Abstract
This is the second article in a series of review articles addressing biosemiotic terminology. The biosemiotic glossary project is designed to integrate views of members within the biosemiotic community based on a standard survey and related publications. The methodology section describes the format of the survey conducted July–August 2014 in preparation of the current review and targeted on Jakob von Uexküll’s term ‘Umwelt’. Next, we summarize denotation, synonyms and antonyms, with special emphasis on the denotation of this term in current biosemiotic usage. The survey findings include ratings of eight citations defining or making use of the term Umwelt. We provide a summary of respondents’ own definitions and suggested term usage. Further sections address etymology, relevant contexts of use, and related terms in English and other languages. A section on the notion’s Uexküllian meaning and later biosemiotic meaning is followed by attempt at synthesis and conclusion. We conclude that the Umwelt is a centerpiece phenomenon, a phenomenon that other phenomena in the living realm are organized around. To sum up Uexküll’s view, we can characterize an Umwelt as the subjective world of an organism, enveloping a perceptual world and an effector world, which is always part of the organism itself and a key component of nature, which is held together by functional cycles connecting different Umwelten. In order to pay respect to Uexküll’s work, we must move from notion to model, from mention of Uexküll’s Umwelt term to actual application of it.
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Notes
From here on, “Uexküll” (without any initial) refers to Jakob von Uexküll, whereas ”T. von Uexküll” refers to his son, Thure von Uexküll.
Some novel research fields of the 20th century, such as cognitive ethology, which work with topics similar to Uexküll, have occasionally integrated the term Umwelt into their vocabulary (see e.g. Burghardt 2008; Bekoff et al. 2002: xi; Allen 2014). However, the term does not hold a central role in the cognitive ethological literature.
Coincidentally, the latest translation of von Uexküll’s work into English, von Uexküll 2010a, 2010b, appeared in the Posthumanities book series. As Paul Cobley remarks in comments to a draft of this article, “the posthumanists and their fellow travellers principally got excited about Umwelt because it was cited and used by Deleuze and then Agamben”.
In contemporary academic literature, some authors use the term “Umwelt” (as in the German original, with a capital U), others “umwelt” (arguing that the word has become naturalized as an English word). It also varies whether the word is italicized – as foreign terms tend to be – or not. In order to be consistent, in this review article we refer to “Umwelt”, unless we cite authors who follow other practices.
The composition of the editorial board was revised, and the advisory board of Biosemiotics was discontinued in the autumn of 2014. At the time of the survey, however, the old structure was still in place.
Including all registered participants at the 14th Gathering in Biosemiotics (London June 30th to July 4th 2014), and members of the editorial and advisory board of Biosemiotics.
“Specialization(s) (by training/scientific activities): Please mark one or more boxes with a cross (X).”
One of which with the input “somewhat”.
For example, six respondents reported having both semiotics and philosophy as specialties, and four respondents indicated having both semiotics and biology as specialties, with two respondents reporting having all three fields as specialties.
Https://www.academia.edu/, a social media website for academics.
January 28th 2016.
In response to a draft of this article, Tim Ireland notes that the authors ”do not offer a definition/explanation of the word ´environment´.” We have not found room for a comprehensive description of that term within the scope of this article.
“Jede Umwelt eines Tieres bildet einen sowohl räumlich wie zeitlich, wie inhaltlich abgegrenzten Teil aus der Erscheinungswelt des Beobachters” (von Uexküll 1980: 281).
“Die Umwelt ist immer nur jener Teil der Umgebung, der auf die erregbare Substanz des Tierkörpers wirkt” (249).
At the same time, the subject is conceptually placed in the centre of the Um-Welt (environment) which surrounds the subject.
However, some Czechoslovakian philosophers have used the translation ‘osvětí’ (meaning something akin to ‘awareness’, consciousness) for Umwelt.
Peter Harries-Jones asks: “What if Uexküll’s intention in using “Planmässigkeit” was to refer to a “propositional order” or, more simply, “family (species?) of rules (habits?)” in the same manner as Wittgenstein and/or Gregory Bateson used in their discussions of subjectivity? He further notes that “Bateson takes recursive feedback to be the means by which organisms learn and act. Is this not the case with Uexküll as well?” If Harries-Jones´ interpretation of von Uexküll is correct, there would likely be less reason for discontent with this term. He furthermore remarks that “[t]he possibility that Uexküll acknowledged circularity or recursiveness in levels of response (functional circles) as a key aspect of sentience seems almost absent in the whole discussion of Umwelt presented above.”
This contrasts with the comparable formulation in the first survey, where respondents were prompted to state how the usage of the terms ‘agent’ and ‘agency’ in biosemiotics differs from mainstream usage (cf. Tønnessen 2015: 138). This question needed rephrasing, since there is in the case of the term ‘Umwelt’ no sharp distinction between biosemiotic term usage on one hand and mainstream term usage on the other, given that biosemioticians are in contemporary times some of the most prominent term users.
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Acknowledgments
Tønnessen’s and Magnus´ work in this project has been supported by the research project “Animals in Changing Environments: Cultural Mediation and Semiotic Analysis” (EEA Norway Grants/Norway Financial Mechanism 2009–2014 under project contract no. EMP151). We would like to thank the peer-reviewers for their comments, an to thank members of the editorial board (specifically Paul Cobley, Peter Dittrich, Peter Harries-Jones, Tim Ireland) and a respondent to the survey (Anton Markoš) for providing useful feedback on a draft of this paper.
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Tønnessen, M., Magnus, R. & Brentari, C. The Biosemiotic Glossary Project: Umwelt. Biosemiotics 9, 129–149 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-016-9255-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-016-9255-6