Organisms Reshape Sign Relations

Abstract

A key feature of biosemiotics is, in contrast with traditional semiotics, that it considers the dynamics of semiosis at multiple time scales, and emphasizes the active role organisms have in reshaping sign relations. Historically, semiotics has been focused either on the structural properties of signs systems or on the relations between sign vehicles, objects, and human interpretations. Questions about the origin and dynamics of sign relations have rarely been raised. Uexküll, who developed the foundational ideas of biosemiotics, was the first to propose that objects in the environment have specific meanings for different organisms. In his biological perspective, organisms have a pivotal role in developing their meaning relations with the environment. Uexküll (1926: 317) further observed that[t]he external world offers to the organism a certain number of properties separated in space and in time, from which to select, and therewith the possibility of making a poorer or a richer surrounding-world [Umwelt]. But the external world itself takes no part in the selection, which has to be made by the organism without external assistance.Uexküll's understanding of evolution departed from Darwin's ideas of environmentallydriven natural selection. He thought that organisms are active players in evolution, and that embryogenesis and animal behavior are mediated by the meanings that are associated with various objects (Magnus 2011; Brentari 2015: 60).The dynamic nature of sign relations and meanings has been emphasized e.g. in studies of child development in humans. Both Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky noted the role of sign-mediated processes in child development and described the developmental Biosemiotics (2015) 8:361-365

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