Abstract
Although neither a biologist nor a biologist manqué, visual artist and design analyst Martin Krampen is the author of one of the most seminal “turning-point” texts in biosemiotics. Phytosemiotics – the selection that is presented here – is invoked in almost every published overview or introduction to the field (e.g., Barbieri 2001, Deely 1990, Favareau 2007, Kull 2003, Sebeok 2001), and is widely-acknowledged as the text that expanded the purview of Sebeok’s zoösemiotic project into the full-blown examination of sign relations pertinent to any living system (and, as at least one pre-eminent semiotician will argue, even beyond).
Martin Krampen (1928– )
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- 1.
The word also appears throughout the biosemiotic literature as zoösemiotics, an orthographical convention initiated by John Deely in 1990, “to prevent a misunderstanding that I have actually encountered,” he explains, “whereby this rich realm of investigation has been unwittingly reduced in hearer’s minds to the study of sign systems among captive animals” (1990: 29).
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Included in this volume as Chapter Nine.
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Indeed, perhaps nowhere is anthropomorphism more fully understood for the fallacy in reasoning that it is – and is therefore studiously avoided and admonished – than in biosemiotics, which insists upon acknowledging both the commonality and the differences in naturally evolved sign systems. The discipline’s foundational insistence on such vigilant non-conflation, then, makes it particularly ironic – and unfortunate – that upon first encountering the word “biosemiotics”, the mistaken idea that comes to mind for many people is that the project must be advocating that all non-human organisms “think like humans.” Yet this is the one notion that is universally considered to be anathema throughout biosemiotics, which is why I often recommend Terrence Deacon’s masterful debunking of this “exactly backwards” idea – his 1997 The Symbolic Species, excerpts of which are included in this volume as Chapter Eighteen – to those encountering the often easily misinterpreted texts of biosemiotics for the first time.
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For reference to this literature, please see footnote 5.
- 5.
Baluska et al. (2006) provides an excellent overview of the current state of the art in plant behavior and plant signaling studies; the scientific peer-review journals Plant Physiology, Trends in Plant Science, and Plant Signaling and Behavior report the latest findings in the field; and Simons (1992) and Attenborough (1995) provide readable and informative introductory texts. See also the Bibliography and Further Readings section in this volume for a list of similarly relevant texts.
- 6.
An English translation of Jakob von Uexküll’s “Bedeutungslehre” (“The Theory of Meaning”) will appear, with an Introduction by Thure von Uexküll, in Semiotica in 1982.
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Favareau, D. (2009). Phytosemiotics. In: Essential Readings in Biosemiotics. Biosemiotics, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9650-1_8
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