Disaster semiotics occupies an intersection between biosemiotics and disaster studies. Contemporary scholarship, in establishing a connection between disaster and semiotics, often separates instrumental rationality from practical rationality within biosemiotic systems, while adopting deontology and utilitarianism as normative foundations for biosemiotic ethics. However, strong accountability fails to adequately recognize the ethical dimension of non-human semiotic processes, whereas weak accountability struggles to address ecological responsibility and the problem of meaning generation. Without confronting the deep-seated technological-linguistic hegemony embedded in human history, it is difficult to realize a life-centered maximization principle of happiness. This paper argues that a virtue-ethical disaster semiotics—characterized by the genuine circulation of meaning and grounded in the material and institutional infrastructures that regulate semiotic processes—should serve as the core framework of moral evaluation. Authentic semiotic relations not only explain disaster phenomena but also guide action under conditions of uncertainty. Human virtues include cultivating resilience among affected populations, as well as humanitarian attitudes and professional virtues among rescue workers. Political virtues include semiotic coordination oriented toward the public good, the cultivation and dissemination of practical wisdom, and the simultaneous development of justice and benevolence in disaster contexts. Finally, historical primacy requires responding to the phenomenon of voicelessness in digital disasters. Moral openness is manifested in the historical adaptability of semiotic practices, the physiological basis of perceptual conflict, and the multi-level responsive feedback mechanisms among living systems.
Science fiction has met biosemiotics, writing biosemiotic fiction, or ‘bi-fi’. Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea (2022) stages the emergence of symbolic communication in an octopus population and refuses to let it resolve into translation. Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker (2022) describes the conceit of de-extinction relying on genome banking but without habits or habitat as a name and an accounting trick. Sue Burke’s Semiosis (2018) builds a code between human colonists and clonal bamboo originating from a series of juxtapositions across several human lifetimes. In dialog with all three authors, this review proposes ‘bi-fi’ as a genre designation alongside cli-fi (climate fiction), distinguished by three formal markers: a novum that is semiotic rather than technological, a narrative engine of translation that fails, and ethical stakes following from semiosis rather than sentience, so that extinction becomes legible as semiocide. The essay argues that these novels perform work biosemiotics cannot currently do for itself. Through first-organism perspectives, they install Umwelt as a habit of perception rather than an abstraction, they license abduction under conditions our research culture rarely permits, and they carry Uexküllian and Peircean percepts to publics the discipline does not reach. The review closes by proposing that narrative Umwelt modeling under explicit scientific constraint be treated as a research instrument in its own right.
This article offers a biosemiotic reading of Forensic Architecture (FA) and David Wengrow’s project The Nebelivka Hypothesis, an archaeological project that relies on forensic architecture methods. Specifically, we examine how the project makes materially embedded traces in the Nebelivka archaeological site—including soil strata, burnt architectural remains, spatial patterns, crop marks, snow marks, and geophysical anomalies—legible through modelling, simulation, visualisation, and curatorial framing. We do not treat the project as a source of new archaeological data, nor do we seek to verify its archaeological claims. The article argues that the project’s operations function as forms of semiotic scaffolding: they organise relations between material traces, forensic reconstruction, and present-day interpretation. In this sense, the biosemiotic contribution is to shift attention from the question of whether Nebelivka was a city in conventional typological terms to the question of how an alternative urban form becomes semiotically intelligible. Drawing on Hoffmeyer’s concept of semiotic scaffolding, Peircean accounts of inference and modelling, and semioethical reflections on alterity, the article reads The Nebelivka Hypothesis as a mediated environment of interpretation. The analysis is theoretical and interpretive rather than empirical; its aim is to clarify how forensic reconstruction can reconfigure the relation between archaeological evidence, digital mediation, and the imagination of past urban life. We do not construe FA’s digital models as “codes” in the strict biosemiotic sense. Rather, we argue that the project transforms materially embedded archaeological traces into an interpretable urban hypothesis through digital, visual, and curatorial mediation. Biosemiotics justifies the application of forensic architecture in archaeology by adding a framework for understanding this process as semiotic scaffolding: a layered relation between traces, models, observers, and interpretive possibilities.
This handbook contributes to neurosemiotics through the integration of biological systems with meaning-making processes, which challenges traditional mind-brain dichotomies. Its framework, however, reveals limitations on two complementary fronts: it not only obscures the psychological underpinnings, innate affective endowments, and evolutionary trajectories of semiosis, but marginalizes the social structures and power dynamics that are central to social semiotics. This review advances a cross-fertilization between neurosemiotics and social semiotics through mediating practices. It calls for a transdisciplinary cognitive science framework that conceptualizes the universal body as an agentive meaning-maker rooted in social, psychological, and evolutionary realities rather than just as a biological entity.
This paper revisits the anthropological claim of “different worlds”—that distinct communities inhabit ontologically incommensurable realities—and offers a biosemiotic revision. It argues that the ontological turn is right that worlds are genuinely multiple, but wrong to treat this multiplicity as absolute incommensurability. Drawing on Uexküll’s Umwelt theory, Schroer’s critical reading, and Kohn’s more-than-human semiotics, the paper reframes ontological divergence as differential calibration of semiotic attunement to a shared physical and ecological world. Through four concepts—Bauplan, perceptual threshold, Funktionskreis, and semiotic attunement—it shows that incommensurability is not a fixed property of worlds but a variable state of semiotic relation, contingent on overlap of perceptual thresholds and on semiotic competence gained through learning and practice. This reframing moves the question from “are worlds commensurable?” to “under what conditions does recognition and translation between worlds become possible?” The argument proceeds in three steps: a reinterpretation of Uexküll’s Umwelt framework; ethnographic analyses of Nuer, Yukaghir, Oroqen-Evenki, and Tibetan cases, showing that local knowledges are context-dependent semiotic strategies rather than incommensurable ontologies; and an examination of linguistic reference. The paper concludes by advancing a semiotically grounded life community in which divergence is the generative medium of reciprocal meaning-making across species and places. Bringing biosemiotic concepts to a central anthropological debate, it offers not a definitive answer to “different worlds” but a new analytical grammar that recasts incommensurability as a matter of semiotic attunement rather than a metaphysical terminus.
Autopoiesis, originally developed by Maturana and Varela, has been influential across multiple disciplines, but its application to rehabilitation medicine remains theoretically underdeveloped. This paper proposes Neurophenomenological Rehabilitation, a theoretical framework for understanding recovery not as the restoration of isolated bodily functions, but as the reorganization and expansion of the patient’s embodied autopoietic system. Drawing on Kawamoto’s system phenomenology, it interprets Sich as the operative organization of sensory relations, Selbst as the bodily articulation of that organization, Umwelt as the meaningful environment correlated with the system’s mode of action, and System as the recursive interaction between embodied organization and environment. In this framework, the therapist mediates the therapeutic process by participating in the recursive interaction constituting the patient’s System and supporting the emergence and stabilization of new sensory relations. As these relations become incorporated into the patient’s body schema, they may become pre-reflective bodily capacities through which environmental differences acquire practical significance within the patient’s Umwelt. The framework is also placed in dialogue with cognitive therapeutic approaches, narrative medicine, personalized medicine, and One Health, which offer complementary resources for addressing cognitive, experiential, individualized, and environmental dimensions of rehabilitation and health. Neurophenomenological Rehabilitation thus offers an analytical framework for understanding how such resources may contribute to autonomous reorganization, rather than a uniform or empirically validated clinical protocol.
Cultural propagation models frequently fail to account for the emergence, recombination, and persistence of complex memetic structures across divergent interpretive contexts. Conventional memetics, reliant on genetic metaphors of high-fidelity replication, neglects the structural affordances and systemic constraints governing meaning-making within a host ecology. The pharmacophore-reactome framework introduced in the current work recharacterizes memes as structured, interpretable configurations operating within a distributed interpretive environment. Memetic transmission is thus determined not by copying accuracy, but by the binding affinity between substructural sign-motifs and the internalized semiotic architecture of the receiver. Grounded in Peircean triadic logic, this mechanism demonstrates how cultural signs acquire functional utility only through integration into compatible semantic receptors. Such a conceptual shift accommodates selective inhibition, modular recombination, and functional clustering within a heterogeneous and evolving semantic ecology. Shifting the analytical focus from the replicator to the interpretable motif enables the simulation of docking interactions and structure-function prediction within cultural systems. Finally, the model provides a formal basis for explaining memetic resistance and non-linear signal propagation in dynamic digital landscapes.
This article examines the semiotic and biosemiotic significance of fungal imagery in visual culture, tracing representations of mushrooms and fungi from prehistoric and medieval traditions to contemporary bio-art and multispecies installations. Drawing on Peircean semiotics, Greimassian visual semiotics, plastic semiotics, and biosemiotic concepts of Umwelt and ecological perception, the study investigates how fungal forms function as signs through which ecological relations, cultural meanings, and multispecies imaginaries become perceptible. Through a diachronic analysis of artistic representation ranging from shamanic depictions and Baroque still lifes to the contemporary works of Nicolas Party, Vicki Sawyer, Saša Spačal, and Theresa Schubert, the article demonstrates a gradual transition from symbolic representation toward relational and process-oriented modes of signification. The analysis shows that fungi occupy a distinctive position within visual culture because of their biological and symbolic liminality. Diachronically and synchronically, fungal imagery repeatedly engages themes of transformation, interdependence, mediation, and ecological connectivity. Contemporary works increasingly move beyond depicting fungi as visual subjects, incorporating fungal materials, growth processes, and mycelial networks into artistic practice itself. As a result, fungi appear less as object of observation and increasingly as mediators through which relationships among organisms, environments, technologies, and cultural meanings are explored. The article argues that this change signals a broader reorientation in visual culture, one that directs attention toward process, relation, and ecological interdependence as fundamental conditions of life.
This article develops a biosemiotic account of motivation as an emergent, value-laden phenomenon linking neurobiological processes, phenomenological experience, and semiotic dynamics. Situating motivation within the broader framework of organism–environment coupling, it argues that motivation is not an isolated psychological state but a relational process mediating between agents, cues, and ecological affordances. Drawing on neurocognitive models of incentive salience (Berridge), phenomenological accounts of intentionality and motivational structure (Brentano, Husserl), and biosemiotic theories of absential phenomena (Deacon) and concomitant processes (Kockelman), the paper proposes a revised triadic schema in which the motivated subject functions simultaneously as interpretant and agent. This synthesis reframes motivation as an axiological dynamic — a felt orientation toward value — that shapes and is shaped by semiotic scaffolding within living systems. By integrating biological, cognitive, and semiotic perspectives, the article offers a framework for understanding how motivational processes participate in the generation of meaning, with implications for both the study of animal and human sign-use and the evaluation of artificial systems that simulate, but do not instantiate, motivational dynamics.
Although not visible to human eyes, ultraviolet (UV) reflectance forms an essential part of the perceptual world of animals belonging to a wide range of taxa. It plays a role in their communication, orientation, and ecological interactions. Although ultraviolet patterns constitute a significant portion of biological signals, their role in species-specific Umwelten remains insufficiently understood, in part because human sensory limitations obscure this domain of meaning. In this essay, we highlight the significance of studying the ultraviolet Umwelten and propose that UV-reflecting surfaces can be interpreted as semantic organs whose biological relevance is based on a reciprocal dynamics of appearance and perception. To overcome the methodological constraints that have historically hindered access to UV-mediated communication, we provide a detailed, reproducible pipeline for UV reflectance photography. Our framework specifies the necessary optical equipment, illumination conditions, filtration strategies, calibration procedures, and postprocessing steps needed to obtain standardised (within our imaging pipeline) and quantitatively interpretable UV images. This protocol should enable researchers to reliably visualise and compare UV patterns in ways that approximate their appearance to UV-sensitive organisms, thus granting empirical access to the aspects of their Umwelten which are normally hidden to human observers. By combining rigorous imaging methodology with a biosemiotic approach to organismal surfaces, we show how UV patterns contribute to the formation of ecological meaning and call for broader integration of UV modalities into the study of biological communication.
This paper examines the North Atlantic’s recent invasion by pink salmon, a phenomenon of increasing concern and scientific curiosity. We posit that this population shift is best explained as an Umwelt degeneracy, or a loss-of-function development in the pink salmon’s relationship to its environment. By degenerating its homing capacity, introduced pink salmon began to wander, colonize, and benefit from radically increased survival rates, leading to an unpredicted leap in population size and distribution. This paper synthesizes a wide array of literature both theoretical and empirical in the presentation of the Umwelt degeneracy hypothesis. As such, it concerns a wide audience and begins with a brief contextual history of pink salmon and relevant Umwelt theory before delving into the indices of an Umwelt degeneracy phenomenon. The Umwelt degeneracy hypothesis calls for new agency-oriented approaches to be taken in the understanding of this biological invasion and entails significance for biological theories of invasion evolution.
This article critically reassesses the alleged intrinsic connection between Jakob von Uexküll’s Umweltlehre and the biopolitics of National Socialism, as recently advanced by Gottfried Schnödl and Florian Sprenger. Against the claim that Uexküll’s biological theory structurally entails totalitarian outcomes, the paper develops a twofold argument. First, it reconstructs Uexküll’s political writings, particularly the Staatsbiologie (1920/1933), showing their fragmentary, inconsistent, and largely occasional character. Rather than constituting a coherent political philosophy, these texts reflect shifting historical contingencies and biographical circumstances, thereby undermining the thesis of a systematic ideological program. Second, the paper offers a detailed analysis of the metaphysical foundations of Umweltlehre, focusing on the concept of Planmäßigkeit. It argues that this notion functions as a regulative, non-empirical principle akin to a Kantian idea, grounding the harmony between organism and environment without prescribing normative or political order. By emphasizing the primacy of functional activity over fixed form and the plurality of subject-specific Umwelten, the paper demonstrates that Uexküll’s framework resists both holistic reductionism and authoritarian unification, proving that there is no necessary derivation from Uexküll’s theoretical biology to totalitarian biopolitics. While acknowledging the problematic aspects of his political views, they ultimately remain theoretically inconsistent with his biological system. Consequently, the wholesale dismissal of Umweltlehre on political grounds is unwarranted, and a critical but nuanced engagement with Uexküll’s work remains both possible and philosophically productive.
Contemporary microbiome research has transformed understanding of the human organism as a multi-species assemblage, yet biomedical frameworks still treat subjective bodily experience as epiphenomenal — leaving untheorized how microbially modulated signals become experientially meaningful and clinically actionable. This paper proposes the Sense of Microbial Harmony (SoMH) as a cognitive-biosemiotic framework in which the human host actively interprets interoceptive signals shaped by microbial ecology. Drawing on Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory and functional circle, Peircean triadic semiosis, enactive cognition, and Thure von Uexküll’s Situationskreis, microbial metabolites, neuroimmune mediators, and visceral cues are reconceived as sign-vehicles requiring interpretation before they can guide adaptive regulation. SoMH is specified at three analytically distinct levels — as a subjective construct (felt interoceptive attunement), a semiotic process (the recursive functional circle linking microbial activity, signaling, and regulatory response), and an observable outcome (the patterned regulatory state that stabilizes over iterated cycles) — enabling a measurement architecture in which divergences between these levels carry diagnostic significance invisible to single-index approaches. The framework explicitly resists individualist self-monitoring imperatives by situating attunement as a relational, ecologically constrained property of the holobiont system, bounded by structural, social, and Planetary Health conditions. Clinically, SoMH is operationalized through biosemiotic phenotyping — characterizing patients by the coherence or incoherence of their interoceptive-regulatory loop — and through Narrative Medicine as the medium for accessing and therapeutically recalibrating stabilized interpretive habits. The SoMH proposes a holobiont-oriented unit of care in which meaning, not biochemistry alone, occupies the explanatory center of host-microbiota relations in health and illness.
The loss of species is now a global phenomenon. This paper explores species extinction as more than a biological fact or cultural metaphor, proposing its interpretation as a symptom within the ecosemiosphere—a semiotic system encompassing ecosystems, species, and cultural processes. While conventional discourses frame extinction either as a singular irreversible event or as a symbolic representation, such views obscure its semiotic depth and ecological significance. By analyzing extinction as a symptom sign, the study reveals its causal links to deteriorating ecological and semiotic processes, including habitat fragmentation, loss of interspecies communication, and erosion of animal umwelts. These processes signal a broader decline in the “depth of meaning” a concept describing the richness of semiotic relationships between organisms (humans and nonhumans alike) and their environments. Furthermore, extinction correlates with cultural impoverishment, as biodiversity and cultural diversity are intertwined, while both are also threatened by modernization. The paper argues for integrating indexical meaning layers into cultural and artistic strategies to counter extinction, highlighting examples from contemporary art that reconnect symbolic and pre-symbolic modes of representation. Such strategies can foster awareness of extinction as an existential crisis affecting both biological and cultural domains. Understanding extinction as a symptom reframes it as a sign of systemic degradation, offering new pathways for ecosemiotic research and creative practices aimed at restoring biocultural connectivity.
In this article we introduce the method of umwelt-based place analysis for urban and nature–culture communities as a semiotic tool for the analysis of place. The article first introduces a toolbox of umwelt-related concepts developed in eco- and biosemiotic research. A step-by-step outline of the umwelt-based place analysis is then provided and subsequently illustrated through a case study conducted in the city of Tartu, Estonia. It involves the basic characterisation of a place, a selection of key species, the analysis of the umwelten of the key species, as well as the relationships between human and other species’ umwelten and the analysis of the major consortia of the place. The method enables the identification of key contact and conflict points between humans and other-than-humans and facilitates an understanding of how physical affordances as well as social-cultural norms and regulations shape multispecies communities. It further grounds the formulation of design-oriented suggestions aimed at supporting species-rich communities in anthropogenic environments.
The idea that “information is physical” has been widely accepted in the scientific community. However, in a paper first published online couple years ago, the author demonstrated phenomenologically that the rules connecting signs and their meanings cannot be physical laws, showing that information is non-physical. In this multidisciplinary study spanning biology, physics, and semiotics, the author extends the argument presented in a recent paper—that biological information is non-physical because its irreversibility violates the time-reversal symmetry in physical laws—to demonstrate that macroscopic information is also non-physical. Macroscopic information processes consist of numerous interconnected signal transductions, and their irreversibility arises from multiple biological mechanisms: unidirectional causal mechanisms determine the irreversibility of sensory transduction and neurotransmitter-gated ion channels; the refractory period of voltage-gated ion channels ensures the irreversible movement of action potentials along axons toward synaptic terminals; and the structural asymmetry of synapses leads to that chemical signals propagate only forward across synapses. In contrast to that the irreversibility of macroscopic physicochemical processes arises from the statistical outcomes of a large number of underlying reversible microscopic physicochemical processes, the irreversibility of macroscopic information stems from a vast number of underlying irreversible microscopic biological information processes. Therefore, macroscopic information also violates the time-reversal symmetry in physical laws, demonstrating that it is non-physical.
This article offers a biosemiotic and environmental memory reading of Forensic Architecture/Forensis’ investigation, The Environmental Continuum of Genocide in Namibia. Focusing on the long afterlife of German colonial violence against Ovaherero and Nama communities, the study argues that the project treats Namibian landscapes not as neutral backdrops but as more-than-human archives that store and transmit memories of ecocide and genocide. The article’s central claim is that FA makes environmental change legible as a form of environmental witnessing—a more-than-human evidentiary practice in which ecological transformation functions as testimonial trace of the ecocide–genocide continuum. To this end, the article’s primary contribution is to develop entangled ecological memory as a framework for analyzing how memory is distributed across landscape materialities (soil, vegetation, hydrology), intergenerational Indigenous testimony, and forensic visualization technologies that translate ecological traces into forensic claims. Drawing on environmental memory and semiotic fitting, the analysis traces how precolonial grassland consortia and herder–land relations constituted a finely tuned semiotic ecology that was violently ruptured by colonial Lebensraum politics and cadastral regimes. Framing FA’s practice this way clarifies why the investigation is not only representational but activist. It re-narrates landscapes against colonial erasure by converting environmental traces into contestatory memory claims, thereby opening a space to rethink transitional justice as a more-than-human field of responsibility, evidence, and repair.
Biosemiotics has often been charged with the use of metaphorical language, redundancy with respect to existing biology, weak falsifiability, and lack of specific methods (see, e.g., Barbieri (Biological Theory, 9(2), 239–249, 2014); Deacon (Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 19(3), 293–311, 2015); Sherman (Chinese Semiotic Studies, 20(2), 231–253, 2024); Vehkavaara (Sign Systems Studies, 30(1), 293–313, 2002). This article examines the epistemological and methodological status of biosemiotics in the light of current philosophy of science and methodological pluralism in life sciences. Rather than asking whether biosemiotics has a single unifying hypothesis or methodology, we want to see whether it can function as a progressive research programme in a broadly Lakatosian sense, while remaining compatible with methodological diversity (Lakatos, 1970; Giere, 2006; Kellert et al, 2006; Chang, 2012; Ruphy, 2016). Our analysis proceeds in four steps. First, we outline evaluation standards appropriate for fields organised around midlevel frameworks that coordinate models, instruments, and standards of evidence rather than for universal ‘methods’. In doing so, we stress model construction, contrasts, and the ability to generate new testable hypotheses, that is, heuristic fertility. Second, we address worries about metaphoricity and conceptual incoherence by tracing how key semiotic concepts (semiosis, code, umwelt, interpretation) can be unified and linked to operational distinctions. Third, we respond to the objections regarding its redundancy and epistemic status by treating biosemiotics as a complementary interpretive layer that functions on top of mechanistic explanations and is useful especially in areas where context-sensitivity, normativity, and agency are central. Fourth, we survey zoosemiotic, ecosemiotic, and biosemiotic studies to identify four recurrent empirical patterns (namely, context-sensitive responses, conventional sign use, norm-guided correction, and remapping under controlled change) related to situations where semiotic and non-semiotic models produce different predictions based on the same data. We conclude that under modest but non-trivial programme-level standards, biosemiotics can be developed as a testable and integrative approach within life sciences and identify domains and methodological practices where its claims remain underspecified and invite further work.
The human–dog (Homo sapiens–Canis familiaris) relationship is humanity’s longest interspecies partnership, yet studies integrating its biological and semiotic mechanisms remain limited. This paper examines the dyad through a biosemiotic lens, synthesising evidence from evolutionary theory, ethology, physiology, and human–animal interaction. We propose that the human-dog dyad can be understood as a biologically and semiotically integrated system grounded in sign interpretation and umwelt overlap. We review bidirectional neuroendocrine, behavioural, and interpretive feedback pathways and introduce the term hominin–canine axis for this interspecific regulatory network. We also hypothesize plausible routes for co-regulation of immune function and the gut microbiome. We suggest that, in some contexts, certain dyads may exhibit superorganism-like features. By positioning the human–dog dyad as both a biological and interpretive system, this novel framework bridges biosemiotics, evolutionary theory, ethology, and human–animal interaction, offering testable hypotheses for future research and a unifying model for heterospecific integration.
