Framework

September 1, 2010, 8:08 am • Tags: , ,

Biosemiotics investigates the role that sign use plays in life processes. All processes in organisms obey physical laws, the difference from inanimate processes lying in their organisation and being subject to control by coded information.

It uses concepts from semiotics and the study of dynamic sign action in humans as well as elsewhere in nature to answer questions about the biological emergence of meaning, intentionality and a psychic world; questions that are hard to answer within a purely mechanist and physicalist framework.

To define biosemiotics as biology interpreted as sign systems study is to emphasize not only the close relation between biology as we know it and the study of signs, but primarily the profound change of perspective implied when life is considered not just from the perspectives of molecules and chemistry, but as signs conveyed and interpreted by other living signs in a variety of ways, including by means of molecules.

In this sense, biosemiotics takes for granted and respects the complexity of living processes as revealed by the existing fields of biology – from molecular biology to brain science and behavioural studies – however, biosemiotics attempts to bring together separate findings of the various disciplines of biology, including evolutionary biology, into a new and more unified perspective on the central phenomena of the living world, including the generation of function and signification in living systems, from the ribosome to the ecosystem and from the beginnings of life to its ultimate meanings.