Kalevi Kull

The interview with one of the founders of the Tartu–Moscow school, semiotician Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov (b. 1929) from August 2010, describes V. V. Ivanov’s opinions of several scholars and their work (including Evgenij Polivanov, Mikhail Bakhtin, Andrej Kolmogorov, Nikolaj Marr etc.), his relationships with his father Vsevolod Ivanov, as well as V. V. Ivanov’s views on the past and future of semiotics, with some emphasis on neurosemiotics, zoosemiotics, semiotics of culture, cybernetics, history of linguistics, study and protection of small languages. The interview also deals with V. V. Ivanov’s book Even and Odd.

The paper focuses on the semiotic principles of the organisation of ecosystems, attempting to find concepts that point to relations and not to elements. (1) Consortium (the term introduced by Johannes Reinke around 1873) can be defined as a group of organisms connected via (sign) relations, or groups of interspecific semiosic links in biocoenosis. The consortial relations include trophic and topic relations, both implying a recognition (identification) of the object by an organism involved (these, i.e., are sign relations). These relations are ecologically inheritable. (2) Umwelt (the term introduced by Jakob von Uexküll around 1909) can be defined as a set of relations an organism has in an ecosystem (as in a semiosphere). The formation of an umwelt is dependent on the modelling system of the organism. (3) Biophony (the term introduced by Bernie Krause around 2000) denotes the coordination of inter- and intra-species relations in a soundscape of a biological community. This can be seen as a special case of Komposition as defined by Jakob and Thure von Uexküll. (4) Ecological code (as introduced, e.g. by Alexander Levich around 1977) can be defined as the set of (sign) relations (regular irreducible correspondences) characteristic to an entire ecosystem. We also mention the concepts of ecomones and coactones (introduced by Marcel Florkin in 1965) as the substances which are responsible for mediation of ecological inter-individual relations. All the relations as sign-relations evidently imply both a static or structuralist description (in terms of codes), and a processual description (in terms of semiosis carried on by interpretation). We conclude that all the above mentioned concepts can be viewed as conceptually connected and are suitable for semiotic description of biological communities

This article poses the hypothesis that the problem of the intrinsic value of nature that stems from the work of G. E. Moore and is widely discussed in environmental philosophy, bas a parallel in a contemporary discussion in semiotics on the existence of semiosis in nature. From a semiotic point of view. value can be defined as an intentional dimension of sign. This is concordant with a biological interpretation of value that relates to biological needs. Thus. a semiotic approach in biology may provide a useful tool for further analysis of the intrinsic value problem in the biological realm. From an ecosemiotic point of view, the problem is also related to the concepts of bioart and ecoart. Ecoart viz environmental art is that which encompasses the human ambience, e.g., landscape or its components. Bioart call be defined as the art whose material ("clay") is a living body, living matter or communication of organisms (which may include, e.g., genetic engineering). It is concluded that the acceptance of biosemiotic view has implications for a large area of ecological philosophy.

This article compares the methodologies of two types of sciences (according to J. Locke) — semiotics, and physics — and attempts thereby to characterise the semiotic and non-semiotic approaches to the description of ecosystems. The principal difference between the physical and semiotic sciences is that there exists just a single physical reality that is studied by physics via repetitiveness, whereas there are many semiotic realities that are studied as unique individuals. Seventeen complementary definitions of the semiosphere are listed, among them, semiosphere defined as the space of qualitative (incommensurable) diversity. It is stated that, paradoxically, diversity, being a creation of communication, can also be destroyed due to excessive communication.

Fundamental turns in biological understanding can be interpreted as replacements of deep models that organise the biological knowledge. Three deep models distinguished here are a holistic ladder model that sees all levels of nature being complete (from Aristotle to the 18th century), a modernist tree model that emphasises progress and evolution (from Enlightenment to the recent times), and a web model that evaluates diversity (since the 20th century). The turn from the tree model to the web model in biology includes (1) a transfer from modern to postmodern approaches, (2) a shift of semiotic threshold to the border of life, and (3) building the semiotic models of living systems, i.e., the rise of biosemiotics