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The Biosemiotic Glossary Project: Agent, Agency

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Abstract

The current article is the first in a series of review articles addressing biosemiotic terminology. The biosemiotic glossary project is inclusive and designed to integrate views of a representative group of members within the biosemiotic community based on a standard survey and related publications. The methodology section describes the format of the survey conducted in November–December 2013 in preparation of the current review and targeted on the terms ‘agent’ and ‘agency’. Next, I summarize denotation, synonyms and antonyms, with special emphasis on the denotation of these terms in current biosemiotic usage. The survey findings include ratings of nine citations defining or making use of the two terms. I provide a summary of respondents’ own definitions and suggested term usage. Further sections address etymology, connotations, and related terms in English and other languages. A section on the notions’ mainstream meaning vs. their meaning in biosemiotics is followed by attempt at synthesis and conclusions. Although there is currently no consensus in the biosemiotic community on what constitutes a semiotic agent, i.e., an agent in the context of semiosis (the action of signs), most respondents agree that core attributes of an agent include goal-directedness, self-governed activity, processing of semiosis and choice of action, with these features being vital for the functioning of the living system in question. I agree that these four features are constitutive of biosemiotic agents, and stipulate that biosemiotic agents fall within three major categories, namely 1) sub-organismic biosemiotic agents, 2) organismic biosemiotic agents and 3) super-organismic biosemiotic agents.

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Notes

  1. In 2002, Emmeche, Kull and Stjernfelt wrote (p. 25) that “[a]ccording to our knowledge, the only published biosemiotic glossary until now has been the one compiled by Thure von Uexküll (1982b) specifically for the translation of Jakob von Uexküll’s Bedeutungslehre” – cf. J. von Uexküll 1982a.

  2. Sedov and Chebanov 2009 includes 20 central semiotic terms (section 4.2.3), 24 central biosemiotic terms (section 4.2.5), eight terms related to genetics (section 4.2.6), six terms related to neurophysiology (section 4.2.7), 12 terms related to ethology/ecology (section 4.2.8), and five terms related to evolution (section 4.2.9), altogether 75 glossary entries, among other material.

  3. In response to a draft of this article, one member of the Editorial Board claimed that there is consensus on the definition provided here. Others, however, appeared to disagree. If nothing else, some biosemioticians find this definition poor and lacking of semioticity, if not outright wrong. One member of the Editorial Board thought such a notion of agency will”align biosemiotics with artificial intelligence or cognitive neurophysiology”. The same scholar noted that agency typically”evokes a process of recursion” and interpreted the current article as implying that”all is linearity of agent-objects, in which even subjects become objects”. Another member of the Editorial Board observed that agency need not be”reduced to the linear, narrow, sociological, unsemiotic assumptions serving as backbone in this essay”, and asked:”where is emergence?”. This scholar further remarked that”the established assumptions about agency in fields so often un- or anti-semiotic, should not be held up as useful for semiotics”. Coincidentally, the term ‘sociological’ was also applied in a negative sense by one of the reviewers of this article, who characterised it as a”quasi-sociological analysis”.

  4. URL: https://www.academia.edu/5116024/Questionnaire_distributed_in_the_biosemiotic_community_as_part_of_the_biosemiotic_glossary_project_conducted_by_Biosemiotics.

  5. In three cases the questionnaire was filled in an inconsistent manner. In two of these cases the respondent’s real intention was clarified by email.

  6. In these nine citations, the terms ‘agent’ and ‘agency’ have been marked in bold. Notably, in the questionnaire and to some extent in this review article, these nine citations are taken out of context, as possible definitions. Detailed reports from closer readings, in context, would of course be valuable in some cases, but this is neither possible nor necessary within the framework of the current article.

  7. In the full sentence there is a reference to Sebeok 1979: 26.

  8. Sedov and Chebanov 2009 mentions the English term ‘agency’ in the entry “Субъект (subject)” (section 4.2.5.9). As it happens, this refers directly to Emmeche et al. 2002 and its entry ‘subject’ (p. 30, see above). This supports Emmeche, Kull and Stjernfelt’s implicit interpretation of ‘subjecthood’ as a synonym for ‘agency’. The Russian term ‘агентство’ [agency] is not used in Sedov and Chebanov 2009; the term ‘агент’ [agent] only in the in our context non-substantial sense of ‘инфекционного агента’ [infectious agent].

  9. ‘Agēns’ or ‘agentis’ is also a Latin adjective meaning ‘effective’ (Collins Latin Dictionary 1997).

  10. In a somewhat similar vein, Harries-Jones (1995: 15) describes the way in which Gregory Bateson argued that concepts based on the primacy of human agency, primacy of human rationality, and primacy of human control must be abandoned. Instead, we must build on an understanding of recursive communication, knowledge of which can overcome the divide in our thinking between humanity and nature.” In Bateson’s own, critical words (2000: 318),”a difference which makes a difference is an idea or unit of information. […] But this is not how the average Occidental sees the event sequence of tree felling. He says,”I cut down the tree” and he even believes that there is a delimited agent, the”self,” which performed a delimited”purposive” action upon a delimited object.” In a biosemiotic understanding, however, agency is always relational.

  11. I refer to “non-semiotic systems” here not because the systems mentioned in medicine and veterinary science cannot potentially be described as semiotic, but because they are in fact not described as such in current terminology.

  12. Cf. Cobley’s mention of Archer in the Appendix’ “Supplement to Section 7. Mainstream meaning vs. meaning in biosemiotics”.

  13. Speaking of economics, ‘travel agent’ is a central example of agent qua representative.

  14. If we compare this terminology with that of AGENT 5, we can note first that ‘principal’ corresponds to ‘agent’ in Sharov’s vocabulary and ‘agent’ to ‘subagent’, and second that in organization theory the behaviour of ‘agents’ (i.e., subagents) is not regarded as ‘programmed’ but far more uncertain.

  15. Incidentally, for Aristotle (2002 [c330 BC/c348-347 BC]) the question of the ‘First Mover’ – first agent, so to speak – was central. This ideal agent is also referred to as the ‘Prime Mover’ or ‘Unmoved Mover’. In Deely’s words (2001: 255), “Aristotle came to think of the ‘Prime Mover’, the ‘Mover that moves without being moved’, in terms of the highest form of distinguished causality, and in terms of thought rather than of transitive action”.

  16. This is consistent with the scheme of levels of biosemiosis presented in Tønnessen and Tüür (2014: 14).

  17. On a related note, Sebeok (1991: 22) remarked that the capacity for treating messages “distinguishes [all terrestrial life forms] more from the nonliving – except for human agents, such as computers or robots, that can be programmed to simulate communication – than any other traits often cited.”

  18. Regarded as belonging to theory of science, the biosemiotic glossary project thus involves both descriptive and normative theory of science.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been carried out thanks to the support of 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). I would like to thank my fellow editors, Alexei Sharov and Timo Maran, for contributing to designing the biosemiotic glossary project and for important feedback on this specific article. Furthermore I thank two reviewers of this paper for critical comments, and the respondents to the first survey for their contributions. I would also like to thank members of the Editorial Board of Biosemiotics for providing feedback – particularly Peter Harries-Jones, Myrdene Anderson, Günther Witzany, Claus Emmeche and Victoria Alexander. Finally I am grateful to Kalevi Kull for providing references for two biosemiotic glossaries, and to Sergey Chebanov for sending me Sedov and Chebanov 2009.

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Tønnessen, M. The Biosemiotic Glossary Project: Agent, Agency. Biosemiotics 8, 125–143 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-015-9229-0

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