Abstract
There is renewed interest in questions of ontology in various fields, as there has been in biosemiotics. But for umwelt theory, ontology needs to be approached in particular ways, in order to avoid it from being yet another “philosophy of access”, part and parcel of the epistemology-ontology dyad, where “ontology” is the leftover of epistemology, or any sort of subjective constitution of things. The article engages in philosophical considerations about what kinds of assumptions and preliminary considerations should be made for a semiosic ontology that was multiple, relational, and irreducible, with the principle goal being to engage with some terminological issues at the meeting point of ontology and umwelt theory. Ontography is proposed as a name for a low-key descriptive engagement with non-human umwelts considered as “worldings”, and maieutics as a particular attitude, or ethos, for the practical situation of direct inaccessibility of nonhuman umwelts. Parallels are drawn with the ontological turn in anthropology, which has also successfully engaged with alterity. A comparative study of umwelts should consider the ontological self-determination of the nonhuman other.
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Notes
Ontology as the “study of what is” and meta-ontological commitment are purportedly different; yet since the entire truth of ontological claims is made dependent on claims of a theory, this distinction remains a paradigmatic example of a “philosophy of access” (Harman, 2005) where the entirety of an explanation remains on the side of “representation” (broadly construed), and can thus be considered irrelevant for present purposes.
With a nod to all the sea urchins and others like them, whose legs move the animal and not the other way around, this transformation should probably be limited to creatures with a central nervous system, at least for the time being.
Latour himself considers phenomenoloy to be last great dying gasp of the Modern Synthesis—a “tightrope walker doing the splits” (ibid.: 59)—but this need not concern us in this limited discussion. Umwelts are sets of relations, they are indeed “over the middle”—but with the corollary that since they are constitutive relations, the relata do not exist in the same shape and form independently of the relations as they do as part of the relations.
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This paper was written with the support of the Estonian Research Council grant PRG314 “Semiotic fitting as a mechanism of biocultural diversity: instability and sustainability in novel environments”.
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Rattasepp, S. Ontography and Maieutics, or Speculative Notes on an Ethos for Umwelt Theory. Biosemiotics 15, 357–372 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-022-09492-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-022-09492-w