Volume 14, issue 2 of Biosemiotics has appeared, featuring our Biosemiotic Achievement Award announcement text.
Full reference:
Rodríguez, Claudio Julio Higuera & Morten Tønnessen 2021. Biosemiotics Achievement Award for the Year 2020. Biosemiotics 14(2): 233–236. Published online August 21st 2021. DOI: 10.1007/s12304-021-09445-9
Our award announcement text has just been published online (the article is available Open Access, including for PDF download):
Reference:
Rodríguez Higuera, Claudio Julio & Morten Tønnessen 2021. Biosemiotics Achievement Award for the Year 2020. Biosemiotics. Published online August 21st 2021. DOI: 10.1007/s12304-021-09445-9
Biosemiotics 13(3) has now been published, see table of contents and links to articles here. This is the last issue from my 7-year period as an Editor-in-Chief (currently along with Alexei Sharov and Filip Jaros).
Some time ago I have informed the editorial board of Biosemiotics that at New Year I will be stepping down from the contracted position as lead Editor-in-Chief for. I have served as co-Editor-in-Chief since 2013, since the summer of 2018 as Lead Editor-in-Chief. The reason for me stepping down is that I will start being Head of Department at University of Stavanger´s Department of social studies January 1st (for the period 2021-2024).
While Filip Jaros will also step down as Editor-in-Chief, Alexei Sharov will continue as Editor-in-Chief, and Yogi Hale Hendlin will start as new lead Editor-in-Chief. Yogi and Alexei are also in process with recruiting Assoctiate Editors, specifically for Asia, Afrika and Latin-America.
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).
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.
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).
For a resolution between signs and signals and its connection with the phenomenality of animal umwelten see Tønnessen et al. (2018: 4).
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).
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.
See Tønnessen (2014: 291): “In terms of umwelt, i.e. subjective experience, we gradually individuate and become first animal, then human, then eventually persons.”
Within the biosemiotic tradition, subjectivity is attributed to every creature that has an umwelt (Tønnessen 2014; Tønnessen et al. 2016).
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.
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.
