Today I have presented my paper “Zoosemiotics beyond Sebeok” in the first session of the 22nd International Gathering in Biosemiotics, which is held at Palacký University in Olomouc, the Czech Republic, June 27th - July 1st. Perhaps 60 people attended the talk. In addition, a dozen people or so followed the conference livestream on YouTube.
By now todays´ livestream has been seen by some 200 people.
I have just submitted the abstract below to the organizers of the 22nd gathering in biosemiotics, which will be held at Palacký University in Olomouc, the Czech Republic June 27th - July 1st 2022.
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Zoosemiotics beyond Sebeok
Author: Morten Tønnessen
Email: ***@gmail.com
Affiliation: Professor of philosophy, Department of social studies, University of Stavanger, Norway
The chapter presented here (Tønnessen, forthcoming) outlines semiotic studies in ethology and zoology, starting with foundational work and contemporary developments and proceeding to relevant methodologies and prospective future studies. The conception of zoosemiotics as a field of study has evolved considerably since Thomas Sebeok coined the term in 1963, and currently signifies a far more comprehensive field than what Sebeok’s original definition of zoosemiotics as “the scientific study of signalling behaviour in and across animal species” indicates (1963: 465). In contrast, Maran et al. (2011: 8) distinguish between ethological zoosemiotics and anthropological zoosemiotics, with the former overlapping with Sebeok’s initial notion of zoosemiotics and the latter programmatically expanding the conception of zoosemiotics. The contemporary notion of zoosemiotics entails that the semiotic study of animals cannot simply be understood as a synthesis between semiotics and ethology, although such a synthesis remains at its core. It must furthermore be understood as engaging and intersecting with ecology, cultural studies and other fields of study where animals appear in one form or another. Contemporary zoosemiotics is markedly post-Sebeokian in that it deviates from Sebeok’s outlook in the framing of the human being’s position within nature at large. In similar terms, it also deviates from Sebeok’s worldview in the framing of culture’s position within nature. In the first case, contemporary zoosemiotics is arguably more consistently pluralistic, and has less of an anthropocentric bias, than Sebeokian zoosemiotics. In the second case, in its view on the relation between culture and nature, it is arguably more consistently holistic. These developments, representing deviations from classical Sebeokian zoosemiotics, appear to be regarded as advances by most scholars and students in the newest generation of zoosemioticians – and to be more in line with the contemporary Zeitgeist among concerned scientists and environmental and animal protection activists.
In modern science, the agency and subjectivity of animals has tended to be neglected. This har largely limited studies of animals to quantitative methods, whether in the study of animals in themselves, or in the study of how animals relate to human beings. Today, zoosemiotics is arguably the theoretically and empirically soundest approach to “taking the animal’s perspective”. More research is needed on how humans relate to animals. And more research is needed on how animals relate to humans. In the near future, work is needed that connects semiotic studies in ethology and zoology with issues in global human ecology, develops flexible zoosemiotic tools and methodology for application by practitioners such as field ethologists, veterinarians, zookeepers etc., and makes further connections between semiotic studies of animals and phenomenology, ethnography, and anthropology by developing tools and methodology tailor-made for studies related to human agents and their dealings with animals.
REFERENCES
Maran, T., D. Martinelli and A. Turovski, eds. (2011). Readings in Zoosemiotics (Semiotics, Communication and Cognition 8), Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton.
Sebeok, T. A. (1963). Review. Language, 39: 448–466.
Tønnessen, M., forthcoming, 2022. Semiotics in ethology and zoology. In Bloomsbury Semiotics (4 volumes, ed. Jamin Pelkey), volume 2, Semiotics in the Natural and Technical Sciences (ed. Stephanie Walsh Matthews). Bloomsbury Academic.
Thomas Sebeok’s role as a founding father of zoosemiotics is unquestioned. On what points should his views be challenged? What is the proper relation of zoosemiotics to biosemiotics, and to ecosemiotics – and how does it compare with cognitive ethology and anthrozoology? Should zoosemiotics be understood as a meta-scientific discipline, as a program for ethology or the animal life sciences, or as a scientific enterprise in its own right? A general aim of semiotics of nature (biosemiotics, zoosemiotics, ecosemiotics etc.) is to help bridging the nature/culture divide and counteract the related compartmentalisation of science and scholarly studies. To what extent should human behavior be included as a study object of zoosemiotics? In particular, how are human-animal relations to be treated? What is the role of the individual subject in biology today – and tomorrow? How well is today’s zoosemiotics fitted to account for the changing global ecological reality?
Dinda L. Gorlée and Morten Tønnessen 2010. "Da Lotman og semiotikken kom til Norge". Pp 258-259 in Turid Farbregd and Øyvind Rangøy (Eds.): Estland og Norge i fortid og nåtid - Norsk-estisk forening 25 år. Oslo: Norsk-estisk forening.
"Modern man" can indeed be said to have been "the animal that does not want to be an animal" [1. Tønnessen 2003: 287], that did not admit to its animality (at least not in its fullness, if at all), preferring [Nöth 2001: 283] "a Cartesian dualism between culture and nature which has opposed humans to the rest of the natural world for centuries". Of course, modern man to the end adhered to the illusion that "man" is a sufficiently comprehensive linguistic expression to designate the human species of animal as a whole, male or female!
The modern treatment of ethics [...] that is to say, the ethical discourse to which we have become accustomed, especially in the wake of the pathological "linguistic turn" within the Analytic tradition - requires its own transformative assimilation to befit the postmodern context. Nor is the point de depart for this assimilation of philosophy's past (not only modernity! but the middle Latin and Greek ages as well) far to seek. It must surely be in the development of Hoffmeyer's distinction, taken up by Tønnessen,[4] between "moral subject" and "moral agent", which at once enables and requires the postmodern thinker to extend the notion of a "right to moral consideration" on the part of moral agents beyond the realm of human interactions within culture to include the larger biosphere presupposed to [the] very existence and healthy development of (as Sebeok put it) "that miniscule segment of nature" modern thought has tended to "grandly compartmentalize as culture."
4. Hoffmeyer 1993: 152-176, esp. 164-166 (= 151-153 in the 1995 reprint) "Biosemiotics and the Question of Moral Subjects"; see further Tønnessen 2003, passim. Tønnessen's expressed reservations concerning Hoffmeyer's foundation, however (2003: 284n2), speaks rather in Hoffmeyer's favor than toward the narrower ethical purview that Tønnessen proposes. Both Hoffmeyer and Tønnessen draw in this discussion from Jon Wetlesen 1993. The point seems to be one coming into general recognition. Thus Arne Johan Vetlesen (1994: 3), announcing that he restricts "discussion of 'morality' to what obtains - or fails to obtain - between human subjects", yet asks the reader to "note that this does not imply that I hold only humans to have a moral standing". In the semioethic view - that is, a view of ethics stringently derived from semiosis itself precisely as involving the human - morality cannot be restricted only to what obtains or not between human subjects, but concerns also the actions and impact of human subjects upon the environment itself, both physical, biological, social, and cultural.
