Jesper Hoffmeyer: Biosemiotics - bridging the science-humanities gap

The next public lecture of Studia Generalia entitled “Biosemiotics: Bridging the science-humanities gap” will be delivered by a leading scientsit in the emerging field of biosemiotics Prof. Em. Jesper Hoffmeyer. The lecture will take place in the auditorium A-121 (TU Astra building, Narva mnt 29) on Thursday, 5 December at 16:00.

Watch the live broadcast: kultuur.err.ee

One of the attractions of a semiotic understanding of life is that the anthropocentric prejudice that has been such an ingrained component in Western thinking is thereby dissolved and replaced by a new nonreductive evolutionary epistemology. The human form of cognition is not, biosemiotically speaking, solitary in the world (sensu Monod) but is an admirable new and sophisticated elaboration of cognitive forms that, by the time hominids finally appeared, had been at work in nature for hundreds of millions of years (and, of course, still are).

From the point of view of biosemiotics the analogy, so often suggested in a freewheeling mood between the dynamics of life and the dynamics of culture, is very often misplaced or false because the relation is one of homology rather than analogy. That the same dynamical principles often pertains to both sides of the classical divide is not, seen in this light, so very surprising, and the focus of our search should be to explain how and why these dynamics sometimes work out so differently in different contexts. One particularly interesting dynamic principle in this context is semiotic scaffolding. Organic life processes at all levels (from the genetic to the behavioral) are coordinated by semiotic interactions between cells, tissues, membranes, organs, or individuals and tuned through evolution to stabilize or scaffold important functions.

Semiotic scaffolding is dynamically very different from the concept of control by which biologist have explained functional stability in organisms. To take just one example, genes do not control the life of organisms, they scaffold it, meaning that the nature-nurture dynamics is far more complex and open than is often claimed. Contrary to physically based interactions, semiotic interactions do not depend on any direct causal connection between the sign vehicle (the representamen) and the effect. Semiotic interaction patterns therefore provide fast and versatile mechanisms for adaptations, mechanisms that depend on communication and "learning" preformation. But semiotic scaffolding is not just a bio-dynamic principle, it is also an important resource for understanding cultural evolution.

The cathedrals of the middle ages, the invention of the printing press, the radio, films, TV, computer networks and the internet are some of the major semiotic scaffolding tools that supported the route 

By learning at this level we refer to cells' acquisition of internal structural markers that reflect past events and influence future activity to the modern world. For each new step in the development of the endless series of still more powerful semiotic scaffolding tools, the semiotic freedom of individuals took on new dimensions, because each of these steps trivialized insights that earlier generations had had to spend their cognitive resources to acquire or learn, where now in the new generation semiotic scaffolding made the insight more or less part of an 'inherited' skill.

Studia Generalia is a series of public lectures delivered by the teachers, researchers and visiting lecturers of TU. Anyone who enters the University building can listen to what prominent thinkers have to say on current topics that affect society, and also participate in the discussion.