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

Summary/Abstract: In the late-life summation of his work in which the above quote appears, semiotician extraordinaire Thomas Sebeok — one of whose dreams was to found an International Biosemiotics Society — explicitly invokes philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to argue that: Both normal science and [scientific] revolutions are community-based activities. To discover and analyze them, one must first unravel the changing community structure of the sciences over time. […Because] a paradigm governs […] not a subject matter but rather a group of practitioners [and therefore] any such study of paradigm-directed or paradigm-shattering research must begin by locating the responsible group or groups. (Kuhn 1962: 179–180).

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