Claudia has been visiting our group in Lund since September 2024, and is by now a firm affiliated member of it! But alas, she is going back to Rome in March, so this will be a kind of good-bye talk - and following dinner. So please let me know if you wish to join by Feb 25. In this talk, Claudia will present the main ideas of the first (of three main) chapters of her dissertation, devoted to (non-human) animal semiosis, triangulating (in a way) between cultural semiotics, bio-semiotics and cognitive semiotics. All are warmly welcome!

In the advancement of any discipline, it is essential to delineate its scope by determining what should be included in its domain of inquiry and what should be excluded. According to Umberto Eco, the natural boundaries of semiotics are defined by its object – namely, signs – while its political boundaries should be established through transitory agreements (Eco, 1976). At the core of this perspective lies the longstanding assumption that signs possess a nature that enables a different level of semiosis not comparable to other kinds, thereby often restricting semiotics to the study of relations among sign elements and relegating the investigation of non-human communicative phenomena to separate disciplines, such as cognitive ethology for animal communication. In contrast, biosemiotics has sought to consider the broad spectrum of semiotic phenomena while rejecting the notion that only certain privileged, enculturated animals engage in semiosis. This research approach suggests that “processes of sign and meaning cannot […] become criteria for distinguishing between the domains of nature and culture” (Hoffmeyer, 2008: 4). From this perspective, cultural sign processes should be regarded as particular instances of a more expansive, general and continuous biosemiosis. Consequently, semiotics should not limit itself to analyzing the internal relations of signs but should instead explore also meaning-making processes more broadly, considering the human semiotic sphere as both rooted in and, to some extent, continuous with analogous phenomena in the non-human domain (Emmeche, 2007).

In this presentation, I examine critical aspects of semiosis and sign-function by juxtaposing the perspectives of traditional semiotics and biosemiotics, employing a theoretical framework derived from cognitive semiotics: the Semiotic Hierarchy (Zlatev, 2018, in press). Within this model, semiosis is neither conceptualized as a distinct “higher level” of meaning nor as something that stands in opposition to the biological. On this basis, I argue for a turn toward cognitive semiotics as a promising means of synthesizing diverse conceptualizations of semiosis and sign use, while also suggesting potential implications for the study of meaning-making in non-human animals. 

Eco, U. (1976). A Theory of Semiotics. Indiana University Press.

Emmeche, C. (2007) A biosemiotics note on organisms, animals, machines, cyborgs, and the quasi-autonomy of robots. Pragmatics & Cognition, 15(3), 455–483. 

Hoffmeyer, J. (2008). Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs, University of Scranton Press, 

Zlatev, J. (2018). Meaning making from life to language: The Semiotic Hierarchy and phenomenology. Cognitive Semiotics, 11 (1), Article 20180001.

Zlatev, J. (in press). Five pillars of cognitive semiotics. In A. Bilgari (Ed.) Open Semiotics Vol 5. Editions L'Harmattan.