Modelling, dialogism and the functional cycle: biosemiotic and philosophical insights
Modelling, dialogism and the functional cycle: biosemiotic and philosophical insights

Summary/Abstract: Charles Peirce, Mikhail Bakhtin and Th omas Sebeok all develop original research itineraries around the sign and, despite terminological diff erences, can be related with reference to the concept of dialogism and modelling. Jakob von Uexküll’s biosemiosic “functional cycle”, a model for semiosic processes, is also implied in the relation between dialogue and communication. Biological models which describe communication as a self-referential, autopoietic and semiotically closed system (e.g., the models proposed by Maturana, Varela, and Th ure von Uexküll) contrast with both the linear (Shannon and Weaver) and the circular (Saussure) paradigms. Th e theory of autopoietic systems is only incompatible with dialogism if reference is to a linear causal model which describes communication as developing from source to destination, or to the conversation model governed by the turning around together rule. Dialogism understood in biosemiotic terms overlaps with the concepts of interconnectivity, interrelation, intercorporeity and presupposes the otherness relation. As Uexküll says, the relation with the umwelt in nonhuman living beings is stable and concerns the species; on the contrary, in human beings it is, changeable and concerns the single individual, which is at once an advantage and a disadvantage. Th anks to “syntactics”, human beings can construct, deconstruct and reconstruct an infi nite number of worlds from a fi nite number of elements. Th is distinguishes human beings from other animals and determines their capacity for pos

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