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Marcello Barbieri 《Biosemiotics》2009,2(2):221-245
Biosemiotics is the synthesis of biology and semiotics, and its main purpose is to show that semiosis is a fundamental component of life, i.e., that signs and meaning exist in all living systems. This idea started circulating in the 1960s and was proposed independently from enquires taking place at both ends of the Scala Naturae. At the molecular end it was expressed by Howard Pattee’s analysis of the genetic code, whereas at the human end it took the form of Thomas Sebeok’s investigation into the biological roots of culture. Other proposals appeared in the years that followed and gave origin to different theoretical frameworks, or different schools, of biosemiotics. They are: (1) the physical biosemiotics of Howard Pattee and its extension in Darwinian biosemiotics by Howard Pattee and by Terrence Deacon, (2) the zoosemiotics proposed by Thomas Sebeok and its extension in sign biosemiotics developed by Thomas Sebeok and by Jesper Hoffmeyer, (3) the code biosemiotics of Marcello Barbieri and (4) the hermeneutic biosemiotics of Anton Marko?. The differences that exist between the schools are a consequence of their different models of semiosis, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. In reality they go much deeper and concern the very nature of the new discipline. Is biosemiotics only a new way of looking at the known facts of biology or does it predict new facts? Does biosemiotics consist of testable hypotheses? Does it add anything to the history of life and to our understanding of evolution? These are the major issues of the young discipline, and the purpose of the present paper is to illustrate them by describing the origin and the historical development of its main schools. 相似文献
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Eliseo Fernández 《Biosemiotics》2008,1(3):347-359
Biosemiotics—a discipline in the process of becoming established as a new research enterprise—faces a double task. On the
one hand it must carry out the theoretical and experimental investigation of an enormous range of semiotic phenomena relating
organisms to their internal components and to other organisms (e.g., signal transduction, replication, codes, etc.). On the
other hand, it must achieve a philosophical re-conceptualization and generalization of theoretical biology in light of the
essential role played by semiotic notions in biological explanation and modeling. This paper attempts to contribute to the
second task by tracing some aspects of the historical evolution of explanatory models in biology. In so doing, a parallel
can be drawn between the present status of biosemiotics and that of physics during the early decades of the last century.
By following the career of the concept instrument (organon) in Aristotelian science, we revisit historical stages of the antithetical (but often complementary) roles of mechanical
and teleological forms of explanation. The impact of the introduction of the organic codes in biology is seen to be somewhat
analogous to that of the introduction of the quantum of action in physics. Faced with intractable empirical facts, physicists
combined experimental results and bold philosophical speculation to create quantum physics—a wider, deeper framework that
accommodates the new facts through a wholesale reformulation of the classical ideas. Essential to this development was the
articulation of the epistemic functions of instruments, which was absent from classical physics. Similarly, the consideration
of the role of instruments in biology may lead to a synthesis of Aristotelian and Kantian intuitions within a wider framework
capable of joining now separate perspectives, such as Jablonka’s four-fold view of inheritance information, Barbieri’s theory
of artifactual copymakers and codemakers, and recently developed models of causation based on the idea of manipulative interventions.
相似文献
Eliseo FernándezEmail: |
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Marcello Barbieri 《Biosemiotics》2009,2(1):19-30
The existence of different types of semiosis has been recognized, so far, in two ways. It has been pointed out that different
semiotic features exist in different taxa and this has led to the distinction between zoosemiosis, phytosemiosis, mycosemiosis,
bacterial semiosis and the like. Another type of diversity is due to the existence of different types of signs and has led
to the distinction between iconic, indexical and symbolic semiosis. In all these cases, however, semiosis has been defined
by the Peirce model, i.e., by the idea that the basic structure is a triad of ‘sign, object and interpretant’, and that interpretation
is an essential component of semiosis. This model is undoubtedly applicable to animals, since it was precisely the discovery
that animals are capable of interpretation that allowed Thomas Sebeok to conclude that they are also capable of semiosis.
Unfortunately, however, it is not clear how far the Peirce model can be extended beyond the animal kingdom, and we already
know that we cannot apply it to the cell. The rules of the genetic code have been virtually the same in all living systems
and in all environments ever since the origin of life, which clearly shows that they do not depend on interpretation. Luckily,
it has been pointed out that semiosis is not necessarily based on interpretation and can be defined exclusively in terms of
coding. According to the ‘code model’, a semiotic system is made of signs, meanings and coding rules, all produced by the
same codemaker, and in this form it is immediately applicable to the cell. The code model, furthermore, allows us to recognize
the existence of many organic codes in living systems, and to divide them into two main types that here are referred to as
manufacturing semiosis and signalling semiosis. The genetic code and the splicing codes, for example, take part in processes that actually manufacture biological objects,
whereas signal transduction codes and compartment codes organize existing objects into functioning supramolecular structures.
The organic codes of single cells appeared in the first three billion years of the history of life and were involved either
in manufacturing semiosis or in signalling semiosis. With the origin of animals, however, a third type of semiosis came into
being, a type that can be referred to as interpretive semiosis because it became closely involved with interpretation. We realize in this way that the contribution of semiosis to life
was far greater than that predicted by the Peirce model, where semiosis is always a means of interpreting the world. Life
is essentially about three things: (1) it is about manufacturing objects, (2) it is about organizing objects into functioning
systems, and (3) it is about interpreting the world. The idea that these are all semiotic processes, tells us that life depends
on semiosis much more deeply and extensively than we thought. We realize in this way that there are three distinct types of
semiosis in Nature, and that they gave very different contributions to the origin and the evolution of life. 相似文献
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