The book presents a general and formal theory of meaning, signs, and language. Its philosophical base rests on a constructivist and non-dualist approach that leads to an ontological monism of meaning or language. The theory offers novel and provocative insights into the fundamental structures and processes of communication, cognition, and reality. Key topics include the construction and use of distinctions and categories, the self-contradictory dualism of word vs. object, linguistic meaning monism, interpretive relations and processes in the semiotic triangle, conceptual prototypicality and fuzziness, semantic fields and frames, meaning medium vs. forms, as well as activation and co-activation of meanings. In order to illustrate and apply the theory, everyday examples, in particular power and law, are discussed throughout the book. Methodological questions of data collection and analysis are also addressed as they are relevant to the empirical application and verification of the theory.

German-Baltic biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) did not regard himself as a phenomenologist. Neither did he conceive of himself as a semiotician. Nevertheless, his Umwelt terminology has of late been utilized and further developed within the framework of semiotics and various other disciplines – and, as I will argue, essen- tial points in his work can fruitfully be taken to represent a distinctive Uexküllian phenomenology, characterized not least by an assumption of the (in the realm of life) universal existence of a genuine first person perspective, i.e., of experienced worlds. Uexküllian phenomenology is an example of – a special case of – a semi- otics of being, taken to be a study of signs designed so as to emphasize the reality of the phenomena of the living. In the course of this paper, I will relate Uexküllian phenomenology to the eco-existentialism of Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899–1990), eco- phenomenology (including David Abram and Ted Toadvine), and semiotics of nature (biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, zoosemiotics). I will further make a few remarks on the partial resemblance between Uexküllian phenomenology and Tymieniecka’s “phenomenology of life,” and its difference from the “phaneroscopy” of Peirce.

Excerpt: Although there is currently no consensus in the biosemiotic community on what constitutes a semiotic agent, i.e. an agent in the context of semiosis (the action of signs), most respondents to a recent survey agree that core attributes of an agent include goal-directedness, self-governed activity, processing of semiosis and choice of action, with these features being vital for the functioning of the living system in question (Tønnessen 2015). 1 In this chapter I seek to compare the biosemiotic understanding(s) of agency with the enactive understanding(s) of agency. Despite considerable overlap in views and outlook, there are in some cases sharp differences in how agency is understood in biosemiotics and enactivism (e.g. Varela et al. 1991). Mapping the differences in outlook and understanding is complicated indeed, given the diversity of views in both camps.

Radical constructvists believe that knowledge is not disembodied but intimately related to the action and experience the learner. It is always contextual and never separated from the knower. There is no objective reality that is independent of human mental activity. Radical constructivism shares many philosophical perspectives with the semiotic model of Stamper (1993) Semiotics claims that knowledge of the wodd is mediated through signs. A radical subjective synthesis of semiotics and radical constructivism leads to two axioms: There is no known reality without an agent, and the agent constructs reality through his action. This paper begins with a brief review of the philosophies of radical constructivism and semiotics, followed by a discussion of the implications of semiotics for radical constructivist leaming. It concludes with the design of a constructivist learning environment using the semiotic perspective as manifested by Stamper.

Key words: radical constructivian, semiotics, learning environment, collaborative, affordances, agents

In this paper I wish to address what I consider one of the central conceptual issues underlying the Immunosemiotics meeting: the origin in meaning in cellular communication. Semioticists have done immunology a great service by framing the role of molecular interactions as a system of signs and their significations. This is hardly what immunologists normally do, involved as they are with the nitty-gritty of molecular mechanisms, far too close to visualize the entire forest.

Advanced and mature societies are undergoing a fundamental transformation of their economic, political, technological and social lives. Developing countries are rapidly catching on and accelerating their participation in the transformation, which is equally rapidly becoming global. Yet, at the same time, the process of globalization itself is exhibiting signs of a reversal towards relocalization, i.e., rebounding after the strong global outbound of the past fifty years. The change of paradigms and change of dominant business models accompany such transformations. Yet transformations get naturally confounded with ongoing recessions and crises. Disentangling the phenomena of crisis from those of transformation remains a challenge, especially for politicians. In this paper we primarily address the issues of unemployment and the changing nature of employment in mature economies. Relevance: It is claimed that the autopoietic cycle of self-production or self-renewal forms the organization of all living and self-sustaining systems.

Excerpt: Much research in cognitive science, and in particular artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial life (ALife), has since the mid-1980s been devoted to the study of so-called autonomous agents. These are typically robotic systems situated in some environment and interacting with it using sensors and motors. Such systems are often self-organizing in the sense that they artificially learn, develop, and evolve in interaction with their environments, typically using computational learning techniques, such as artificial neural networks or evolutionary algorithms. Due to the biological inspiration and motivation underlying much of this research (cf. Sharkey and Ziemke 1998), autonomous agents are often referred to as “artificial organisms”, “artificial life”, “animats” (short for “artificial animals”) (Wilson 1985), “creatures” (Brooks 1990), or “biorobots” (Ziemke and Sharkey 1998). These terms do not necessarily all mean exactly the same; some of them refer to physical robots only, whereas others include simple software simulations. But the terms all express the view that the mechanisms referred to are substantially different from conventional artifacts and that to some degree they are “life-like” in that they share some of the properties of living organisms. Throughout this article this class of systems will be referred to as “artificial organisms” or “autonomous agents/robots” interchangeably. \\The key issue addressed in this article concerns the semiotic status and relevance of such artificial organisms. The question is whether and to what extent they are autonomous and capable of semiosis. This is not straightforward since semiosis is often considered to necessarily involve living organisms. Morris (1946), for example, defines semiosis as “a signprocess, that is, a process in which something is a sign to some organism”. Similarly, Jakob von Uexküll considered signs to be “of prime importance in all aspects of life processes” (T. von Uexküll 1992), and made a clear distinction between organisms, which as autonomous subjects respond to signs according to their own specific energy, and inorganic mechanisms, which lack that energy, and thus remain heteronomous.

Key words: cognitive science, artificial intelligence, artificial life, semiotics, umwelt, mechanistic theories, self-organization