Consultation on Biolinguistics

At January 14, 2010, Marcello Barbieri mailed this message to a group of scholars in biosemiotics:

"We have all been critical of Chomsky’s ideas, to a lesser or greater extent, but we cannot ignore them, especially because they are the basis of the new research field of Biolinguistics which has been developed in parallel with Biosemiotics. By a strange coincidence, the journals that bear their names, Biolinguistics and Biosemiotics, have even started regular publication together, in 2008.
The crucial point is that both fields regard language as a natural phenomenon and claim a scientific approach to its study. Two different philosophies can remain entrenched forever into antagonistic positions, but two scientific disciplines are bound to look for dialogue, testing, confrontation and, ideally, for a synthesis of their ideas. Such a process, however, requires not only individual contributions but also collective discussions, and that is precisely the purpose of this collective letter.
I am sending in attachment the draft of a paper [here, C.E.] that proposes a synthesis of the two fields and I invite each of you to express your opinion. If you want to comment on the paper I shall be grateful, of course, but you can also ignore it and just express your ideas on the issue in question. The purpose of this consultation is to get a realistic picture of the feelings that exist today in Biosemiotics in respect to Biolinguistics, and I hope therefore that you will accept to comment on this point. Many thanks in advance for your attention and for your contribution."

Now Barbieri has compiled a file with the ensuing discussion, and asked me to post it here. You can download the the file here.
Postscript:
Barbieri kindly mailed me a version of his revised manuscipt, "On the Origin of Language - A synthesis of Biolinguistics and Biosemiotics", of February 11, 2010, that you can download here. Noam Chomsky and members of the Biosemiotic community are acknowledge.

Call for papers: Special issue of Hortus Semioticus

See our call for papers below (plus here). Note that graduate students and young scholars are particularly encouraged to submit. As my fellow guest editor Riin Magnus writes in an email, we hope seniors in the field can help by spreading the cfp to potentially interested students and young professionals. We would like to express...

...that we would thereby also like to form and strengthen the network of graduate students working in the semiotics of nature or similar fields.

(MT)

CALL FOR PAPERS: SPECIAL ISSUE ON THE SEMIOTICS OF NATURE
Hortus Semioticus
Guest editors: Riin Magnus, Nelly Mäekivi and Morten Tønnessen

Hortus Semioticus is an online academic journal of semiotics - the study of signs and sign processes. In Tartu, Estonia, where the student journal is based, nature has long accompanied culture as a topic for semiotic inquiry (cf. the fields known as biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, and zoosemiotics). The driving force behind the journal is curiosity and the joy of inquiry. Around the summer of 2010 the journal will publish a special issue on the semiotics of nature (meaning living nature, rather than physical nature). We are inviting papers on the topics of meaning, value, communication, signification, representation, and cognition in and of nature (ranging from the cellular level to the global scene). We encourage originality within a scientific framework which emphazises the semiotic aspects of the life processes alluded to above. Not least, we strongly welcome submissions from other fields (besides, beyond or beneath semiotics). Graduate students and young scholars are particularly encouraged to submit. Contributions (5-20 pages) should be written in English or Estonian and sent to the guest editors by May 1st, 2010. Prior to that we're expecting an abstract (100-200 words) plus 3-5 keywords by April 1 2010. Please find further instructions here. Email addresses of the guest editors: riin.magnus@gmail.com (Riin Magnus), nellymaekivi@gmail.com (Nelly Mäekivi) and mortentoennessen@gmail.com (Morten Tønnessen)

More special issues

The online Tartu journal Hortus Semioticus will later this year publish a special issue on various forms of semiotics of nature (biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, zoosemiotics). Guest editors: Nelly Mäekivi, Riin Magnus and myself. The issue will feature an English language interview with Kalevi Kull.

About to appear right now is the Sign Systems Studies special issue on zoosemiotics (guest editors: Dario Martinelli and Otto Lehto).

Update on special issue 'Semiotics of perception'

The special issue of Biosemiotics 'Semiotics of perception' will appear as no. 2, volume 3, in August (guest editors: Kati Lindström and myself).

After a few changes have been made, the authors now include:
David Abram
Kalevi Kull
Kati Lindström
Timo Maran
Renata Sõukand & Raivo Kalle
Morten Tønnessen
Wendy Wheeler
Ane Faugstad Aarø

Abram's contribution is a chapter ("The discourse of the birds") from his forthcoming book Becoming animal: An earthly cosmology, to be published August 24th.

Animals and aesthetics

To interested colleagues: to what extent do we have dialogue with participants in events such as the one below?

Proposed Panel Subject: Imagining Boundaries: Animals, Aesthetics, and the Posthuman

Panel Organizer: Drew Ayers, Georgia State University

Summary: The goal of this panel is to explore the various strategies of imagining the Animal within cultural and scientific imagery. The Animal has been a source of interest for commentators throughout history, and ideas of what constitutes the Animal have informed ideas of what constitutes the Human. That is, Humanity has been, in part, defined in opposition to Animality. Contemporary and 20th century philosophers such as Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Agamben, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Haraway have all contributed to the discussion of the Animal, and this panel aims to understand these various conceptualizations of the Animal in relation to contemporary visual culture. In particular, this panel aims to interrogate the aesthetics of visualizing animals and to understand more fully the ways in which the relationship between the human and non-human animal is imagined within cinema, TV, and other media. Theoretical, philosophical, and/or historical approaches of all types are welcome, and this panel is open to analyses of any kind of contemporary media – film, TV, new media, advertising, painting, plastic art.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

*The construction of cultural and scientific boundaries between the human and non-human animal
*Becoming-animal
*Ecocriticism and media
*The phenomenology of human and non-human interaction
*The animal in posthumanism
*Socio-scientific approaches to the animal
*The ideology of biology’s attempts to separate the human and non-human animal
*Imagining the animal thorough nature films and documentaries
*Histories of animal imagery
*Imagining the animal through animation
*Media technologies and animal imagery
*The media industry’s use/exploitation of animal actors

Please send abstracts or proposals (250-500 words), including a five-item bibliography and brief biographical note, to Drew Ayers (dayers2@gsu.edu) by August 8, 2009. Selected presenters for the panel will be notified by August 15, 2009, and the panel will be submitted to SCMS by September 1, 2009. Acceptance of your proposal does not guarantee that SCMS will accept the panel as a whole.

The Turing Machine as Context.

The following was first posted on the Biosemiotics Forum, operated by Fatima Cvrckova:

"Consider this example of the a priori nature of context vis-à-vis meaning. The Turing machine, of which modern computers are a close approximation, contains within itself the capacity for all possible computations. This is to say, the computer contains all possible computational meaning. Programs, on the other hand, are informational, and in particular, serve to whittle away from the total set of meanings contained within a computer, yielding the particular subset of meanings that define a specific computational goal.

"While programs can learn (for example, see the work of John Myhill 1963), computers cannot learn. Instead, computers are computationally omniscient. That is, the Turing machine embodies all possible computational meaning, a priori, just by its construction. The mere fact of construction provides the Turing machine with this omniscience."

wrb

Biosemiotics by Hoffmeyer

This is an excellent book. My thanks to Bruce Weber, for recommending that I read it. I've learned with every turn of the page.