Claus Emmeche

This paper examines the biosemiotic approach to the study of life processes by fashioning a series of questions that any worthwhile semiotic study of life should ask. These questions can be understood simultaneously as: (1) questions that distinguish a semiotic biology from a non-semiotic (i.e., reductionist–physicalist) one; (2) questions that any student in biosemiotics should ask when doing a case study; and (3) still currently unanswered questions of biosemiotics. In addition, some examples of previously undertaken biosemiotic case studies are examined so as to suggest a broad picture of how such a biosemiotic approach to biology might be done

The individual and social formation of a human self, from its emergence in early childhood through adolescence to adult life, has been described within philosophy, psychology and sociology as a product of developmental and social processes mediating a linguistic and social world. Semiotic scaffolding is a multi-level phenomenon. Focusing upon levels of semiosis specific to humans, the formation of the personal self and the role of friendship and similar interpersonal relations in this process is explored through Aristotle’s classical idea of the friend as ‘another self’, and sociologist Margaret Archer’s empirical and theoretical work on the interplay between individual subjectivity, social structure and interpersonal relations in a dynamics of human agency. It is shown that although processes of reflexivity and friendship can indeed be seen as instances of semiotic scaffolding of the emerging self, such processes are heterogeneous and contingent upon different modes of reflexivity

In philosophy of science, the literature on abduction and the literature on styles of thinking have existed almost totally in parallel. Here, for the first time, we bring them together and explore their mutual relevance. What is the consequence of the existence of several styles of scientific thinking for abduction? Can abduction, as a general creative mode of inference, have distinct characteristic forms within each style? To investigate this, firstly, we present the concept of abduction; secondly we analyze what is understood by styles of thinking; thirdly, we give some comments on abduction and styles of thinking by analyzing examples of scientific discovery or innovation within each style. We develop a case-based comparative investigation of creative aspects of abductive reasoning with examples drawn from different styles of scientific thinking and doing as understood by the Crombie/hacking tradition. We argue that abduction, as a general mode of reasoning, can have a variety of specific expressions enabled and constrained by the styles of scientific thinking. Finally, we draw some conclusions on the relationship between abduction and styles of thinking suggesting that scientific discovery is a dynamical goal-directed activity within the scientific community that benefits from distinct styles of thinking and doing research.

The present paper discusses a topic often neglected by contemporary philosophy of biology: The relation between metaphorical notions of living organisms as information processing systems, the attempts to model such systems by computational means (e.g., Artificial Life research), and the idea that life itself is a computational phenomenon. This question has ramifications in theoretical biology and thedefinition of Iife, in theoretical computer science and the concept of computation, and in semiotics (the study of signs in the most general sense, including information, signification, and meaning), and the concept of the interpreter. It is argued, that the theory of autopoietic systems known from theoretical biology should be integrated with a biosemiotic reflection on the natural history of signs.

This book presents programmatic texts on biosemiotics, written collectively by world leading scholars in the field (Deacon, Emmeche, Favareau, Hoffmeyer, Kull, Markoš, Pattee, Stjernfelt). In addition, the book includes chapters which focus closely on semiotic case studies (Bruni, Kotov, Maran, Neuman, Turovski). According to the central thesis of biosemiotics, sign processes characterise all living systems and the very nature of life, and their diverse phenomena can be best explained via the dynamics and typology of sign relations. The authors are therefore presenting a deeper view on biological evolution, intentionality of organisms, the role of communication in the living world and the nature of sign systems - all topics which are described in this volume. This has important consequences on the methodology and epistemology of biology and study of life phenomena in general, which the authors aim to help the reader better understand.

The increasing problem of bioinvasion (the mixing up of natural species characterising the planet's local ecosystems due to globalisation) is investigated as an example of an ecosemiotic problematic. One concern is the scarcity of scientific knowledge about long term ecological and evolutionary consequences of invading species. It is argued that a natural science conception of the ecology of bioinvasion should be supplemented with an ecosemiotic understanding of the significance of these problems in relation to human culture, the question of cultural diversity, and what it means to be indigenous or foreign. Bioinvasion, extinction of native species, and overall decrease in biodiversity, may go along with decreased cultural diversity; as when the loss of local agricultural traditions lead to genetic erosion. There are possible ecosemiotic parallels between language extinction and species extinction, both being related to globalisation. It is argued that the case of bioinvasion reveals the existence of two kinds of ecosemiotic contingency, (1) evolutionary openended and partly random generation of new species and extinction of old ones; (2) the historicity of culture in general and "culture's nature" specifically in the demarcation of a set of landscapes characteristic to a particular nation and piece of human history

A short review of complexity research from the perspective of history and philosophy of biology is presented. Complexity and its emergence has scientific and metaphysical meanings. From its beginning, biology was a science of complex systems, but with the advent of electronic computing and the possibility of simulating mathematical models of complicated systems, new intuitions of complexity emerged, together with attempts to devise quantitative measures of complexity. But can we quantify the complex?

There were days in the 70s when studying a subject at university and participating in a cultural and social revolution seemed like one and the same thing. When you were studying something like biology there was nothing the least bit strange in the fact that `biomass' became political student slang for the mass of biology students who constantly had to be `mobilized' against the bourgeoisie's reactionary measures directed against the experimental Roskilde University, university Marxism, long student careers and other benefits of the new society. And it seemed quite a matter of course that the biomass could not itself be a revolutionary subject, so it had to be mobilized from without, by the party or the `critical' avant-garde. I don't want to gloat over the romantic revolutionary naiveté of the period - plenty of others do that, although one is unlikely to understand history through irony and condemnation. But in this particular context the thought of the mobilizable mass came up again. Perhaps the very notion of masses - very generally - involves the idea that masses must be without a will of their own, or if they have one, that it is at any rate not very rational and must be given some..

It is argued in this paper that robots are just quasi-autonomous beings, which must be understood, within an emergent systems view, as intrinsically linked to and presupposing human beings as societal creatures within a technologically mediated world. Biosemiotics is introduced as a perspective on living systems that is based upon contemporary biology but reinterpreted through a qualitative organicist tradition in biology. This allows for emphasizing the differences between an organism as a general semiotic system with vegetative and self-reproductive capacities, an animal body also with sentience and phenomenal states, and higher forms of anthroposemiotic systems such as humans, machines and robots. On all three levels, representations are crucial processes. The “representationalism” invoked by critiques of cognitive science and robotics tends to focus only on simplistic notions of representation, and must be distinguished from a Peircean or biosemiotic notion of representation. Implications for theorizing about the physical, biological, animate, phenomenal and social body and their forms of autonomy are discussed.

When posing the question "is artificial life possible?", our immediate answer is that on the one hand : of course it is - people make it, and indeed very interesting and even breathtaking structures have already been constructed, such as `aminats', self-reproducing patterns and the other things, we have seen already. In this sense we are forced to take artificial life as a fact (at least as a fact about a new branch of research), nearly in the same way that the philosopher Kant took the theoretical physics of his days, Newtonian physics, as a matter of fact, and then asked: What are the conditions of possibility for this kind of theoretical science? On the other hand: The situation differs from Kant's. Artificial Life does not confront us with an analogy of theoretical mechanics within the field of biology. We face a curious situation: It is not obvious to the majority of biologists that Artificial Life is possible at all, at least in the purely computational sense of `software life'. Probably, most biologists would never call these artificial constructs `living'. Why not? Because the intuitive notions of life and living systems within biology implies, among other things, that living beings are a result of a long, ongoing evolutionary process that have created autonomous organisms, single-celled and multi-celled, that are highly organized, open (non-equilibrium), material thermodynamic systems based on metabolism and some kind of genetic information supported by macromolecules, that only metaphorically resemble a computer program. It is not that..

The strong version of Artificial Life claim that emergent computational patterns may not simply simulate life but realize the very phenomenon. This is one of several reasons why a definition of life is of interest. In this paper, it is argued that the received view of definitions of life in biology and philosophy is misleading. Generality cannot in general be dispensed with. Though criteria for adequacy of definitions are highly context-dependent, definitions of life are of a special nature, belonging to what is here called ontodefinitions. Separate definitions of life fulfilling a set of relevant criteria exist and belong to distinct paradigms of theoretical biology. Emergence is implicit in these. The paper investigates if emergence entails 'downward causation' (several kinds are defined), and asks if computational models can represent higher orders of emergence. Finally, a comment is made on the role of Wittgenstein's philosophy in understanding the nature of explanation and definition in science. --- ### --- Bibliographical note: Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Princeton History of Science Workshop on "Growing Explanations", Princeton University, February 15, 1997; and at the meeting in the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB) in Seattle, USA, July 16-21, 1997. Different parts were published in a modified form as 1) Emmeche (1997): "Autopoietic systems, replicators, and the search for a meaningful biologic definition of life", Ultimate Reality and Meaning 20 (4): 244-264 [the original title was: "Is the definition of life important?"], and 2) Emmeche (1998): "Defining life as a semiotic phenomenon", Cybernetics & Human Knowing 5 (1): 3-17. The present web version below contains the complete argument of both articles. A further thoroughly rewritten version, accessible also for non-specialists, was made in collaboration with Charbel Niño El-Hani, and translated by him into Portuguese as a contribution to a book (this version can also be found at web (dot)archive(dot)org)

The vitalism/reductionism debate in the life sciences shows that the idea of emergence as something principally unexplainable will often be falsified by the development of science. Nevertheless, the concept of emergence keeps reappearing in various sciences, and cannot easily be dispensed with in an evolutionary world-view. We argue that what is needed is an ontological nonreductionist theory of levels of reality which includes a concept of emergence, and which can support an evolutionary account of the origin of levels. Classical explication of emergence as “the creation of new properties” is discussed critically, and specific distinctions between various kinds of emergence are introduced for the purpose of developing an ontology of levels, framed in a materialistic and evolutionary perspective. A concept of the relation between levels as being inclusive is suggested, permitting the “local” existence of different ontologies. We identify, as a working hypothesis, four primary levels and explicate their nonhomomorphic interlevel relations. Explainability of emergence in relation to determinism and predictability is considered. Recent research in self-organizing non-linear dynamical systems represents a revival of the scientific study of emergence, and we argue that these recent developments can be seen as a step toward a final “devitalisation” of emergence.

It is argued that the notion of Umwelt is relevant for contemporary discussions within theoretical biology, biosemiotics, the study of Artificial Life, Autonomous Systems Research and philosophy of biology. Focus is put on the question of whether an artificial creature can have a phenomenal world in the sense of the Umwelt notion of Jakob von Uexküll, one of the founding figures of biosemiotics. Rather than vitalism, Uexküll's position can be interpreted as a version of qualitative organicism. A historical sketch of Autonomous Systems Research (ASR) is presented to show its theoretical roots and fruitful opposition to traditional AI style robotics. It is argued that these artificial systems are only partly 'situated' because they do not in the full sense of the word experience an Umwelt. A deeper understanding of truly situated autonomous systems as being a kind of complex selforganizing semiotic agents with emergent qualitative properties must be gained, not only from the broad field of theoretical biology, but also from the perspective of biosemiotics in the Uexküll tradition. The paper is thus an investigation of a new notion of autonomy that includes a qualitative aspect of the organism. This indicates that the Umwelt concept is not reducible to purely functional notions.

In this essay review of Alin Olteanu: "Multiculturalism as Multimodal Communication: A Semiotic Perspective" ([Series Numanities – Arts and Humanities in Progress 9; Dario Martinelli, series editor], Cham: Springer, 2019) I discuss culturalism, multiculturalism, and polyculturalism, and a problematic style of reasoning seen in some contributions to the humanities, a style here called "associative hermeneutics", with no genuine theory construction. As a contrast to this style, I illustrate some challenges of understanding multiculturalism through an example, the question of how to interpret friendship across cultures as seen from the point of view of cross-cultural friendship research.

The development of form in living organisms continues to challenge biological research. The concept of biological information encoded in the genetic program that controls development forms a major part of the semiotic metaphor in biology. Development is here seen in analogy to an execution of a program, written in a formal language in the computer. Other versions of the semiotic or "nature-as-language" metaphor use other formal or informal aspects of language to comprehend the specific structural relations in nature as explored by molecular and evolutionary biology. This intuitively appealing complex of related ideas, which has a long history in the philosophy of nature and biology, is critically reviewed. The general nature of metaphor in science is considered, and different levels of metaphorical transfer of signification is distinguished. It is argued, that the metaphors may be of considerable value, not only heuristically, but in order to comprehend the irreducible nature of living organisms. In arguing for a semiotic perspective on living nature, it makes a marked difference whether the departure is made from the tradition of F. de Saussure´s structural linguistics or from the tradition of general semiotics of C. S. Peirce. An agenda is made for a Peircean perspective on the semiotics of nature.