This article addresses the conception of the environment (Umwelt) of the Estonian physiologist and biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944). Uexküll’s core idea is that the Umwelt of animals and humans is a species-specific subjective construction. Two basic dynamics co-operate in this process: the first is a transcendental elaboration of the stimuli from outside reality, which creates potential signs ready to be used for the animal’s behavioural needs; the second is the re-assignation (Hinausverlegung) of these signs to the outside world. Uexküll’s theory about the construction of the Umwelt can only be understood by acknowledging both aspects (the transcendental and the semiotic) and keeping them together. A criticism could therefore be made of those interpretations of Uexküll’s thought that view the species-specific Umwelt as the product of a passive perception process. Finally, two critical points in Uexküll’s theory will be focused on: the risk of “species-specific solipsism” and an inadequate consideration of two peculiarities of the human semiotic environment (its high intra-specific variability and its inclusiveness towards other species’ Umwelten)

Key words: species-specific umwelt, transcendental subject, endosemiotics, ethology, biosemiotics

This paper examines dance instruction and choreographic work within Western contemporary dance practice. Its goal is to re-contextualize the later Wittgenstein’s ideas regarding the nature of our linguistic competence and cognitive abilities at large in the light of the rise of enactivism. I discuss examples within dance practice that show that cognition is distributed across brain, body and environment. In the process, this paper supports a good number of sensorimotor enactivism’s fundamental claims. However, its main purpose is to bring insight into embodied cognition that is non-representational at root, which could motivate the radical version of enactivism. In this regard, I provide evidence against the conception of perceptual experience as like snapshots. I also argue that sensorimotor enactivism – due to its focus on visual experience – is held captive by such a picture, despite its battle against it. In this regard, I refute sensorimotor enactivism’s idea that practical knowledge mediates in perceptual experience by means of examples. I explore instances of non-conceptual, non-mediated perceptual experience that are a product of embodied engagements with the environment. As a result, I propose an enactivist view of embodied cognition that accounts for non-representational processes.

Key words: dance, wittgenstein, embodied cognition, extended cognition, enactivism.

In linking evolution, biosemiotics and languaging, analysis of meaning is extended by investigation of natural innovation. Rather than ascribe it to internal or external content, meaning comes first. Ecological, evolutionary and developmental flux defy content/ vehicle distinctions. In the eco-evo-devo frame, I present the papers of the Special Issue, pose questions, and identify a direction of travel. Above all, meaning connects older views of semiosis with recent work on ecosystemic living. Whilst aesthetics and languaging can refer to evolving semiotic objects, nature uses bio-signals, judging experience, and how culture (and Languages) can condition free-living agents. Further, science changes its status when meaning takes priority. While semiotics shows the narrowness of laws and recurrent regularity, function brings semiotic properties to causal aspects of natural innovation. By drawing on languaging one can clarify, for example, how brains and prostheses can serve human cyborgs. Indeed, given a multi-scalar nexus of meaning, biosemiotics becomes a powerful epistemic tool. Accordingly, I close with a model of how observers can use languaging to track both how self-fabricated living systems co-modulate and also how judging (and thinking) shapes understanding of changing ‘worlds.’ In certain scales, each ’whole’ agent acts on its own behalf as it uses epigenetic history and adjusts to flux by engaging with an ecosystem

Key words: biosemiotics, languaging, semiotics, eco-evo-devo, meaning, distributed language

With the purpose of establishing life-mind-language continuity, the paper thematizes an important phenomenon missing from Maturana’s (1988) theory of languaging: the generative basis of second order consensual coordination. While Maturana suggests that coordination involving biological information is qualitatively different from coordination involving concepts, we make the case that the two should be seen as continuous. We critically expand on Clark’s (2003) point that language and technical artefacts extend human cognitive capacities while challenging Clark’s Shannon-based view on information. Rather than focusing on language as a representational medium we turn to how languaging is enabled by multiple, qualitatively different organizational levels in organism-environment systems. On our view, language is irreducible to the exchange of predetermined, conceptual meanings. Rather, we hold, human linguistic abilities are based in embodied hierarchies of molecular coding in the sense that some of these hierarchies rise to neuronal (electromagnetic) and cognitive patterns that enable meaning-making activities (including languaging) connected with a particular praxis. Our account is based on the case of synthetic evolution and engineering (Evoneering) of humans with intelligent (bio)nanomaterials and (bio)chips implanted into their body for medical purposes.

Key words: languaging, shannon-information, biosemiotics, evoneering, radical linguistics

As a functional feature of our species, language, it is argued, cannot be understood outside the domain of biological organization. The established view of language as a tool used for communication has little to offer towards a better understanding of the nature and function of language, making it external to human biology and accounting for the language–mind dichotomy entrenched in philosophy of language and mainstream cognitive science. By contrast, biosemiotics, an interdisciplinary paradigm for the study of life as semiosis, attempts to overcome this epistemological inconsistency by positing the biological nature of signs. At the same time, the theoretical framework of biosemiotics is marked by a conceptual tension between the physicalist accounts of symbol often used in biosemiotics and the Peircean notion of symbol as a kind of sign in the semiotic hierarchy of iconic, indexical, and symbolic reference; this hierarchy is essential in understanding linguistic semiosis as a major evolutionary transition rather than a cultural invention. The firmly established belief that, evolutionarily, sapience precedes language impedes our understanding of language as human life in semiosis; such an understanding becomes possible with a systems approach to the study of our species. As situationally driven embodied interactional behavior, languaging is constitutive of the human organism-environment system as a unity. Linguistic semiosis – the development of the ability to orient others and self in their consensual domain to what is not perceptually present – is a biological adaptation that allows humans to be able to better live in their habitat and sets them apart from the rest of the living world as linguistic organisms capable of operating on first-order abstractions in co-ordinations of interactional behavior. It is hypothesized that the emergence of language was the pivoting point in the evolution of the human brain, laying the basis for abstract thought as neuronal processes that lead to the establishment of second-order consensuality and languaging as behavior in a second-order consensual domain: cognition as a biological function met language as a biological adaptation, and the ontogenesis of Homo sapiens began.

Key words: language, languaging, biosemiotics, sign, symbol, mind, evolution

A ‘Black Box’ cannot be opened to reveal its mechanism. Rather, its operations are inferred through input from (and output to) an ‘observer’. All of us are observers, who attempt to understand the Black Boxes that are Minds. The Black Box and its observer constitute a system, differing from either component alone: a ‘greater’ Black Box to any further-external-observer. To Glanville (1982), the further-external-observer probes the greater-Black-Box by interacting directly with its core Black Box, ignoring that Box’s immediate observer. In later accounts, however, Glanville’s greater-Black-Box inexplicably becomes unitary. Why the discrepancy? To resolve it, we start with von Foerster’s archetype ‘machines’, that are of two kinds: ‘Trivial’ (predictable) and ‘Non-Trivial’ (non-predictable). Early-on, Glanville treated the core Black Box and its observer as Trivial Machines, that gradually ‘whiten’ (reveal) each other though input and output, becoming ‘white boxes’. Later, however, Black Box and observer became Non-Trivial Machines, never fully ‘whitenable’. But Non-Trivial Machines can be concatenated from Trivial Machines, and are the only true Black Boxes; any greater-Black-Box (Non-Trivial Machine) may (within its core Black Box) involve white boxes (that are Trivial Machines). White boxes, therefore, could be the ultimate source of the greatest Black Box of all: the Mind.

Key words: glanville, black box, observer, mind, machine, von foerster.

Languaging is interactional and relational in nature. The aim of this paper is to explore the constitutive conditions of human language from a «bio-logic» perspective. The main claim is that the notion of languaging contributes to expanding the post-cognitivist understanding of social interaction and linguistic activity. From both a phylogenetic and an ontogenetic perspective, the emergence of language needs to be traced to a species-specific form of sociality and distributed agency. By connecting individual agency to social interdependence, the approach of languaging shows that language arises from patterns of concerted actions. It follows that not only is linguistic activity inherently distributed, but also cannot be separated from the activities and practices it brings into being.

Key words: coordination, linguistic activity, linguistic analysis, agency, human sociality

Along some striking and real convergences, are there also relevant differences between Wittgenstein and 4E cognitive science? This paper answers positively to that question, by focusing upon the cognitive or psychological status of reading and understanding in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of psychology and in enactivism. The main difference deals with the posited relations between reading, understanding, and material processes. Despite its anti-representationalist, externalist and and-intellectualist core, enactivism continues to conceive cognition as supervenient on processes, whereas for Wittgenstein, the relations between psychological phenomena and concomitant processes are mediated by psychological concepts, behavioural criteria and normative practices.

Key words: reading, understanding, enactivism, processes, criteria, cognition.