Papers in English by Donald Favareau
Sharov & Mikhailovsky, 2024
Increasingly, the examination of the phenomena of signs and meanings in the biosphere is becoming... more Increasingly, the examination of the phenomena of signs and meanings in the biosphere is becoming recognized as an important area of inquiry for biology and ecology. In the current chapter, we both look back to some of the earliest history of such inquiry, as well as look ahead to how we think that these ideas are developing. The chapter is then divided into two main parts, accordingly. Part 1 presents a selectively abbreviated history of some of the more influential ways that the phenomena of signs and meanings have been conceptualized in the natural sciences from antiquity to the present, while Part 2 presents some of the key insights and concepts now being developed within the field of biosemiotics for furthering our understanding of the role of signs and meanings in the organization and interaction of living systems.
Journal of Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology , 2015
Stuart Kauffman's revolutionary notion of the Adjacent Possible as an organizing principle in nat... more Stuart Kauffman's revolutionary notion of the Adjacent Possible as an organizing principle in nature shares much in common with logician Charles S. Peirce's understanding of the universe as an ever-unfolding 'process ontology' of possibility space that is brought about through the recursive interaction of genuine possibility, transiently actualized order, and emergent (but never fully deterministic) lawfulness. Proceeding from these three fundamental categories of becoming-as-being, Peirce developed a complimentary logic of sign relations that, along with Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll's action-as-meaning-imprinting Umwelt theory, informs the work that is currently being undertaken under the aegis of Biosemiotics. In this paper, I will highlight the deep affinities between Kauffman's notion of the Adjacent Possible and Biosemiotics' hybrid Peircean/Uexküllian " sign " concept, by which living systems e both as individuals and in the aggregate (i.e., as co-actors, communities and lineages) e " capture " relevant aspects of their relations with the immediately given Adjacent Possible and preserve those recipes for future interaction possibilities as biologically instantiated signs. By so doing, living systems move into the Adjacent Possible by " collapsing the wave function " of possibility not just probabilistically, but guided by system-internal values arising from previously captured sign relations that are biologically instantiated as replicable system biases and generative constraints. The influence of such valenced and end-directed action in the world introduces into the universe the phenomenon of the Relevant (and not just deterministic, or even stochastic) Next. My argument in this paper is that organisms live out their lives perpetually confronted with negotiating the omnipresent Relevant Next, and are informed by the biological capture of their (and their lineage's) previous engagements in doing so. And because that " capture " of previous agent-object-action relationships are instantiated as biological signs for the guidance of the organism, not only are " successful survival strategies " within a given possibility space captured (as in traditional accounts of Natural Selection), but captured as well within those signs are the entire complement of previously untaken but still veridical real-world possibility spaces that are inseparably 'entangled' with that sign, and just awaiting exploration by the organism. Thus, while all action in the universe is both current-context dependant and next-context creating, the emergence of ever-more complex semiotic capabilities in organisms has expanded the possibility space of immediate-next-action in the world exponentially, and has brought into being not a pre-given, singly end-directed ordered world, but an emergent, many ends-directed world of promiscuous, unforeseeable and interacting telos. The goal of Biosemiotics is to understand and to explore this world.
Semiotics and its Masters: Volume 2, 2023
“In actual existence,” notes John Deely “every substance and every accident is maintained by real... more “In actual existence,” notes John Deely “every substance and every accident is maintained by realities of circumstance and being other than itself” (2001: 228). Accordingly, all things – including and, perhaps most especially, organisms – arise and are maintained within a dense web of inextricably interwoven relationships. Thus the question for modernist science, since at least the time of Ockham, becomes whether or not such ‘relationships’ per se can be said to have a genuine, and sometimes end-directed, existence in their own right (the doctrine of semiotic realism), or whether they are merely the linguistic and analytical constructions of we observers, which we impose upon our acts of apprehending the conjoint activity of particular things (the doctrine of nominalism, which today mostly takes the form of scientific instrumentalism). Recent advances both in biology and in semiotics, it is argued here, support the necessity of semiotic realism as an irreducible organizing principle in the living world.
The Routledge Handbook of Semiosis and the Brain, 2023
The main task of neurosemiotics is to identify and explain the neural processes and mechanisms th... more The main task of neurosemiotics is to identify and explain the neural processes and mechanisms that create sign-relations, thereby supplying semiotic models to neurobiological accounts. Due to the diversity of neurosemiotic mechanisms, neurosemiotic research may have a major impact on general semiotics, zoology, neurobiology, cognitive science and consciousness studies. We (1) provide a brief account of the history of neurosemiotics, (2) review the approaches, scope and aims of neurosemiotic research, (3) formulate the general problems of neurosemiotics, (4) specify some features of the neural system that are relevant for semiosis, and (5) describe some general characteristics of neurosemiosis.
Journal of Physiology, 2023
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Biosemiotics , 2021
Forty-five years ago, while still an undergraduate student at Western Washington University's Fai... more Forty-five years ago, while still an undergraduate student at Western Washington University's Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, Terrence Deacon produced as his honours thesis a programmatic manifesto for re-situating the semiotic logic of Charles Sanders Peirce "out of the realm of philosophy and [revealing instead] its necessary association with the information sciences and its close parallels with current systems theories" (Deacon, 1976:10). Deacon's project, then and now, has been to show how, within the context of naturally occurring physical processes, Peirce's essential insight regarding a "mode of being which consists in the fact that future facts of secondness will take on a determinate general character" (CP 1.26) can be, and is continuously, manifested in living systems. Considering this explication to be the "hard problem of biosemiotics", I therefore read the current target article as a progress report, and an extremely encouraging one, of Deacon's ongoing efforts to develop a "proof of principle" model for the naturalistic origin and biologically instantiated logic of this 'causalis in futuro' mediation process unique to living systems.
A Legacy of Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as a Precursor to Biosemiotics, 2012
Devoted to an explication of how interacting agents mutually and micro-temporally provide for eac... more Devoted to an explication of how interacting agents mutually and micro-temporally provide for each other the grounds for immediate next action in the seemingly transparent give-and-take of ordinary conversation, empirical findings from the disciplines of Interaction Analysis suggest that " language " as it is actually realized in naturally occurring, everyday talk-in-interaction, may derive its semiotic efficacy more from the active co-participation of situated speakers in creating contexts of relevancy, constraint and possibility for each other's immediate next reshaping of the cybernetic surround than it does from the computational recombination of referential tokens within the bounds of some predetermined, category-structuring syntax. The twin purposes of this article are to: (1) to serve as an introduction to some of the basic principles, methodologies and research data of Interaction Analysis, and (2) to attempt to situate such research and its findings within the broader study of meaning-making among living agents that is the goal of a Gregory Bateson-inspired biosemiotics. Here I hope to show how the former can well illuminate latter's efforts to explicate the principles whereby not only our human social worlds – but our very biological world itself – comes into being not as a " pre-given " in the furniture of the universe, but as a locally organized, massively co-constructed, participant-fashioned accomplishment in that universe instead.
Biosemiotics, 2015
As the accompanying articles in the Special Issue on Semiotic Scaffolding will attest, my colleag... more As the accompanying articles in the Special Issue on Semiotic Scaffolding will attest, my colleagues in biosemiotics have done an exemplary job in showing us how to think about the critically generative role that semiotic scaffolding plays vertically – i.e., in evolutionary and developmental terms – by allowing "access to the upper floors" (Hoffmeyer Semiotica 198: 11–31, 2014a) of biological complexity,
cognition and evolution.
In addition to such diachronic considerations of semiotic scaffolding, I wish to offer here a consideration of semiotic scaffolding’s synchronic power, as well – and in particular the ability that it can afford its users to access new and other sign relations horizontally, as a function of the way that multiple semiotically scaffolded relations intertwine to result in a definite semantic topology that determines the ways that symbols
modify each other’s referential functions in different combinations (Deacon 1997:99).
Taking up, in turn, Terrence Deacon’s later challenge that "what the sciences of cognition – and biology more generally – needs to come to grips with [is] the process of semiosis; the dynamic of interpretive activity by which semiotic relationships emerge from other semiotic relationships [as] intrinsically dynamic phases in a generative
process" (Deacon 2011:10), I attempt here to show how Deacon’s own Peirce-inspired matrix of referential sign relations, when viewed as a semiotic scaffold of interactional constraints and possibility biases,
provides the key to understanding the essentially thirdness-manifesting nature of symbol reference, formation and growth.
Introduction to Biosemiotics: The New Biological Synthesis, 2006
Having spent the last six years in regular correspondence with the world's small but steadily gro... more Having spent the last six years in regular correspondence with the world's small but steadily growing population of " biosemioticians, " I feel warranted in saying of this diverse group of molecular biologists, neuroscientists, zoologists, anthropologists, psychologists and philosophers, that while each one more or less found their way into this common project alone – proceeding from vastly different starting points and through drastically varying routes – it might yet not be too broad a claim to say that a growing discontent with what was being offered as (or in lieu of) " explanation " regarding the nature of empirically observed, real-world sign processes in their respective fields of origin appears to be the single most common impetus setting the majority of these researchers on their respective paths to what has now converged to become the growing interdisciplinary project of biosemiotics. Indeed, my own entry into this field came as the result of my growing discontent with the inability of cognitive neuroscience to confront issues of experiential " meaning " at the same level that it was so successful in, and manifestly committed to studying the mechanics of those very same electro-chemical transmission events by which such meanings were being asserted (but not explained) to, be produced. For the 1990s were declared (by fiat of an actual act of Congress) to be " The Decade of the Brain " in the United States – and, reservations about the seriousness of such self-aggrandizing hyperbole aside, this period did indeed see a great explosion of ideas and energy emanating out of such newly minted hybrid research projects
Co-operative Engagements in Intertwined Semiosis: Essays in Honour of Charles Goodwin, 2018
For almost 40 years Charles Goodwin’s pioneering work on real-time human interaction has re-shape... more For almost 40 years Charles Goodwin’s pioneering work on real-time human interaction has re-shaped the field of interaction studies and
has shed light on a pervasive form of social action that he calls intertwined semiosis. Defined as the act of laminating different kinds of semiotic materials, contributed by different actors, into local arrangements for the building of conjoint action, "intertwined semiosis", Goodwin maintains, is the distinctive form of human sociality and cognition.
In this short festschrift article, I pay tribute to my dear friend and doctoral adviser, and attempt to show the deep and mutually informing overlaps between Biosemiotics and Charles Goodwin's pioneering ideas on the always situated and always collaborative construction of meaning.
Biosemiotics, 2020
In his introductory overview of Peirce's semiotic theory entitled "Peirce Divested for Non-Intima... more In his introductory overview of Peirce's semiotic theory entitled "Peirce Divested for Non-Intimates," semiotic anthropologist Richard Parmentier begins with the quote from Peirce that "truth, as it walks abroad, is always clothed in figures, of which it divests itself for none but its intimates" (MS 634:18-19, 1909; in Parmentier 1987). In a similar fashion, it is not unusual to find that non-intimates to biosemioticsor in this case, to Terrence Deacon's complexly growing and interlocking system of ideasmay sometimes find themselves so confused, put off, or simply overwhelmed at the level of the "clothing of the figures" (e.g., terms like finiousity, semiosis, absential relations, teleogenesis, etc.) that they, too, would feel the need an "intimate" to help reveal to them what, if anything at all of vital importance is lurking underneath all of this puzzling and unusual clothing. Doing that patient explanatory divestment is the task that Jeremy Sherman has set out for himself in writing Neither Ghost nor Machine, an exposition of Terrence Deacon's work in layperson's terms, and it is a task that he accomplishes exceedingly well. A colleague and collaborator of Deacon's for over 20 years, as well as a prolific Psychology Today blogger and columnist in his own right, Sherman is uniquely positioned to translate some of Deacon's most subtle and challenging ideas into an idiom that can be easily understood by a general reader, without dumbing those ideas down to the point of superficiality. Moreover, and as Deacon himself points out in his introduction to the volume, Neither Ghost nor Machine is "more than just a simplified précis of Incomplete Nature" (Deacon's 2011 masterwork that many have struggledand failedto fully grasp the essential arguments of, as Deacon himself admits in the
Writing, Voice, Undertaking, 2013
Beginning with his landmark publication La relazione interpersonale in 1967, philosopher and semi... more Beginning with his landmark publication La relazione interpersonale in 1967, philosopher and semiotician augusto Ponzio has, over the course of his long and esteemed career, argued for the centrality of otherness and alterity to the realization of human semiosis. as amply demonstrated by Cobley (2010), nöth and Santaella (2007), Petrilli (2005, 2007) and others, Ponzio's ideas were well ahead of their time-and in many ways, remain so even now. indeed, "Ponzio's role in the history of semiotics since the 1960s has been the one of an original and forward-looking nonconformist propagating subversive and innovative semiotic theories," writes nöth and Santaella (2007:120), noting that: against the Heraclitian dualistic tenet that "all things come into being by opposites" (Diog. laert. Lives iX.8) embraced by the structuralists, Ponzio sets levinas's notion of an otherness "located inside the subject, the self", which is "itself a dialogue, a relation between self and other […], inseparable from the ego" (Petrilli and Ponzio 2005: 390). From Peirce, Ponzio derives the insights that alterity "is able to infiltrate the very sphere of the symbolic" and that otherness is "constitutive of the very identity of the sign" (1990: 197) … and with Bakhtin, Ponzio reminds us that the value of a sign (Bakhtin's "word") cannot be reduced to its opposition to other signs of a system abstracted from the processes of semiosis. instead, "it is both directed to the object of discourse as well as to the alien word, that is, to the discourse of others", so that "before being one's own word, originally the word belongs to others" [ibid.: 215] (nöth and Santaella 2007:120).
Semiotica, 2000
Extended book review and commentary on Wendy Wheeler's The Whole Creature (2006)
Bloomsbury Semiotics, 2022
This chapter provides a brief review on how the processes of life have been seen from the semioti... more This chapter provides a brief review on how the processes of life have been seen from the semiotic point of view in general biology thus far, and indicates the ways in which the application of a more explicitly semiotic understanding of life may aid in the development of general biology in the future. It argues that since the processes of meaning-making, i.e. semiosis, cannot be eliminated in the study of living beings, general biology will benefit greatly by drawing from and building upon the work that has already been done in investigating meaning-making in the discipline of semiotics. In the process, certain important changes in, and of benefit to, the general model of semiosis will accrue, as an important part of this more unified perspective will include more foundational definitions and analyses of interpretation, choice, categorization, meaning, habit, representation, learning, evolution, and translation. Finally, some of the outstanding problems, lacunae, and research priorities for the development of a more semiotic general biology will be addressed.
Chinese Semiotic Studies 2023; 19(1); 79-91, 2023
Having been intimately aligned with the research agenda of biosemiotics since his colleague Thoma... more Having been intimately aligned with the research agenda of biosemiotics since his colleague Thomas Sebeok first started using the term in 1992, Paul Cobley has consistently argued against the idea that the primary aim of biosemiotics is to make an intervention in the discourse and epistemology of the life sciences. Instead, he argues for the potential of a biosemiotically informed humanities for refashioning the ways in which we humans come to understand our situation within a world of signs and other organismsas well as our existential duty of care for preserving the diversity and flourishing of both through the development of an anti-volunteerist ethics. Paul Cobley's 2016 Cultural implications of biosemiotics fills a much-needed lacuna in the literature of biosemiotics in focusing with laser-like precision on those aspects of our human beingpolitics and aesthetics, education and ideologythat, Cobley rightly claims, have gone disproportionately under-analyzed and even under-appreciated in biosemiotics, due to its competing emphasis on reformulating biology. As one of the justly accused, I would like to take the occasion of this Festschrift to show the extent to which I now believe that Paul's more expansive understanding of the purview of biosemiotics is, indeed, a proper one.
Biosemiotics, 2017
In 2014, Morten Tønnessen and the editors of Biosemiotics officially launched the Biosemiotic Glo... more In 2014, Morten Tønnessen and the editors of Biosemiotics officially launched the Biosemiotic Glossary Project in the effort to: (1) solidify and detail established terminology being used in the field of Biosemiotics for the benefit of newcomers and outsiders; and to (2) by involving the entire biosemiotics community, to contribute innovatively in the theoretical development of biosemiotic theory and vocabulary via the discussions that result. Biosemiotics, in its concern with explaining the emergence of, and the relations between, both biological 'end-directedness' and semiotic 'about-ness', would seem a fertile field for re-conceptualizing the notion of intentionality. The present project is part of a systematic attempt to survey and to document the current thinking about this concept in our field.
Semiotics in the Wild: Essays in Honour of Kalevi Kull, 2012
A tribute to Kalevi Kull on the occasion of his 60th birthday
Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 2015
At a time when strictly materialist reductionist explanations of life and its evolution
have beco... more At a time when strictly materialist reductionist explanations of life and its evolution
have become increasingly incompatible with what biologists are now conceding is the
complex, adaptive and non-linear nature of organization and interaction in the natural
world, the conceptual work now taking place under the aegis of the ‘biosemiotic
perspective’ is grounded in the conviction that the living organism must be understood
not only in its material organization, but also in its relational and interactive situatedness
– and, above all, in the superordinate sign relationships that effectively join the
two. This introductory article presents a brief overview of the history and some of the
major concepts basic to the biosemiotic perspective, discussing both the benefits and
the challenges that such a perspective offers to the dominant explanatory paradigms of
both contemporary science and the humanities.
The American Journal of Semiotics, 2008
In keeping with the conference theme, a roundtable panel discussion entitled " Understanding and ... more In keeping with the conference theme, a roundtable panel discussion entitled " Understanding and Misunderstanding the Interdiscipline of Biosemiotics " was presented, wherein five of the founders of the contemporary project of biosemiotics attempted to explicate for those in attendance not only what the 'biosemiotic project' of scientifically examining natural sign relations entails — but also to clarify the many misconceptions about biosemiotics that they so often find themselves having to explain both to other biologists, as well as to other semioticians. What follows is a transcript of that discussion. DF: Let me begin by explaining the purposes of this roundtable. It is now almost twenty-three years since Tom Sebeok made his proposal for the development of a semiotics — and for a view of life sciences — whose goal would be to transcend the explanatory limitations of both naive realism and
Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy , 2009
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Papers in English by Donald Favareau
cognition and evolution.
In addition to such diachronic considerations of semiotic scaffolding, I wish to offer here a consideration of semiotic scaffolding’s synchronic power, as well – and in particular the ability that it can afford its users to access new and other sign relations horizontally, as a function of the way that multiple semiotically scaffolded relations intertwine to result in a definite semantic topology that determines the ways that symbols
modify each other’s referential functions in different combinations (Deacon 1997:99).
Taking up, in turn, Terrence Deacon’s later challenge that "what the sciences of cognition – and biology more generally – needs to come to grips with [is] the process of semiosis; the dynamic of interpretive activity by which semiotic relationships emerge from other semiotic relationships [as] intrinsically dynamic phases in a generative
process" (Deacon 2011:10), I attempt here to show how Deacon’s own Peirce-inspired matrix of referential sign relations, when viewed as a semiotic scaffold of interactional constraints and possibility biases,
provides the key to understanding the essentially thirdness-manifesting nature of symbol reference, formation and growth.
has shed light on a pervasive form of social action that he calls intertwined semiosis. Defined as the act of laminating different kinds of semiotic materials, contributed by different actors, into local arrangements for the building of conjoint action, "intertwined semiosis", Goodwin maintains, is the distinctive form of human sociality and cognition.
In this short festschrift article, I pay tribute to my dear friend and doctoral adviser, and attempt to show the deep and mutually informing overlaps between Biosemiotics and Charles Goodwin's pioneering ideas on the always situated and always collaborative construction of meaning.
have become increasingly incompatible with what biologists are now conceding is the
complex, adaptive and non-linear nature of organization and interaction in the natural
world, the conceptual work now taking place under the aegis of the ‘biosemiotic
perspective’ is grounded in the conviction that the living organism must be understood
not only in its material organization, but also in its relational and interactive situatedness
– and, above all, in the superordinate sign relationships that effectively join the
two. This introductory article presents a brief overview of the history and some of the
major concepts basic to the biosemiotic perspective, discussing both the benefits and
the challenges that such a perspective offers to the dominant explanatory paradigms of
both contemporary science and the humanities.
cognition and evolution.
In addition to such diachronic considerations of semiotic scaffolding, I wish to offer here a consideration of semiotic scaffolding’s synchronic power, as well – and in particular the ability that it can afford its users to access new and other sign relations horizontally, as a function of the way that multiple semiotically scaffolded relations intertwine to result in a definite semantic topology that determines the ways that symbols
modify each other’s referential functions in different combinations (Deacon 1997:99).
Taking up, in turn, Terrence Deacon’s later challenge that "what the sciences of cognition – and biology more generally – needs to come to grips with [is] the process of semiosis; the dynamic of interpretive activity by which semiotic relationships emerge from other semiotic relationships [as] intrinsically dynamic phases in a generative
process" (Deacon 2011:10), I attempt here to show how Deacon’s own Peirce-inspired matrix of referential sign relations, when viewed as a semiotic scaffold of interactional constraints and possibility biases,
provides the key to understanding the essentially thirdness-manifesting nature of symbol reference, formation and growth.
has shed light on a pervasive form of social action that he calls intertwined semiosis. Defined as the act of laminating different kinds of semiotic materials, contributed by different actors, into local arrangements for the building of conjoint action, "intertwined semiosis", Goodwin maintains, is the distinctive form of human sociality and cognition.
In this short festschrift article, I pay tribute to my dear friend and doctoral adviser, and attempt to show the deep and mutually informing overlaps between Biosemiotics and Charles Goodwin's pioneering ideas on the always situated and always collaborative construction of meaning.
have become increasingly incompatible with what biologists are now conceding is the
complex, adaptive and non-linear nature of organization and interaction in the natural
world, the conceptual work now taking place under the aegis of the ‘biosemiotic
perspective’ is grounded in the conviction that the living organism must be understood
not only in its material organization, but also in its relational and interactive situatedness
– and, above all, in the superordinate sign relationships that effectively join the
two. This introductory article presents a brief overview of the history and some of the
major concepts basic to the biosemiotic perspective, discussing both the benefits and
the challenges that such a perspective offers to the dominant explanatory paradigms of
both contemporary science and the humanities.