The emergence of signs of living feeling: Reverberations from the first Gatherings in Biosemiotics
The emergence of signs of living feeling: Reverberations from the first Gatherings in Biosemiotics

Summary/Abstract: What is biosemiotics and why bother — or gather — around it? During the final decade of the twentieth century, biosemiotics grew from being an idea conceived by a few semioticeans, biologists, ethologists and other specialists to becoming a more widely recognized perspective for the study of the "signs of life" as well as the "life of signs". Due to its unifying vision biosemiotics has implications, not only for a diversity of separate fields inside physics, biology, medicine, psychology, anthropology, semiotics, and philosophy as well as cross-disciplinary research programs such as cognitive science, artificial life or autonomous agents, but also for our very idea of living nature. Biosemiotic analysis may also offer interesting new ways of evaluating biological technology, and may also be seen as a fundamental new approach to theoretical biology. Biosemiotics has been on the agenda of many interna¬tional meetings, and the 1990s saw a couple of publications devoted to biosemiotics proper (e.g. Sign Systems Studies vols. 27 and 28; Semiotica vols. 120(3/4) and 127(1/4), etc.).

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