The Biosemiotic Glossary Project: Agent, Agency

What the Humanities Are For

“…First, all semiosis is 'social' in character in that it involves more parties than just one (Cobley and Randviir 2009); secondly, culture, as Sebeok repeatedly emphasized, is just one small compartment of nature; thirdly, as Agamben (1998) and others attest, semiosis 'in nature' is more frequently subject to the vagaries of socio-political forces than we often acknowledge. Nevertheless, agency has become a central theme in biosemiotics (Tønnessen 2014) and is instructive for the question of what the humanities are for. Biosemiotics has identified agency at very lowly biological levels, in the most rudimentary of organisms.…”

The Biosemiotic Glossary Project: Intentionality

“…In 2014, Morten Tønnessen and the editors of Biosemiotics officially launched the Biosemiotic Glossary Project in the effort to: (1) "solidify and detail established terminology" being used in the field of Biosemiotics for the benefit of newcomers and outsiders; and to (2) by involving the entire biosemiotics community, "contribute innovatively in the theoretical development of biosemiotic theory and vocabulary" via the discussions that result (Tønnessen 2015;Stjernfelt, Emmeche, and Kull 2002).…”

“…Accordingly, previous iterations of this project have surveyed biosemioticians and researchers in related fields to share with one another their own particular ways of understanding and employing the terms Agency (Tønnessen 2015), Umwelt (Tønnessen, Magnus and Brentari 2016), and Semiotic Threshold (Higuera and Kull, 2016) in their work and thinking.…”

Composite Agency: Semiotics of Modularity and Guiding Interactions

“…In biology, whole living organisms or groups of interacting organisms are viewed as agents (Burge 2009). The universal features of agents include goal-directedness (or normativity) and self-governed activity (autonomy), which implies the use of internal energy and signs/information for a choice and execution of actions (Tønnessen 2015) (see section 2).…”