Semiotics is the systematic study of sign processes (semiosis) and meaning-making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, usually called a meaning, to the sign's interpreter. The meaning can be intentional, such as a word uttered with a specific meaning; or unintentional, such as a symptom being a sign of a particular medical condition. Signs can also communicate feelings and may communicate internally or through any of the senses: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory (taste). Contemporary semiotics is a branch of science that studies meaning-making and various types of knowledge.
Juri Lotman was a prominent Russian-Estonian literary scholar, semiotician, and historian of Russian culture, who worked at the University of Tartu. He was elected a member of the British Academy (1977), Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (1987), Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1989) and Estonian Academy of Sciences (1990). He was a founder of the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School. The number of his printed works exceeds 800 titles. His archive which includes his correspondence with a number of Russian and Western intellectuals, is immense.
Biosemiotics is a field of semiotics and biology that studies the prelinguistic meaning-making, biological interpretation processes, production of signs and codes and communication processes in the biological realm.
Terrence William Deacon is an American neuroanthropologist. He taught at Harvard for eight years, relocated to Boston University in 1992, and is currently Professor of Anthropology and member of the Cognitive Science Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.
Jakob Johann Freiherr von Uexküll was a Baltic German biologist who worked in the fields of muscular physiology and animal behaviour studies and was an influence on the cybernetics of life. However, his most notable contribution is the notion of Umwelt, used by semiotician Thomas Sebeok and philosopher Martin Heidegger. His works established biosemiotics as a field of research.
Thomas Albert Sebeok was a Hungarian-born American polymath, semiotician, and linguist. As one of the founders of the biosemiotics field, he studied non-human and cross-species signaling and communication. He is also known for his work in the development of long-time nuclear waste warning messages, in which he worked with the Human Interference Task Force to create methods for keeping the inhabitants of Earth away from buried nuclear waste that will still be hazardous 10,000 or more years in the future.
Helge Mølsted Sander is a Danish politician. He is the former Danish Minister of Science, Technology and Development. He is a member of the Liberal Party, and was a member of parliament (Folketinget) from 10 January 1984 to 31 January 1998; and again from 2005.
The semiosphere is an idea in biosemiotic theory proposing that, contrary to ideas of nature determining sense and experience, the phenomenal world is a creative and logical structure of processes of semiosis where signs operate together to produce sense and experience.
Kalevi Kull is a biosemiotics professor at the University of Tartu, Estonia.
John Deely was an American philosopher and semiotician. He was a professor of philosophy at Saint Vincent College and Seminary in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Prior to this, he held the Rudman Chair of Graduate Philosophy at the Center for Thomistic Studies, located at the University of St. Thomas (Houston).
In the study of the biological sciences, biocommunication is any specific type of communication within (intraspecific) or between (interspecific) species of plants, animals, fungi, protozoa and microorganisms. Communication basically means sign-mediated interactions following three levels of rules. Signs in most cases are chemical molecules (semiochemicals), but also tactile, or as in animals also visual and auditive. Biocommunication of animals may include vocalizations, or pheromone production, chemical signals between plants and animals, and chemically mediated communication between plants and within plants.
Martin Krampen was a leading German semiotician, semiotics Professor in Göttingen.
The International Society for Biosemiotic Studies (ISBS) is an academic society for the researchers in semiotic biology. The Society was established in 2005. Its official journal is Biosemiotics, published by Springer and launched in 2008.
Jesper Hoffmeyer was a professor at the University of Copenhagen Institute of Biology, and a leading figure in the emerging field of biosemiotics. He was the president of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies (ISBS) from 2005 to 2015, co-editor of the journal Biosemiotics and the Springer Book series in Biosemiotics. He authored the books Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs and Signs of Meaning in the Universe and edited A Legacy for Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as Precursor to Biosemiotics.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to semiotics:
Copenhagen–Tartu school of biosemiotics is a loose network of scholars working within the discipline of biosemiotics at the University of Tartu and the University of Copenhagen.
Cognitive biology is an emerging science that regards natural cognition as a biological function. It is based on the theoretical assumption that every organism—whether a single cell or multicellular—is continually engaged in systematic acts of cognition coupled with intentional behaviors, i.e., a sensory-motor coupling. That is to say, if an organism can sense stimuli in its environment and respond accordingly, it is cognitive. Any explanation of how natural cognition may manifest in an organism is constrained by the biological conditions in which its genes survive from one generation to the next. And since by Darwinian theory the species of every organism is evolving from a common root, three further elements of cognitive biology are required: (i) the study of cognition in one species of organism is useful, through contrast and comparison, to the study of another species’ cognitive abilities; (ii) it is useful to proceed from organisms with simpler to those with more complex cognitive systems, and (iii) the greater the number and variety of species studied in this regard, the more we understand the nature of cognition.
Luis M. Rocha is the George J. Klir Professor of Systems Science at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science, Binghamton University. He has been director of the NSF-NRT Complex Networks and Systems graduate Program in Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. He is also director of the Center for Social and Biomedical Complexity, between Binghamton University and Indiana University, Bloomington, a Fulbright Scholar, and Principal Investigator at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia, Portugal. His research is on complex systems and networks, computational and systems biology, biomedical complexity and digital health, and computational intelligence.
Howard Hunt Pattee is an American biologist, Professor Emeritus at Binghamton University and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He graduated at Stanford University in 1948 and completed a Ph.D. there in 1953.
Helge Stjernholm Kragh is a Danish historian of science who focuses on the development of 19th century physics, chemistry, and astronomy. His published work includes biographies of Paul Dirac, Julius Thomsen and Ludvig Lorenz, and The Oxford Handbook of the History of Modern Cosmology (2019) which he co-edited with Malcolm Longair.
