Definition
The term biosemiotics derives from the Greek root bios (“life”) semeion (“sign”) and suffix –ika (“study of”). Biosemiotics is thus the study of sign processing both within and between living systems.
History and Overview
The contemporary interdisciplinary research agenda of Biosemiotics has its roots in the pioneering work done by the linguist Thomas A. Sebeok (1920–2001) in bringing biologists and semioticians together to develop more fine-grained understandings about animal communication practices – and, in particular, about how those practices might underlie the evolution of human language use (Sebeok 1990, 2001).
Sebeok initially christened his interdisciplinary research project zoösemiotics – “a discipline within which the science of signs intersects with ethology, devoted to the scientific study of signalling behaviour in and across animal species” (Sebeok 1969).
However, as the number of researchers from various fields of study (including zoology, neuroscience,...
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References
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Favareau, D. (2006). The evolutionary history of biosemiotics. In M. Barbieri (Ed.), Introduction to biosemiotics: The new biological synthesis (pp. 1–67). Dordrecht: Springer.
Hoffmeyer, J. (2009). Biosemiotics: An examination into the signs of life and the life of signs. Scranton: Scranton University Press.
Kull, K. (2003). Thomas A. Sebeok and biology: Building biosemiotics. Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 10(1), 47–60.
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Peirce, C. S. ([1910] 2010). The logic of signs. In D. Favareau (Ed.), Essential readings in biosemiotics: Anthology and commentary (pp. 115–148). Berlin: Springer Science.
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Uexküll, J. von. ([1940] 2010). The theory of meaning. In D. Favareau (Ed.), Essential readings in biosemiotics: Anthology and commentary (pp. 81–114). Berlin: Springer.
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Favareau, D. (2018). Biosemiotics. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3832-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3832-1
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