Paper accepted for presentation at 19th gathering in biosemiotics (Moscow)

I have been notified by the organizers of the 19th gathering in biosemiotics, to be held in Moscow in July, that my paper "How relationally connects the individual and ecological level of biological study" has been accepted for oral presentation.

2011 article "Perception and the levels of biosemiosis" perhaps to be reworked

I have received peer reviews of my 2011 article "Perception and the levels of biosemiosis", which was initially submitted to proceedings of the conference NASS VII (see previous posts). They are more or less critical, but I have been invited to rewrite and then resubmit. The plan for the NASS VII articles is now to publish them in the journal Cognitive Semiotics.

"Perception and the levels of biosemiosis" to appear in print?

The main organizer of the 7th conference of the Nordic association for semiotic studies, Göran Sonesson, has announced that there will indeed be conference proceedings. Deadline for submissions has been set to October 24th.

At present, we have two offers for printing the acts of the conference, both unsolicited: from Benjamins, and from Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Both offers involve a selection of papers, from a somewhat different perspective. If the impression we had during the conference is borne out, there were so many good papers, that we might consider accepting both proposals.

As suggested earlier, we can always make a complete publication of the acts on the web, if the papers received stand up to the quality expected.

My paper "Perception and the levels of biosemiosis", then, will likely appear in print, one form or another.

Conference pictures II: 7th conference of the Nordic association for semiotic studies - Lund

These pictures have been taken by Michael Ranta, and have been published along with a host of others on the conference webpage.

From the conference dinner.

From a coffee break.

From my presentation of "Perception and the levels of biosemiosis", Friday May 6th.

See above.

In the audience - listening to Michael Arbib's plenary lecture, entitled "From action-oriented perception to language".

Nordic Semiotics, Lund: Paper given

As scheduled I gave my paper "Perception and the levels of biosemiosis" Friday 6th of May in Lund, Sweden, at the Seventh conference of the Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies. The response from the audience was positive, with one notable exception. There were 20-30 people present in this parallel session.

The levels of biosemiosis - revised

This is my revised sketch of what I call the levels of biosemiosis, which I will present at conferences in Lund, Sweden and in New York the next couple of months. The revision consists in replacing 'Biosemiotics' as the primary field of the somatic (sub-perceptual, microscopic) realm with 'Endosemiotics' so that Biosemiotics can be used unequivocally as an umbrella term for the study of the three layers of endosemiosis, zoosemiosis and ecosemiosis (where cultural semiosis in a super-perceptual sense is to be categorized under ecosemiosis, since society can be viewed as a superorganism). Earlier I had to distinguish between biosemiotics in a narrow and a wide sense. Now biosemiotics concerns the full movement (cycle) including all three levels. The revision was suggested by my supervisor Kalevi Kull, and is in accordance with an alternative proposed by Wendy Wheeler.

Schedule change for talk at Nordic semiotics conference

The program for the seventh conference of the Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies, to be arranged in Lund, Sweden, May 6-8 (cf. previous posts), has been revised. My oral presentation "Perception and the levels of biosemiosis" has been rescheduled to 16.30-17.00 on Friday 6th of May.

Nordic semiotics conference - program (where are the Norwegians?)

The pre-liminary program of the 7th Conference of the Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies has been released online.

My presentation 'Perception and the levels of biosemiosis' (official conference version of the abstract here) has been scheduled for Friday May 6th at 11.45-12.15, in the session Semiotical Views of Perception, chaired by Lars Kopp. There are two more presentations in the session: Luis Emilio Bruni's 'A heterarchical approach to semantic congruence in multimodal perception' and Anna Cabak Rédei's 'Visual Perception—a matter of ’filling in’ the gaps'.

Judging by the names in the program, I am not sure whether there are other Norwegians coming to present than me (Dinda Gorlée is presenting, though, and she has a link to Norway). An embarassing fact.

Talk on levels of biosemiosis in Lund materializing

My abstract for the Seventh Conference of the Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies (NASS), to be arranged May 6-8 in Lund, Sweden, has been accepted as an oral presentation. It is entitled "Perception and the levels of biosemiosis".

Abstract to Nordic semiotic conference: Perception and the levels of biosemiosis

I have just completed and submitted the following abstract, for the Seventh Conference of the Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies (NASS) (with the thematic title "Towards Cognitive Semiotics. A semiotic perspective on cognition - A cognitive perspective on semiotics") - to take place in Lund, Sweden, May 6-8 2011:

Perception and the levels of biosemiosis

Morten Tønnessen, Department of Semiotics – University of Tartu

This paper will dwell on the presentation of an original, tentatively all-inclusive model of various levels of biosemiosis, aiming at a treatment first and foremost of perception. According to this model there are six levels of biosemiosis, falling under three broader categories.

CATEGORIES // PRIMARY REALM

SUB-PERCEPTUAL (MICROSCOPIC) SEMIOSIS // Somatic

Intra-cellular semiosis

Inter-cellular semiosis

PERCEPTUAL (INDIVIDUAL) SEMIOSIS // Social

Intra-organismic semiosis

Inter-organismic semiosis*

Extra-organismic semiosis

SUPER-PERCEPTUAL (MACROSCOPIC) SEMIOSIS // Ecological

Super-organismic semiosis*

* social proper, in the sense of involving several individuals

The tripartite model is relevant for simple and complex life forms alike (though in the case of very simple – non-social – creatures it collapses into a two-category model). As it demonstrates, perception is at the core of biosemiosis, even though not all biosemiosis is perceptual, and even though perception is but one level (or layer) of biosemiosis. The standing of perception is tied to the standing of the individual. With such a model of biosemiosis, the individual organism (and its lifeworld) is methodologically placed at the center of biological research.

Such a perception-oriented model of biosemiosis has implications for cultural studies as well. Applied on humans, it evokes a perspective in which the human mind, or soul – as Plato and Aristotle would have it, but in a radically different sense – partakes in three realms. Perceptual semiosis (which is ‘social’ in the primal sense of being related to the active navigating of an individual) is grounded in somatic semiosis, and interacting with a yet higher (more complex) level, namely that of superorganisms – e.g., society, or an animal population. It is on this highest, more-than-individual level that society’s often indiscernible yet absolutely principal influence on how individual members of society carry out their lives is to be located.

According to the abovementioned tripartite model of the levels of biosemiosis, cells and organisms (individuals, where applicable) are the primary substances of the biological world, though there are also larger wholes. It may perhaps shed new light on the notions of endosemiosis and exosemiosis, which is usually conceived of as semiosis that is internal and external to the body respectively. In our tripartite model, the boundary between ‘the outer’ and ‘the inner’ is in flux depending on the level of biosemiosis considered. It is thus possible to argue that endo- and exo-semiosis occurs both at the somatic level and the social level, and that in a global ecological perspective all semiosis is ultimately endosemiosis.

This comprehensive model will be supplemented by a simple model of the interrelations of the sign-relation phenomena of signification, communication and representation in a conceptualized Umwelt. Depending on whether the dominant cognitive processing (if dominated it be) is of a significational, communicational or representational nature, some people will perceive in a way that is dominantly based on immediate (unmediated) perception, social perception (included herein extremist autocommunicative perception) or symbolic perception – though most well-functioning individuals are more balanced.