Skip to content

Opening book details…

Can I read Why Life Presupposes Semiosis on EtoBox?

Why Life Presupposes Semiosis by John Deely is a Arts and Humanities article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Why Life Presupposes Semiosis about?

Semiosis" comes to us from Charles Sanders Peirce as a coinage derived from Locke's 1690 coinage of "semiotics". In early to latemiddle twentieth century, however, with the notable exception of Juri Lotman , who knew Locke's work, this "new science" for studying signs was known rather as "semiology", the name proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure , who was ignorant of Locke's earlier proposal. Drawing upon Locke's original terminology, Thomas A. Sebeok distinguished between anthroposemiotics as the exclusive realm of "semiology" and zoösemiotics as studying the action of signs throughout the animal kingdom. Sebeok identified Saussure's "semiology", accordingly, as a pars pro toto fallacy: the fallacy of mistaking a part for the whole, and later concluded that "sign-science and lifescience are co-extensive", a thesis establishing the framework for studying the action of signs throughout the realm of living things, or biosemiotics. The present essay addresses the question of whether the unnecessarily reductive interpretation of this thesis as restricting sign-action to the living world is not itself a further illustration of Sebeok's pars pro toto fallacy, inasmuch as communication invol

Who reads Why Life Presupposes Semiosis?

It is typically read by researchers, students, and practitioners in Arts and Humanities.

Author
John Deely
Publisher
Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Published
2016
Language
EN
Field
Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

More by John Deely

Browse all works by John Deely