Abstract1
The present chapter is intended to provide an introductory overview to the history of biosemiotics, contextualizing that history within and against the larger currents of philosophical and scientific thinking from which it has emerged. Accordingly, to explain the origins of this most 21st century endeavour requires effectively tracing – at least to the level of a thumbnail sketch – how the “sign” concept appeared, was lost, and now must be painstakingly rediscovered and refined in science. In the course of recounting this history, this chapter also introduces much of the conceptual theory underlying the project of biosemiotics, and is therefore intended to serve also as a kind of primer to the readings that appear in the rest of the volume. With this purpose in mind, the chapter consists of the successive examination of: (1) the history of the sign concept in pre-modernist science, (2) the history of the sign concept in modernist science, and (3) the biosemiotic attempt to develop a more useful sign concept for contemporary science. The newcomer to biosemiotics is encouraged to read through this chapter (though lengthy and of necessity still incomplete) before proceeding to the rest of the volume. For only by doing so will the disparate selections appearing herein reveal their common unity of purpose, and only within this larger historical context can the contemporary attempt to develop a naturalistic understanding of sign relations be properly evaluated and understood.
1Pages 1-20 of this chapter originally appeared as The Biosemiotic Turn, Part I in the journal Biosemiotics (Favareau 2008). The remaining pages appeared as The Evolutionary History of Biosemiotics in the volume Introduction to Biosemiotics: The New Biological Synthesis (Favareau 2007, in Barbieri, ed.). In keeping with the anthology nature of this volume, I have refrained from substantially changing the original text, though some citations have been updated to reflect the more recent work done by the scholars discussed herein. Accordingly, the bibliographic information for all works published after 2006 appear in the Bibliography and Further Readings at the back of this volume, rather than in the References list at the end of the chapter.
Donald Favareau
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Notes
- 1.
But see Denhizan 2008 for an illuminating reconsideration of the still lingering effects of the Mesopotamian worldview upon subsequent Western epistemology.
- 2.
One can detect some resonance with modernist scepticism in one or two of the minor traditions of the ancient world, most notably those of the “Middle Academy” thinkers Arcesilaus (c. 315–241 BCE) and Carneades (c. 213–129 BCE), and especially the later neo-Pyrrhonean scepticism popularized by Sextus Empiricus (c. 150–225 CE). In the case of the Academicians, however, such doctrine appear to be motivated more by a desire to weaken the stultifying hold that the un-self-critical “dogmatism” of the competing Stoic school then held on the popular imagination, then on the attempt to embark upon anything resembling Descartes’ epistemological program of radical doubt (Long and Sedley 1987). Similarly, the Pyrronean revival of 2nd and 3rd centuries Rome appears to have used the inarguable conclusions of sceptical logic purely instrumentally in the quest to cultivate the spirit of ataraxia, or emotionally detached equanimity, as a “practical philosophy” and recipe for living – a worldview that Diogenes Laertius suggests that Pyrrho may have originally re-fashioned out of the belief systems he encountered in his time in India with Alexander’s army (Burnyet and Frede 1997). Most critically: both schools argued in favor of the foundational epistemological usefulness of precisely those sense-perceptible “appearances” (Pyrro’s phianomena and Carneades’ pithanon) and pragmatic axioms of everyday “folk psychology” (Arcesilaus’ eulogon) that constitute the “mind-dependant illusions” so bewailed by the – let us call them – “Dogmatic Sceptics” of modernity.
- 3.
Indeed, the briefest time spent with either the neo-Platonic theology of Augustine (354–430) or the Aristotelian apologetics of Aquinas (1225–1274) will reveal that ‘naïve realism’ is not a charge that can be levelled against the Latin thinkers (nor their counterparts in the Islamic world, for that matter).
- 4.
An absolutely ordinary – but quite profound, it turns out – definition from the American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin 2006).
- 5.
“A sign is something which, offering itself to the senses, conveys something other than itself to the intellect.” De doctrina christiana II 1, 1963, 33 (trans. Meier-Oeser 2003: o.l.).
- 6.
De- theologized, this is a large part of the contemporary biosemiotic project as well – which is why Augustine’s extra-linguistic notion of the sign will remain important to us as we move from human knowing to animal sensing to cellular self-organization.
- 7.
See especially Deely’s (1985) translation of Poinsot’s Tractatus de Signis and its accompanying “critical apparatus” – as well as Deely’s detailed explication of the works of the Coimbra school in Deely (2001) (esp. pp. 411–484) and of Poinsot’s contribution to a post-modernist theory of perception and understanding in Deely (2007) (passim).
- 8.
Readers interested in pursuing this latter project should find in Tweedale (1990), Magee (1989), Broadie (1989) and especially Deely (2007) inspiration on where to begin. Those wishing more general overviews with which to begin their own investigation into medieval semiotics are strongly urged to consult Eco and Marmo (2000), Kretzmann (1982, 1988), Gill (1999), and Jackson (1969), as well as the relevant chapters in Escbach as Trabant (1983) and Deely (2001).
- 9.
And of modernity, as well, which, although determinedly paying little acknowledgement to its roots in the scholastic tradition has nonetheless inherited unquestioningly the premise that sign relations are human language-like and should be studied accordingly, and has taken this idea to extremes undreamt of by the medievals, as we shall have plenty of opportunity to observe shortly.
- 10.
This wonderfully insightful phrase is from Terrence Deacon’s equally insightful The Symbolic Species (1997: 53), a highly recommended entry point into biosemiotics.
- 11.
It is germane to repeat here Deely’s observation that it is precisely those aspects of Ockham’s writings called the via nominalia that were “presciently called the via moderna” by his successors at Oxford as the High Middle Ages were coming to a close (2001: 395).
- 12.
The argument that universal properties and sign relations are mere mental nominalisms seems sound when applied to the attributions of human culture, such as happiness or beauty. It seems much less sound when applied to the physics of gravity or the ineliminable triadicity of the genetic code – both of which exert real causal influence in the world, while being irreducible to their material particulars. The unique mode of being that is relation, as the sciences of the 20th century will show us, is in eliminable from any kind of scientific explanation applicable to the kind of cosmos we are in. Being, as Aristotle seems to have always understood it, is not a noun, but a verb. It will be many centuries hence, however, before that common sense notion will be retrieved.
- 13.
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation Two: On the Nature of the Mind, 1641 [1973: 80].
- 14.
Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences, 1637 [1973: 24].
- 15.
It would yet be several centuries after Descartes’ attempt to describe the non-minded world of animals as “mere clockwork mechanisms” (1649/1991: 365–6, 374) – and almost 100 years after Lloyd Morgan would deploy his Occamite Canon – before biologist Francis Crick would note that: “While Occam’s razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology” given that the evolution does not organize living beings “parsimoniously” in any straightforward kind of sense. “It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research” warns Crick (1988).
- 16.
The tradition of seeing the human being as the perpetually duped and deceived animal – homo decipi, as it were – would turn out to be one of the most enduring, if unfortunate, tropes of all modernity, snaking its way out of Plato’s cave, through the “revolutionary” pronouncements of Marx and Freud, and to the “revelationary” pronouncements of neuronal and genetic eliminative materialism on the one hand, and the pseudo-postmodernism of “radical deconstructionism” on the other. As I have argued elsewhere (Favareau 2001b), nothing could be more diametrically opposed to the understandings advanced by biosemiotics than this self-regarding yet internally-contradictory stance that I hereby dub “the Fallacy fallacy.”
- 17.
A joke commonly attributed to comedian Steven Wright captures the dilemma well: “Last night I was all alone in my room and I started thinking, “You know, the human brain is probably the most magnificent structure ever created in nature.” …but then I thought: “Wait a minute. Who’s telling me this?”
- 18.
Again, we are in an analogous position when we try to understand how “signs” of any kind – the ink marks on this page, the waggle dance of bees, a voltage change generated in a cortical neuron – comes to signify something other than itself, when there is only, physically, itself. And the answer of course, here and on the genetic level, is that we must look at “information-bearing” things not in their material isolation – where they are, in fact, nothing but themselves – but also in the function that they serve in the system that makes use of them as signs, in order to see how they can be both “nothing but themselves” and “standing for something other than themselves” in the operation of that system. Exploring this logic of relations within the scientific paradigm is, of course, the raison d’être of biosemiotics.
- 19.
Moreover, and by necessity, not every attempt at a science of biological sign-use undertaken even in the last half century can be included in this short history. Such a survey would, of course, be impossible given the space available and would, by necessity, involve long discussions on the history and major figures of comparative psychology, cognitive science, molecular biology, Artificial Intelligence, pharmacology, cognitive neuroscience and much much more. Yet it is only because of such space limitations that even the individual accomplishments of such generally accepted “proto-biosemioticians” as Elia Sercarz (1988), Sorin Sonea (1988), Günter Bentele (1984), Yuri Stepanov (1971), F.S. Rothschild (1962), and Marcel Florkin (1974) are not discussed at length in this overview. This is not to say, however, that the works of these researchers are insignificant to the larger project whose narrative is recounted here. Florkin, Stepanov and Rothschild – a molecular biologist, a text semiotican, and a psychologist, respectively – each independently coined the term “biosemiotic” to describe where they wanted their investigations to be heading. But because no interdisciplinary movement resulted from these individual efforts, I have made the purely editorial decision to refrain from any in-depth discussion of them overview, and the works of Florkin and Rothschild are examined in much detail later in this volume. No slight on my part is intended by these purely editorial decisions, and those wishing to consult the original works are directed to the bibliography, as well as to the more inclusive “pre-histories” of biosemiotics by Sebeok (1998, 2001a) and Kull (1999a, 1999b, 1999c, 2005).
- 20.
As is evident from the footnote above, Thomas A. Sebeok was not the first to coin the compound noun joining “bio” with “semiotics” (again, see Kull (1999a) for a detailed history of the use of the term) – however, it is the specific project that Sebeok initiated and christened as such that is the subject of this history and this book.
- 21.
Deely notes that it was Margaret Mead who, at the end of a contentious conference about animal communication that Sebeok had organized in 1962, proposed the specific form of the word “semiotics” to denote “patterned communication in all modalities, [whether] linguistic or not” (Deely 2004) – an understanding perfectly congruent with Sebeok’s growing conviction that human language “was not much more than that realm of nature where the logosphere – Bakhtin’s dialogic universe – impinges in infant lives and then comes to predominate in normal adult lives” (Sebeok 2001a).
- 22.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (1934– ) distinction between a “field” and a “domain” remained one central to Sebeok’s life and thought. In short: A domain refers to an intellectual culture of shared meanings, definitions, assumptions, rules and evidentiary procedures (such as “science,” or more finely, “medical science”), while a field comprises “all the individuals who act as gatekeepers to the domain…[and who decide] whether a new idea…should be included in the domain” (Csikszentmihalyi 1997: 27–28). And in 1970, Juri Lotman’s Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School was by far the closest thing resembling an established field of disciplinary gatekeepers for the nascent world of international semiotic study (see Sebeok 1998, Kristeva 1994, Kull 1999c).
- 23.
The history of this manuscript’s subsequent loss at the hand of a translator is recounted in Sebeok (1998). Suffice it to note for our purposes that it would not be until twenty years after the event, in 2005, that the English language translation of Lotman’s manuscript would appear in the journal that Lotman himself founded in 1964, Trudy po znakovym sistemam – now known in English as Sign System Studies, Volume 33.1
- 24.
Lotman himself resisted this equivalence (1989: 43), insisting that the ability of cognitive agents to shape the material surround of their environment (Vernadsky’s noosphere) differed from the purely “abstract” cognitive interactions of the semiosphere. The distinction that Lotman fails to draw here – as is so often the case in such discussions about “mind and world” that yet accept the assumptions of Cartesian dualism on some fundamentally under-examined level – is the failure to differentiate between the symbolic level of embodied, biologically based sign processing, and its equally biological iconic and indexical substrates, with which it is on an experiential continuum. Such delineations are critical to the project of a scientifically sound biosemiotics that can yet account for the realities of abstraction and counterfactual reasoning, and we will have much more to say about these delineations presently. For an edifying discussion of the Lotman/Vernadsky controversy, see Chang (2002) and Kull (1999c).
- 25.
Later, Sebeok himself would be instrumental in tracking down the author of an obscure unpublished doctoral dissertation on Peirce and commissioning him to revise the all-but-forgotten manuscript thirty years later for publication. This work (Brent 1993) has since become the definitive biography of Peirce.
- 26.
- 27.
We pass over here, due to the limitations of space, von Uexküll’s influence on the then-developing field of neuroscience, and especially his influence upon one of its principal founders, Charles Scott Sherrington (1857–1952), who credits von Uexküll frequently and whose work on the neurobiology of reflex, posture and muscle movement was a direct outgrowth of von Uexküll’s earlier experiments (Lagerspetz 2001: 646). Suffice it to say that the notion of the “neural net” is already prefigured in Uexküll (1928: 106) – and while many contemporary neuroscientists and roboticists take these notions as their starting points, few have worked their way back to von Uexküll for the purposes of either further enlightenment, nor for the acknowledgement of a debt (but see Fuster (2003) and Ziemke and Sharkey (2001) for exceptions).
- 28.
“Bio-semiotic” premises are implicitly discoverable – though never fully articulated as such – in all of these neurobiologists’ works to some extent, though none save Fuster show any acquaintance with the work of von Uexküll or Peirce that informs much of contemporary biosemiotics.
- 29.
Though perhaps it would be fair to say that Stuart Kauffman eventually did also pursue such a deliberately interdisciplinary project, via his long-standing participation in the Santa Fe Institute.
- 30.
A journal dedicated to the study of “second-order cybernetics, autopoesis and cyber-semiotics” – roughly, the role of feedback and generative recursion in the organization of observing systems, self-maintaining systems, and sign-using systems – Brier’s journal is deeply influenced by the work of biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco J. Varela (1987), cyberneticians Heinz von Foerster (1982) and Ernst von Glasersfeld (1987) as well as the pioneering interdisciplinarity of cybernetician/anthropologist/psychologist Gregory Bateson (1973).
- 31.
- 32.
Many of these papers have since been published in Sign Systems Studies, Vol 30.1 (2002).
- 33.
This history would not be complete without mentioning those related researchers who, although not regular attendees at the Gatherings, continue to produce work that has particular relevance for most biosemioticians. Among these scholars must surely be included Stanley Salthe (1993), Kochiro Matsuno (1999), Luis Rocha (2001), Peter Cariani (2001), Robert Ulanowicz (1986), Mark Bickhard (1999), John Collier (1999), Merlin Donald (1991), David Depew (1996), Bruce Weber (2000) and perhaps most important of all Terrence Deacon (2003), whose 1997 The Symbolic Species is perhaps the clearest and most compelling application of Peircean semiotic to evolutionary biology yet produced. And while Deacon does not identify himself as a ‘biosemiotician’ per se, seminal biosemiotician Claus Emmeche spoke for many when he remarked at the recent Gregory Bateson Centennial Symposium in Copenhagen that “Many biosemioticians consider themselves not only Peirceans, but Deaconians as well.” Accordingly, Deacon’s work is well represented in the present volume.
- 34.
This movement also includes biologist and philosopher of science Zdeněk Neubauer, systems theorist Ervin Laszlo, cognitive scientist Ivan Havel, animal ethologist Karel Kleisner, and geologist Václav Cílek. An excellent English language introduction to their ideas can be found in Havel and Markoš (2002), which collects the proceedings of a conference that also features contributions from Giuseppe Sermonti, Pier Luigi Luisi, and Mae-Wan Ho. Markoš, Grygar et al.’s Life as its own Designer (2009) offers a more in-depth presentation of the group’s ideas.
- 35.
Bibliographic information for works cited in this section, but published after 2006 can be found in the Bibliography and Further Readings section appearing at the end of this volume.
- 36.
It should also be noted here that many of the “non-Peirceans” from outside of the Copenhagen school – such as Prague physiologists Anton Markoš and Fatima Cvrčková – also eschew the idea that formalized equations between “digital signs and bodily (or analog) entities [could] be reduced to an unequivocal correspondence” (Cvrčková and Markoš 2005: 87). Rather, for the majority of more complex organisms (and certainly for mammals), the action of interpretation upon a sign is “its own shortest description” (a la the incompressible algorithms discussed by Kauffman 2000).
- 37.
In all fairness, not all members of the so-called Copenhagen tradition subscribe to this line of thinking – Taborsky (2001) and Christiansen (2002), for example, certainly do not – nor, indeed, did Peirce himself. Artmann (in preparation) and Barbieri (2001, this volume) have argued convincingly, however, that the assumption that true sign processes start with life (and, for all practical purposes, vice-versa) is retrievable in the works of Hoffmeyer, Emmeche, Kull, et al., and I do believe that this assertion is a reasonable one.
- 38.
Personal correspondence with the author April 21, 2006.
- 39.
- 40.
Bruno Latour (1987) distinguishes these two phases in the construction of knowledge as, first, “science in the making” – which is characterized by uncertainty, debate, personality, happenstance and abduction; followed by “ready made science” – which is characterized by relatively uncontentious induction using formulae, models, vocabulary, theories, methodologies and technologies that have been vetted in the earlier phase. The layperson’s notion of “science” is generally the latter; the scientist’s experience, the former – but as Latour argues against Kuhn, the relation between the two enterprises is not revolutionary struggle, but evolutionary dialectic.
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Favareau, D. (2009). Introduction: An Evolutionary History of Biosemiotics. In: Essential Readings in Biosemiotics. Biosemiotics, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9650-1_1
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