Jakob von Uexküll (1864, Keblaste [now Mihkli], Estonia–1944, Capri, Italy) was a biologist, and the founder of biosemiotics. He studied zoology at the University of Tartu (then Dorpat), Estonia, from 1884 to 1889; after that he worked at the Institute of Physiology of the University of Heidelberg in the group led by Wilhelm Kühne (1837–1900), and at the Zoological Station in Naples. In 1907 he was given an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg for his studies in the field of muscular physiology and tonus. One of his results from those years became known as Uexküll’s law, which is probably one of the first formulations of the principle of negative feedback occurring inside an organism. His later work was devoted to the problem of how living beings subjectively perceive their environment, how they build the inner model of the world, and how this model is linked to their behaviour. He introduced the term Umwelt (1909) to denote the subjective world of an organism. This is the notion according to which Uexküll is most frequently cited in the contemporary literature. Uexküll developed a specific method of the experimental study of behaviour which he termed ‘Umwelt-research’. Between 1927 and 1939, Uexküll was the director of the Institut für Umweltforschung (also founded by him) at the University of Hamburg, spending his summers with his family on Puhtu peninsula (western coast of Estonia) in his summer cottage, where he wrote many of his works (Brock 1934a, 1934b: G. v. Uexküll 1964).
Uexküll’s field of research was the behaviour of living organisms and their interaction as cells and organs in the body or as subjects within families, groups and communities (T. v. Uexküll 1987). He is recognized as one of the founders of behavioural physiology and ethology, and a forerunner of biocybernetics.
Of particular interest to Uexküll was the fact that signs and meanings are of prime importance in all aspects of life processes. His concept of the functional cycle (Funktionskreis) can be interpreted as a general model of sign processes (semiosis).
Uexküll considered himself a follower of the biologists Johannes Müller (1801–1858) and Karl Ernst von Baer (1792–1876).
Uexküll wrote one of the first monographs on theoretical biology (1920, 1928). The fields in which he also made a remarkable contribution include comparative physiology of invertebrates, comparative psychology and philosophy of biology. He is recognized as the founder of the semiotic approach in biology (1940; translation 1982). In semiotics, his work became widely known after the publications of Sebeok (1979b) and J. v. Uexküll’s son T. v. Uexküll (1987), followed by republications of earlier works (Uexküll 1980, 1982, 1992). Since 1993, the Uexküll Centre in Tartu, Estonia, has organized work on Uexküll’s legacy. (KK)
See also Kull.
Kull, K. (ed.) (2001) Jakob von Uexküll,special issue of Semiotica, 134(1/4).
Mildenberger, F. (2007) Umwelt als Vision: Leben und Werk Jakob von Uexkülls (1864– 1944), Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.
Sebeok, T. A. (1989) ‘Neglected figures in the history of semiotic inquiry: Jakob von Uexküll’, in The Sign and Its Masters, 2nd edn, Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Thure von Uexküll (1908–2004), German physician and son of Jakob von Uexküll, was an early figure in the emergence of biosemiotics. His involvement in semiotics began in the 1970s with the recognition of the important semiotic implications of his father’s work in biology. His contributions include pioneering work in endosemiotics, microsemiotics, medical semiotics and psychosomatic medicine. He criticized modern biomedicine for its failure to understand the body as a living system engaged in a dialogue with its environment and itself. He was an early proponent of the inclusion into semiotics of all biologically based sign-producing systems, arguing that ‘even the single cell has its semiotic self’. For von Uexküll, the ‘some-body’ in Peirce’s definition of the sign was the living system itself which constantly engages in the transformation of inputs from its environment into meaningful signs that guide its behaviour and further structure it as a ‘semiotic self’. (KSR)
Umwelt is the self-centred world of an organism, the world as known, or modelled. The concept was introduced by Jakob von Uexküll (1909, 1928).
The basis for the existence of an Umwelt is semiosis (Funktionskreis or functional cycle, according to Uexküll) that forms the functional world in its whole. The Umwelt is the modelled part of the functional world, whereas the modelling process belongs to the part that Uexküll has called Innenwelt. The Innenwelt is like a cognitive map that relates the self to the world of objects, the Umwelt being the objective world (‘objects’ in the sense of Peirce, the aspects of the triadic sign relation). Umwelt can also be defined as a species-specific network of relations according to which an organism becomes aware of its environment (Deely 2001b).
The Umwelt is the conjunction of the perceptual world (Merkwelt) and the operational world (Wirkwelt) through the functional cycle. Umwelt as the individual (species-specific) world is opposed to the environment as the physical world, the latter being the same for different organisms. Innenwelt is the world as represented in the sign system of an organism.
One can distinguish between simple Umwelten which may consist of only a few interrelated iconic signs (e.g., in bacteria, protozoa, plants), and more complex Umwelten which include space that is built using iconic and indexical signs, and yet more complex Umwelten, rich in symbols, which include space and time (the human Lebenswelt). The Umwelten that feature imaginary objects (i.e. in the case of organisms which can recognize the non-existent) existing to the subject alone and bound to no experiences, or, at most, related to one single experience, are called magic Umwelten (these may include also genetically inherited Umwelten).
The description of Umwelten is possible through the study and comparison of the sense and effector organs of living organisms. In addition to this, comparative behavioural studies and behavioural experiments can shed light on the categorization of forms in the structure of Umwelt, which it may not be possible to describe on the basis of anatomical data. The notion of Umwelt is nowadays also widely used in anthropology and comparative psychology. (KK)
See also BIOSEMIOTICS and Kull.
Kull, K. (1998) ‘On semiosis, Umwelt, and semiosphere’, Semiotica, 120(3/4): 299–310.
Uexküll, J. von (1928) Theoretische Biologie, 2nd edn, Berlin: Verlag von Julius Springer.
Uexküll, J. von (1982 [1940]) ‘The theory of meaning’, Semiotica, 42(1): 25–82.
Chomsky’s term for those parts of our competence in a particular language which are innate, transmitted via our genes, apply to all languages, and therefore do not need to be learned by young people acquiring a language. Chom sky argues that it is a reasonable initial assumption that some aspects of language are genetically encoded, and that they are specific to language, i.e. not general aspects of human cognition. He proposes that linguists can formulate specific hypotheses about universal grammar by investigating parts of grammars of individual languages which can be shown to be impossible to learn on the basis of the data available to young people. These hypotheses must be general enough to apply to all languages but specific enough to account for the relative ease with which young people acquire their particular first language.
Universal Grammar is seen by Chomsky as a system of principles which limit the range of hypotheses which young people have to try out in the process of acquiring a language.
For Chomsky, it is the possibility of finding out about Universal Grammar that makes linguistics interesting. If his approach is correct, then studying linguistics enables us to discover fundamental things about the human mind. (RS)
Charles S. Peirce’s definition of ‘sign’ (with its dynamic triadic relationship between sign or representamen, interpretant and object) contains implicitly an ongoing semiosic process that can be defined as infinite or unlimited semiosis. For Peirce:
a sign or representamen is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant.
(CP 2.228)
It is important to note that the interpretant of the sign becomes in itself a sign or representamen and, thus, we initiate a series characterized by an ‘interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum’ (CP 2.303).
Peirce has also defined a sign as ‘something by knowing which we know something more’ (CP 8.332), implicating an endless cognitive process that develops as we follow the chain of signs/interpretants. For Peirce every act of cognition is determined by previous ones and cognition, being of the nature of a sign, must be interpreted in a subsequent cognition and so on.
In the 1980s these notions of ‘infinite semiosis’, combined with those of ‘unlimited intertextuality’, became quite popular especially with semioticians and narratologists. We recall that Eco in The Name of the Rose underlines frequently the idea that ‘often texts speak of other texts’. Radical deconstructionists go as far as to maintain that there is nothing outside of a text except other words pointing to other texts, and so on. And thus, infinite semiosis, like intertextuality, often accompanies images and meta phors of libraries, labyrinths, encyclopedias, rhizomes and of the theoretically infinite ‘web’ of possible links on the Internet, in order to illustrate the potentially unlimited chains of definitions, explanations, quotations or allusions employed in the process of acquiring and conveying knowledge. (RC)
See also POSTSTRUCTURALISM.
Eco, U. (1990) ‘Unlimited semiosis and drift’, in The Limits of Interpretation, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Merrell, F. (1995) Peirce’s Semiotics Now: A Primer, Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press.
Peirce, C. S. (1931–1935; 1958) Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols 1–6 ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss; Vols 7 and 8 ed. A. Burks, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.