The article "Cognitive Systems of Human and Non-human Animals: At the Crossroads of Phenomenology, Ethology and Biosemiotics" by Filip Jaroš & Matěj Pudil (published in Biosemiotics) cites my work quite extensively.
Footnote 2:
Our contribution should not be understood as adhering to an Uexküllian puritanism. Influenced by an evolutionary-ontogenetic approach, we fully acknowledge the usefulness of the concept of umwelt transition (Tønnessen 2011) and recognize that a one-sided endorsment of umwelt theory can obscure many phenomena of interspecies communication (cf. Lestel 2011b).
P. 4:
In an editorial in this journal, Tønnessen et al. (2018) examine the relationship between phenomenology and biosemiotics and conclude that phenomenological investigation, which is traditionally focused on the experience of the human individual, can be enriched by biosemiotically oriented research on the experience of animals – only against this background will the specificity of human experience emerge.
P. 5:
But not only interspecific differences are worthy of attention. The human individuals also undergo transformations during their own ontogenesis, as reflected in the biosemiotic literature (Tønnessen 2014) and also in Merleau-Ponty´s own work (Merleau-Ponty 2002).
Footnote 4:
For a resolution between signs and signals and its connection with the phenomenality of animal umwelten see Tønnessen et al. (2018: 4).
P. 7:
Accordingly, Tønnessen (2014: 302) notes that language acquisition is connected with a certain loss of those non-verbal aspects of human experience and so “the mature human being’s umwelt consists for the most part only of those objects that can be named”. Once human language is acquired to this extent, it becomes a superior realm of meanings that often pushes out other, e.g. pictorial, representations of the world (cf. Portmann 1990: 113).
P. 7:
Language changes us, it gives us a fully subjective dimension by which we relate to the world because it penetrates our perception, changes it, but also stays flexible. In this sense, language becomes the way by which we live.6 Tønnessen (2014: 288) in this sense distinguishes three aspects of umwelt: the core umwelt, based on automated acts of perception and automated mental acts; mediated umwelt, based on wilful acts of perception and wilful mental acts; and conceptual umwelt, characteristic for higher animals, as an aspect of umwelt distinctive by its habitual acts of perception and habitual mental acts defined as “the learned matching of something with something else”. In the case of humans, this last aspect of umwelt is specifically connected with language use.
Footnote 6:
See Tønnessen (2014: 291): “In terms of umwelt, i.e. subjective experience, we gradually individuate and become first animal, then human, then eventually persons.”
P. 11:
Within the biosemiotic tradition, subjectivity is attributed to every creature that has an umwelt (Tønnessen 2014; Tønnessen et al. 2016).
P. 13:
According to a canonical understanding of umwelt (Tønnessen et al. 2016: definitions 3–5), the form of these meanings is predetermined by belonging to the particular species and is bound to its physiological properties and limitations.
References:
Tønnessen, M. (2011). Umwelt transition and Uexküllian phenomenology: An ecosemiotic analysis of Norwegian wolf management. Doctoral thesis, Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, Estonia.
Tønnessen,M. (2014). The ontogeny of the embryonic, foetal and infant human umwelt. Sign Systems Studies, 42(2), 281–307. https://doi.org/10.12697/SSS.2014.42.2-3.06.
Tønnessen, M. (2015). Uexküllian phenomenology. Chinese Semiotic Studies, 11(3), 347–369.
Tønnessen, M., et al. (2018). Phenomenology and biosemiotics. Biosemiotics, 11(3), 323–330. https://doi. org/10.1007/s12304-018-9345-8.
Tønnessen, M., Magnus, R., & Brentari, C. (2016). The Biosemiotic Glossary Project: Umwelt. Biosemiotics 9(1): 129–149.
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