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How Can the Study of the Humanities Inform the Study of Biosemiotics?

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Abstract

This essay – a collection of contributions from 10 scholars working in the field of biosemiotics and the humanities – considers nature in culture. It frames this by asking the question ‘Why does biosemiotics need the humanities?’. Each author writes from the background of their own disciplinary perspective in order to throw light upon their interdisciplinary engagement with biosemiotics. We start with Donald Favareau, whose originary disciplinary home is ethnomethodology and linguistics, and then move on to Paul Cobley’s contribution on general semiotics and Kalevi Kull’s on biosemiotics. This is followed by Cobley (again) with Frederick Stjernfelt who contribute on biosemiotics and learning, then Gerald Ostdiek from philosophy, and Morten Tønnessen focusing upon ethics in particular. Myrdene Anderson writes from anthropology, while Timo Maran and Louise Westling provide a view from literary study. The essay closes with Wendy Wheeler reflecting on the movement of biosemiotics as a challenge, often via the ecological humanities, to the kind of so-called ‘postmodern’ thinking that has dominated humanities critical thought in the universities for the past 40 years. Virtually all the matters gestured to in outline above are discussed in much more satisfying detail in the topics which follow.

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Notes

  1. With this formulation, and with this collective manifesto as a whole, we attempt to specify and develop the thesis on “semiotics as a bridge”, which has been argued for on several earlier occasions. (See, for e.g., Perron et al. 2000.)

  2. “[...] Art means mastering the world (modelling the world) in a conditional situation. [...] Works of art [...] can increase the amount of information stored in them. This unique characteristic of works of art makes them similar to biological systems and gives them an extremely special place among everything created by the mankind. [...] Artistic models are a unique combination of scientific and play-type models, which simultaneously organize both the intellect and behaviour. In comparison to art, play is without content, while science is without effect” (Lotman 2011 [1967]: 265; 268; 269).

  3. That Lotman’s approach to semiotics of culture can be productively used for deriving the principles for biosemiotics, has been demonstrated (e.g., in Kull 2015).

  4. The musings presented here are developed elsewhere. In Ostdiek (2012), I argue that self-awareness exists as a consequence of multiple scales of post biotic phenomena exerting selective pressure on the interactions of living things. In Ostdiek (2016), I argue that symbiosis with post-biotic living things distinguishes human experience from that of other animals. In Ostdiek (2015), I argue that religion, philosophy and science form a Neo-Peircean trinity wherein (proto)religion represents the binding of interpretation into interpretant, which results in and is the presence of mind, which is furthered by checking itself against the objects of the signs of which it is composed, as well as against itself. Should the argumentation of these essays prevail, the notions I present here become a mere matter of course.

  5. Ayn Rand (1905–1982) was a libertarian, and a defender of capitalism and ethical egoism.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies for encouraging the affirmation of the interdisciplinary nature of biosemiotics by suggesting the compilation of this multi-contributor essay on the importance of the humanities in the scientifically grounded biosemiotic endeavour.

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Favareau, D., Kull, K., Ostdiek, G. et al. How Can the Study of the Humanities Inform the Study of Biosemiotics?. Biosemiotics 10, 9–31 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-017-9287-6

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