Richard Smith

There is a longstanding difficulty in distinguishing philosophy (and philosophy of education) from other kinds of writing. Even the notions of clarity and rigour, sometimes claimed as central and defining characteristics of philosophy at its best, turn out to have ineliminably figurative elements, and accounts of philosophical method often display the very rhetoricity that they describe philosophy as concerned to avoid. It is tempting to wonder how far notions of philosophy as austere and analytic are responsible for ideals of educational research as unnaturally tidy and formal, and even for conceptions of the practice of education in schools and universities as focused on targets, performance indicators and statistics. Perhaps the nature of philosophy is best understood through its history. Then the philosopher must “go to school” not only with the poets, but also with the historians, so that the disciplinary divisions here become ever harder to mark out, to the enrichment of those who practise them.

French mathematician and natural philosopher René Descartes in the early seventeenth century developed his “thinking thing” definition of human being. This ontological construct that places the rational intellect of mankind as separate and superior to the natural world became the centerpiece of the Enlightenment and established the Modern Age. Descartes’s definition underlay the scientific and industrial revolution, colonialism, and the cultural imperialism of the West to become globalized along with modernity. With the marvelous technological advances of the worldwide spread of modernity also came devastating climate change and massive biodiversity loss that threatens our species sustainability. The American philosopher John Deely in the early twenty-first century developed his “semiotic animal” definition of human being that places our species within the natural world while being endowed with a unique responsibility toward its preservation and restoration. Deely’s definition is viewed as in consonance with our sustainable Paleolithic animistic ontological orientation centered on accurately interpreting relational being while going beyond it through clarifying the semiotic processes involved in accurate discernment of sustainable activities. It is asserted that replacing Descartes’s thinking thing definition with Deely’s semiotic animal and globalizing it through contemporary communication technology such as the Internet will launch a Semiotic Age and resolve our sustainability crisis.

Because of the cybernetic or living system underpinnings of the vast sign-based semiotic system that is the Internet, virtual representation of the natural world can foster self-organization and the emergence of novel solutions to the sustainability crisis. This is illustrated by the recent development of an environmentally enhancing semiotic animal definition or sign for human that if rapidly globalized to replace the dominant modern environmentally deleterious meaning could reverse the present dire trajectory. Its embrace could usher in a Semiotic Age when we realize that to survive, we must stochastically calibrate the best of our marvelous discoveries and creations, including the Internet, to sustaining life on our planetary home.

When ecological restoration is accomplished, it is crucial that it is sustained over a long period of time for the endeavor to be worthwhile. this paper presents the idea that in environmental restoration efforts there is a stakeholder type, non-government ecological (NGE), which is most in consonance with a sign-based way of knowing nature, or a semioepistemology. Centered on a longitudinal study of the Minnesota River, a prairie river that experienced major restoration and then a chalenge to this restoration, the paper further asserts that this stakeholder group is necessary to long-term environmental protection of the communicative processes of living systems or the health of semiosis, which semioticians under the influence of Thomas Sebeok view as the definition of life itself (petrilli 2005: 72). the final segment the stakeholder typology is placed on a health of semiosis continuum (Petrilli 2005: 74) -this typology was gleaned from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork and based on the ideas of ecological anthropologist Gregory Bateson.