Bladderworts
Bladderworts

Summary/Abstract: I was a very pleased recipient of a signed copy of Jesper Hoffmeyer’s Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Life of Signs and the Signs of Life (2008) which I obtained at the Semiotic Society of America meeting in Houston, Texas, during those momentous and therefore unforgettable weeks when the stock market crashed. Within the first 30 pages, however, I became a puzzled reader, as the first example of the significance of signs in Biosemiotics is ‘the semiotics of a slap’ – based on human activity – while the first example of organization in an eco-niche, the indirect mutualism of bladderworts, gives no example of the contribution of semiosis to mutual causality. Why human semiotics, first of all, in order to illustrate biosemiotics in an eco-system? I suspected that herein lies an unresolved dilemma.

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