A common way of performing the split between humans and other species is to assume that meaning-making, value, intention, understanding, and ultimately awareness, is the property of language. Semantic permutation, through infinitely recombinable symbols and syntax, is the magical trap door that gives humans a way out of the harsh mechanism of the otherwise lawlike universe. And because other species are seen to lack both, they invariably fall on the side of instinct, reflex, genetics, mechanism, or law. However, even if we grant that symbolic language is unique to humans, it does not seem that it is as significant for meaning and communication as we once thought - even in human activity (on the latter, see Abram, 1997; Johnson 2007). The biosphere, it is now becoming clear, is not the result of blind mechanical processes simply churning on. Rather, the interpretive activities of all life forms, inform their activity and feed back into the conditions of the environment, altering and creating relationships, and generating new and often evolutionarily significant novelty. This is true not merely of dolphins and bonobos. All organisms, to the cellular level, make sense of their worlds through the autopoietic activity of constituting a self-environment relationship which heterogeneously discloses phenomena as mattering or signifying different things for them (Thompson, 2007). For example, it is only because a bacterium takes sugar to “be food” that it is tricked into swimming towards the perceptually similar artificial sweetener (Stjernfelt, 2007). Even so-called genetic information is not “encoded in the genes” like a mystical homunculus (Oyama, 2000; Noble, 2008), but is performed through semiotic interpretations and re-interprations by the cell as it makes sense of DNA in light of ongoing viscittudes in its shifting conditions (Bruni, 2008). Beyond symbolic meaning and value, countless other modes of making sense of the world are being engaged in and invented. Biosemiotics is the study of the emergence, interaction, and evolution of these varied sign processes (Hoffmeyer, 2008). The fact that ecologies are ever constituted and reconstituted through semiotic interactions means that the biological world is not adequately explained through energy and matter exchange models, but is instead much more responsive, indeterministic, and sentient that we give it credit for. The fact of semiosis also means that an educational dimension pervades the living, as organisms on all scales and in all kingdoms learn from others learning from them (Affifi, 2016). The implication is that education must ‘go biological’ while biology likewise “educationalizes,” that the two fractured fields benefit by mending the rupture imposed between them. Language is but one form of semiosis, but one with significant effects. Insofar as our linguistic conception of meaning ties it exclusively to language, we attenuate our responsiveness to other modes of meaning-making, become calloused to meaning flowing within ourselves and in others. The study of our linguistic constructions of semiotic activity is therefore itself part of reconstructing more healthful relationships with ourselves, other humans, and the various organisms elaborating the earth’s varied ecologies.
| Period | 28 Apr 2017 |
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| Event title | AERA 2017 - San Antonio |
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| Event type | Conference |
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