“In Support of the Interpretation Model in Biosemiotics”
In this paper I will argue that Biosemiotics can contribute to redefine life. This is relevant by itself, in a Platonic-Aristotelian sense (knowledge for knowledge’s sake), but in today’s world where organ cloning defies the most essential ideas of living and human beings, what must be understood for ‘life’ has to be debated not only from a theoretical scope but also in practical philosophy and in the field of everyday behaviour. Neurobiology and Philosophy sometimes hold radically opposing views upon this issue, and it is an increasingly assumed perception that semiotics (the science of signs), now stretched up to include the whole life phenomena (biosemiotics) can make important contributions to the matter and renew it with unprecedented perspectives. Biosemiotics is not just another branch of biology or of semiotics, but an innovative perspective that promotes a complete and basic new starting point concerning life phenomena, to which it attends as meaning bearing phenomena. Biosemiotics’ main axiom is that life and semiosis overlap: they are one and the same thing. Very important moral dilemmas may be considered under a different light from this alternative viewpoint. Biosemiotics is unquestionably a conversational partner in the current and future treatment of the concept of life.