In Chapter Two of my book, I very briefly mention one of the key figures in the study of cross-species communication: the late Thomas Sebeok. Born in Hungary, he came to the United States in 1937, graduated from the University of Chicago with a bachelor’s degree and from Princeton University with master’s and doctoral degrees. As a linguist, he was heavily involved in foreign language training for U.S. troops during the Second World War, and joined the Indiana University faculty in 1943.
His interests went far beyond those of human languages, however: he introduced the term “zoosemiotics” in 1963, which was soon to become a keyword inextricably associated with the study of animal communication. He was a keen critic of much of the contemporary work on ape “language,” as evidenced by his articles such as “Clever Hans and Smart Simians” in which he pointed out various errors in experimental designs and protocols by those working with great apes. (One well-known example of this is the acerbic exchange with Francine Patterson in the pages of The New York Review of Books about her interactions with Koko the gorilla.)
As the founding editor of the journal Semiotica, he was deeply interested in the entire communicative spectrum of living beings. His most famous (and controversial) quote is probably “semiosis is co-extensive with life,” which reflects his involvement in biology, and with the emerging field of biosemiotics.
In a 2001 article for Semiotica (“Biosemiotics: Roots, Proliferation, and Prospects“), he wrote, “The over-arching context for biosemiotics is our biosphere in the sense of the organic whole of living matter; and this is the only geosphere which contains living matter. Because there can be no semiosis without interpretability – surely life’s cardinal propensity – semiosis presupposes the axiomatic identity of the semiosphere with the biosphere. As Short persuasively argued, “there is no basis for the assertion that semiosis occurs outside of living things” (1998: 49) (except, one may add, man’s inert extensions, such as automata, computers, or robots). Local nature (Gaia), however, additionally comprehends the inorganic matrix for the place wherein organisms dwell – the enveloping gaseous mass, waters, and rocks; while cosmic nature further includes the totality of extraterrestrial objects.”
In their excellent 2021 piece on his impact as a semiotician, Canizzaro and Anderson happily term the twentieth century “Sebeok’s century.” Now that it’s the twenty-first century, however, Sebeok’s work continues to inspire new challenges, such as Nicola Zengiaro’s proposal to explore the possibilities of “semiogenesis” within inorganic matter (“a speculative semiotics of the inorganic”) as part of what Sebeok called “local nature.” I suspect that Sebeok himself might be intrigued by this prospect of empirical investigation into “the inorganic matrix”!
Keywords In and Out of Context 