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Linguistics, Semiotics, and Philosophy

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Molecular Theory of the Living Cell

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Abstract

Semiotics is the study of signs that dates back to ancient times when farmers predicted the weather from cloud patterns in the sky, or doctors diagnosed diseases based on the symptoms of patients. The American chemist-logician-philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) has made a major contribution to establishing the field of modern semiotics which has been applied to a wide range of disciplines from linguistics to art, to philosophy, and to biology (Sebeok 1990; Emmeche 2002, 2003; Hoffmeyer 1996; Barbieri 2008a, b, c; Fernández 2008). Since signs can be divided into two types – macroscopic (e.g., stop signs) and microscopic (e.g., DNA) – based on their physical sizes, it would follow that semiotics itself can be divided into two branches – macrosemiotics and microsemiotics (Ji 2001, 2002a). Few biologists would deny that DNA molecules are molecular signs, since they encode (or refer to) RNA and protein molecules that are different from themselves. Likewise, few biologists would deny that the cell is the smallest physical system that can read and implement the genetic information/instructions encoded in DNA, leading to the following conclusions:

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  1. Dept. of Pharmacol. & Toxicol. Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA

    Sungchul Ji PhD

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Ji, S. (2012). Linguistics, Semiotics, and Philosophy. In: Molecular Theory of the Living Cell. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2152-8_6

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