BIOSEMIOOTIKA
Biosemiotics

Summary/Abstract: According to a fundamental idea of Juri Lotman, mind and culture are essentially similar. Accordingly, it should be possible to define semiotics as a general theory of mind, or – a study of mind. Indeed, a major development in the semiotics of the last 30 years (as compared to the semiotics of 1960s) demonstrates that semiosis includes about the same area as the one assigned, according to the Aristotelian view, to have a soul. In other words, semiosis is a process that has often been described as life. The biosemiotic project, being fundamentally non-Cartesian and thus denying the substantial dualism of mind and matter, as well as of culture and nature, has intensively studied the mechanisms of semiotic thresholds and as a result redefined the qualitative differences between life and non-life, language and other sign systems, etc. Biosemiotics is thus a part of semiotics dealing with non-linguistic sign processes — the semiosis that occurs in all living organisms. On the other hand, biosemiotics is an extended biology — the study of life that can study such phenomena as biocommunication, organic needs, purposeful behaviour, the emergence of self and internal worlds of organisms, etc. The article gives a brief account of the history of biosemiotics from two perspectives. A history from a longer distance describes it as a version of the epigenetic approach, represented, e.g., by Karl Baer and Jakob von Uexküll. A history from a smaller distance starts from the works of Thomas Sebeok with his contribution to zoosemiotics and a fundamental statement of coextensiveness of life and semiosis. Since the early 1990s, Jesper Hoffmeyer and his colleagues from several other centers have introduced a whole set of biosemiotic concepts, and biosemiotics has become a regular part in many international meetings and publications on semiotics. Since 1992, a course on biosemiotics has also been taught at the University of Tartu. A helpful general biosemiotic classification that uses a model of Charles Peirce, distinguishes between three major types of semiosis. (1) Vegetative semiosis is exclusively iconic, which means it includes recognition, memory, and end-directed behaviour, but is unable to deal either with spatial orientation or with representation of past or future. (2) Animal semiosis starts with the ability of associative learning, which enables representation of space and, thus, indexical relations. However, it still lacks any narrative and linguistic structures. (3) Specifically human semiosis starts together with an ability to form and use symbols, which is accompanied with the universal operations of rearrangement, i.e. counting, combining, and narrating. Symbolic semiosis includes the appearance of time representation. Accordingly, there are three basic semiotic thresholds – the lower semiotic threshold which coincides with the appearance of cellular life, the indexicality threshold that is structurally correspond

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