it was Thomas Sebeok and Thure von Uexküll who popularised it. The discipline of biosemiotics is separated into theoretical and applied biosemiotics, which both challenge normative notions of biology. 

Biosemiotic insights have also found their way into the humanities and social sciences, such as human-animal studies and human-plant studies.

Definition

Main branches

Biosemiotics can be classified into two categories based on the primary types of semiosis under investigation.

• Vegetative semiotics (also endosemiotics or phytosemiotics) is the study of semiosis at the cellular and molecular level (including the translation processes related to genome and the organic form or phenotype); vegetative semiotics occurs at the cellular and tissue level in all organisms; vegetative semiotics includes prokaryote semiotics, sign-mediated interactions in bacterial communities such as quorum sensing and quorum que
• Anthroposemiotics, or the study of semiotic behaviour in humans, includes zoosemiotics, or the study of animal forms of knowledge; animal semiosis occurs in species having a neuromuscular system.

The terms biopragmatics, biosemantics, and biosyntactics have been used to describe the dominating component of semiosis under investigation.

History

Early pioneers of biosemiotics included Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944), Heini Hediger (1908–1992), Giorgio Prodi (1928– 1987), Marcel Florkin (1900–1979), and Friedrich S. Rothschild (1899–1995), in addition to Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and Charles W. Morris (1903–1979); the founding fathers of the contemporary interdiscipline were Thomas

René Thom (Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques), Yannick Kergosien (Dalhousie University and Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques), and Robert Rosen (Dalhousie University, also a former member of the Buffalo group with Howard H. Pattee) explored the relationships between Semiotics and Biology in the 1980s, using such headings as "Nature Semiotics," "Semiophysics," and "Anticipatory

Biologists Jesper Hoffmeyer, Kalevi Kull, Claus Emmeche, Terrence Deacon, semioticians Martin Krampen, Paul Cobley, philosophers Donald Favareau, John Deely, John Collier, and complex systems scientists Howard H. Pattee, Michael Conrad, Luis M. Rocha, Cliff Joslyn, and León Croizat belong to the contemporary period (as initiated by the Copenhagen-Tartu school).

The Gatherings in Biosemiotics, an annual international conference for biosemiotic research, began in 2001 and has been held every year since.

Marcello Barbieri, Claus Emmeche, Jesper Hoffmeyer, Kalevi Kull, and Anton Markos formed a group of biosemioticians in 2004 to launch a worldwide magazine of biosemiotics. Nova Science Publishers published two issues of the Journal of Biosemiotics under their editorship in 2005, and Springer published Biosemiotics with the same five editors in 2008. Claus Emmeche, Donald Favareau, Kalevi Kull, and Alexei Sharov edited the Biosemiotics (Springer) book series, which began in 2007 and has now released 23 volumes.

Donald Favareau and the five editors named above founded the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies in 2005. In 2009, a group of researchers published a programmatic paper on the fundamental hypotheses of biosemiotics. Essential Readings in Biosemiotics, an 800-page textbook and anthology with bibliography and comments by Donald Favareau, was published in 2010.

In the humanities

Several humanities scholars have engaged with or appropriated ideas from biosemiotics in their own projects since the work of Jakob von Uexküll and Martin Heidegger; conversely, biosemioticians have critically engaged with or reformulated humanistic theories using ideas from biosemiotics and complexity theory. Andreas Weber, for example, has reinterpreted parts of Hans Jonas' views using biosemiotics principles, while biosemiotics has been used to analyse John Burnside's poetry.

In 2021, American philosopher Jason Josephson Storm proposed hylosemiotics, a theory of ontology and communication that Storm believes could help the humanities to advance beyond the linguistic turn, based on biosemiotics and actual study on animal communication.

John Deely's work also exemplifies a collaboration between humanistic and biosemiotic perspectives. Deely was a historian, not a biologist, yet in his basic semiotics works, he explored biosemiotics and zoosemiotics extensively and explained concepts that are pertinent to biosemiotics. [Practicing biosemioticians criticised his concept of physiosemiotics, but Paul Cobley, Donald Favareau, and Kalevi Kull wrote that "the debates on this conceptual point between Deely and the biosemiotics community were always civil and marked by a mutual admiration for the contributions of the other toward the advancement of our understanding of sign relations." 

References