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Signs Pointing in a New Direction: A Biosemiotic Framework for Biolinguistics

Biosemiotics is considered by some to be a new philosophy of biology in the sense that it recasts our understanding of the living world as being replete with meaning from the interaction of molecules to the intercommunication of human societies — a grand idea which is systematically missing from the modern biological framework. But because contemporary philosophy of biology grew out of the analytic tradition and thus is mainly concerned with analysis of the key terms and concepts endemic to biology and, to a lesser extent, the philosophical recasting of outstanding puzzles in biology, others instead argue that biosemiotics is a new kind of science, an empirical method through which we can discover the codes of life (see especially Barbieri 2008, also contained in the present volume). As a philosopher of science, I think both views are correct: No great revolution in science occurs without an attendant sea change in our philosophical world view. A lesson from Thomas Kuhn is that paradigm shifts affect not only the practice of science but also our thinking about science insofar as how and to what extent it contributes to our understanding of the world. I believe that Donald Favareau’s new volume in the Springer Biosemiotics book series, Essential Readings in Biosemiotics: Anthology and Commentary, demonstrates that biosemiotics has captured the attention of both those who do science and those who think and write about science, as well as that special third category of those who do both — a category that is well represented within biosemiotics. Why should biolinguists take an interest in biosemiotics? First, there is the sentiment held by some in the biosemiotics community that it would be counterproductive for the two fields to operate in isolation from each other, as has traditionally been the case, since there is considerable overlap between the empirical and philosophical questions pursued by each (see, for example, Augustyn 2009). For starters, the two fields are in agreement that human language is a biological phenomenon. However, a distinction between the two fields can be identified with regard to their respective methodological foci: While biolinguistics focuses on human language and tries to embed it conceptually and empirically among grander patterns in the natural world, biosemiotics focuses more fundamentally