Kalevi Kull

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

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.

Juri Lotman wrote, in Russian, a book Непредсказуемые механизмы культуры — the unpredictable mechanisms of culture. Its English translator, Brian Baer, preferred to translate the title as The Unpredictable Workings of Culture . He had a reason for this — many scholars tend to refuse the term ‘mechanism’ for the phenomena of meaning-making. However, there exist quite clear cultural differences in this opinion. For instance in Russian, ‘mechanisms’ are understood so broadly that there is no question to use the term for purely mental creations; the case is similar in German, in Estonian, and in several other languages. It seems that the applicability of this term to culture is correlated with the usage of the term ‘science’. In Russian, in German, and in Estonian, the humanities are sciences , while the English-language tradition tends to separate the humanities from the sciences. However, the latter h ..