Thomas A. Sebeok, a pioneer in the field of semiotics andSebeok, Thomas A., 1920-2001.semiotics
Indiana Universityspouse: Jean Umiker-Sebeok [SLIS Visiting Scholar, Associate Professor of Semiotics, and Co-Director, Center for Applied Semiotics], of Bloomington, Ind.
Distinguished Professor emeritus of linguistics and semiotics at Indiana University, died at his home on December 21, 2001.Education:
B.A., University of Chicago, 1941
M.A., Princeton University, 1943
PhD, Princeton University, 1945
Obituaries:
Indiana University (see also below)
New York Times (see also below)
SLIS Press News
Press Release:
Thomas A. Sebeok, Senior Fellow at SLIS, Passes On
FOR RELEASE: CONTACT: George Vlahakis
Dec. 21, 2001
812-855-0846 (o)
888-514-3889 (p)OBITUARY: THOMAS A. SEBEOK
NOTE: "Distinguished Professor," used in the first paragraph, is a special title granted to a select number of outstanding professors and should be capitalized.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind., Dec. 21, 2001 -- Thomas A. Sebeok, a pioneer in the field of semiotics and Distinguished Professor emeritus of linguistics and semiotics at Indiana University, died at his home on December 21.
Semiotics is the scientific study of communication and sign functions, a discipline with widespread ramifications in the human sciences, the arts and life sciences.
Sebeok also served as chairman of the IU Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies, was a professor of anthropology and of Uralic and Altaic Studies and was a fellow of the Folklore Institute.
His work in folklore, anthropology, linguistics and animal communication underscored that semiotics is an unusually diverse field. A semiotician studying human communication, for instance, would examine not only conversation but also non-verbal signs such as facial expressions and body movements that carry information along with -- and sometimes contradictory to -- the words being used.
Sebeok is survived by his wife, Jean Umiker-Sebeok [SLIS Visiting Scholar, Associate Professor of Semiotics, and Co-Director, Center for Applied Semiotics], of Bloomington, Ind., and three daughters, Veronica Sebeok Wald, of Chicago; Jessica A. Sebeok, of New Haven, Conn.; and Erica L. Sebeok, of Brooklyn, N.Y.
Born in Budapest, Hungary, on Nov. 9, 1920, Sebeok left Hungary in 1936 to study at Magdelene College, Cambridge University. The following year, he immigrated to the United States and became a citizen in 1944. He earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Chicago in 1941 and a master's degree in 1943 and doctorate in 1945 at Princeton University.
While at Princeton, he commuted to Columbia to pursue his studies of linguistics under the tutelage of Roman Jakobson, his doctoral dissertation director. He maintained a lifelong attachment to the University of Chicago, which awarded him a Professional Achievement Citation in 1992. Sebeok was fond of saying "I received my degree from Princeton, but my education from Chicago."
He came to IU in 1943 to assist in running the largest Army Specialized Training Program in foreign languages in the country and eventually took over the helm. He was assigned to teach courses in the Department of English, but later went on to create IU's renowned Department of Uralic and Altaic Studies.
He was offered the directorship of the Research Center for Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics. Several fellowships at the Stanford University Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences gave him the opportunity to return to his avocation, biology.
A new scholarly field was born, biosemiotics. As his new academic base transformed itself into the Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies in 1956, Sebeok, then a Distinguished Professor in Linguistics, established programs in semiotics and came to share with his friend and colleague, Umberto Eco, the signal honor of holding a designated chair of semiotics.
In 1991, he was awarded the title of Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, of Linguistics, of Semiotics, and of Central Eurasian Studies.
A linguist studying Finno-Ugric languages, his linguistic fieldwork took him to Central and Eastern Europe, including Lapland and the former Soviet Union. He also carried out studies in the former Mongolian People's Republic, Mexico and in the U.S. (among the Winnebago Indians of Wisconsin and the Laguna Indians of New Mexico). In addition to these studies in grammar and phonology, his interest in anthropology, folklore and literary studies led to early publications dealing with folksongs, charms, games, poems and the supernatural.
He carried out some of the first computer analyses of verbal texts and published a path-breaking volume on Mythin 1955, and Style in Language, in 1960. At the same time, he contributed to the creation of the new field of psycholinguistics, publishing, with Charles Osgood, the famous classic text, Psycholinguistics, in 1954.
By 1960, he had established himself as a scholar known for overcoming academic boundaries between subjects in his own research, in collaborations with scholars in adjacent fields, and in organizational roles as an book and journal editor, founder and officer of several academic organizations, conference organizer, and mentor.
In the 1960s, he turned to the study of human nonverbal and animal communication, publishing several seminal volumes on these topics that made important contributions to the comparative study of communication and signification. The publication of his classic Approaches to Semiotics in 1964, marked the beginning of his turn toward general semiotics (the study of signs and symbols).
His book, Speaking of Apes, presents a detailed critical evaluation of current investigations of the ability of apes to learn language. Sebeok expressed doubt that apes have such capabilities. "Investigators and experimenters accommodate themselves to the expectations of the animal subjects," Sebeok once explained. "They unwittingly enter into a subtle nonverbal communication with them while convincing themselves on the basis of their own human rules of interpretation that the apes' reactions are more humanlike than the evidence warrants."
The transmission of information among animals also was the subject Animal Communication, a book Sebeok edited. He also wrote Portraits of Linguists, a book dealing with the history of Western linguists from the late 18th century to the present.
His research succeeded in broadening the definition of semiotics beyond human language and culture to encompass human nonverbal communication as well as communication in all living organisms and sign processes within organisms. His final, global conception of semiotics -- biosemiotics -- equates life with sign interpretation or mediation. He was most proud of having brought into being a group of theoretical biologists and semioticians to pursue this field of investigation.
Sebeok once described himself as an academic Apis mellifera, who darts "solitary from flower to flower, sipping nectar, gathering pollen from flowers, serendipitously fertilizing whatever he touches." His insatiable intellectual curiosity, astounding working capacity and ease in writing yielded more than 600 books and articles. He remained prolific after his retirement from teaching in 1991.
In the past two years alone, he published Essays in Semiotics I: Life Signs; Essays in Semiotics II: Culture Signs; Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis (with Marcel Danesi);Global Semiotics; and Signs. An Introduction to Semiotics.
Sebeok was the recipient of five honorary doctorates -- three from European institutions, one from a U.S. university and another from a university in Argentina. He was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and retained affiliations with other three universities until his death: the Institute for Advanced Study (Collegium Budapest), the University of Helsinki and the University of Toronto.
He also had been a visiting professor at the universities of Michigan, New Mexico, Arizona, Illinois, Colorado, South Florida and Stanford, as well as Puerto Rico, Vienna, Besancon, Hamburg and Bucharest. Well-known as a forceful and stimulating teacher and speaker, over the years he held visiting appointments at 33 universities in 17 countries.
He was awarded fellowships for advanced study at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, East-West Center [Hawaii], Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, National Humanities Center, Smithsonian Institution, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, XXXInstitute for Advanced Study and Fundatia Culturala RomanaFundatia Culturala Romana.
In 1971, he was awarded a medal by the College de France in Paris for "appreciation of your uncommon contributions to French culture." In 1972, he accepted a commission from UNESCO to prepare a worldwide study of university teaching of linguistics.
Throughout his career, Sebeok contributed to and edited numerous scholarly publications, including Semiotica (journal of the International Association of Semiotic Studies), The Journal of American Folklore, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, The Semiotic Web (Yearbook of Semiotics), numerous IU-based publications in Uralic and Altaic Series and Semiotics and Toronto Studies in Semiotics.
Among his many honors, he received the Distinguished Service Award of the American Anthropological Association, IU's President's Medal of Excellence, Honorary Membership in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Domus Hungarica Scientiarum (Artium Prize) from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Memorial services will be announced at a later date.
Memorial contributions may be made to the University of Chicago, Office of College Development, Harper Memorial Library, Room HM586, 1116 E. 59th St., Chicago, Ill., 60637. Checks may be written to The University of Chicago and should be designated for the Undergraduate Endowment Scholarship Fund (in memory of Thomas A. Sebeok, AB41).
SLIS NOTE:
Thomas Sebeok, Distinguished Professor emeritus of linguistics and semiotics, was named a senior fellow at SLIS in the year 2000. Sebeok was chair emeritus of the Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies, and professor emeritus of anthropology, folklore, and Uralic and Altaic studies. His research interests included topics in general and applied semiotics, among them the relationship between semiotics and cognitive science.
Posted Jan 03, 2002
http://www.slis.indiana.edu/news/story.cfm?story_id=364
Thomas Sebeok, 81, Debunker of Ape-Human Speech Theory, Is Dead
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR
Dr. Thomas A. Sebeok, a pioneer in the science of signs and symbols, noted for challenging the theory that apes and chimpanzees could learn language to communicate with humans, died on Dec. 21 at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 81.The cause was leukemia, said his wife, Dr. Jean Umiker-Sebeok.
Dr. Sebeok, a professor emeritus at Indiana University, published more than 60 books in his field, known as semiotics, including the classic "Speaking of Apes" (1979), which he edited with his wife.
He argued that apes could not learn language because they lacked the body parts for language, like a larynx or vocal cords, and that they were unable to pass language on to their offspring.
"Dr. Sebeok (pronounced see-bee- AWK) showed that nonhuman animals need both the anatomy and nature for learning language," said Dr. Marcel Danesi, a professor of semiotics at the University of Toronto, who has also written extensively in the field. "His work demonstrated that if language were a genetic endowment in apes, then we could just teach them and they would pass it on."
The Sebeoks also argued that language experiments with the animals were unsuccessful because the researchers had not taken into account signals or cues from the trainers, like facial expressions. They also argued that animals did not have the intellect to pick up the human sign language and were instead taught a signal system less complex than human language.
When Dr. Sebeok began his career, his field was limited to the study of language. But with the publication of his "Approaches to Semiotics" (1964), he revolutionized that field, expanding it beyond human language to nonverbal communication in all organisms.
In 1981, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission turned to Dr. Sebeok for help in developing "keep away" signs that could be understood by people in 10,000 years, the duration that nuclear waste may be dangerous to humans.
Dr. Sebeok suggested signs with words, pictures, cartoons and stick figures to indicate danger. The signs, he said, should also include a "veiled threat that to ignore the mandate would be to invite some sort of supernatural retribution."
Thomas Albert Sebeok was born in Budapest but left to study at Cambridge and then immigrated to the United States, receiving a bachelor's degree at the University of Chicago and a doctorate at Princeton. He next went to Indiana, where he created its department of Uralic and Altaic studies, covering languages of Eastern Europe, Russia and Asia.
There, he was chairman of its Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies, retiring in 1991.
Dr. Sebeok held visiting appointments at 33 universities in 17 countries and received the Distinguished Service Award of the American Anthropological Association.
Besides his wife, he is survived by three daughters, Veronica Sebeok Wald of Chicago, Jessica Sebeok of New Haven and Erica Sebeok of Brooklyn.
The Sign Science and the Life Science
Thomas A. Sebeok
Indiana University
____________This piece was written for Modern Semiotics/Nyere semiotik, ed. Jorgen Dines Johansen and Svend Erik Larsen, where it appeared in 1991 under the Danish title "Videns-kaben om tegn og videnskaben om liv," and later in the author's A Sign is Just A Sign. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of Dr. Thomas A. Sebeok.
In the celebrated passage in which Saussure referred to une science qui étudie la vie des signes au sein de la vie sociale, the term science is, as a rule, loosely, arguably, and, in my view, misleadingly rendered by the English quasicognate "science" (for example, by Harris, in Saussure 1983:15). Saussure went on to say that this science __that is, semiotics (alias semiology) __ "does not yet exist," nor can one "say for certain that it will exist." If so, the status of semiotics as a science (in the strict sense, rather than meaning simply savoir) would be comparable with that of, say, exobiology, a sanguine term coined by Joshua Ledeberg at a meeting in Nice in 1957 for the study of extraterrestrial life (Ponnamperuma 1972: viii); but this "science" of exobiology remains, to this day, devoid of a palpable subject matter.
Such is not, however, the case if semiotics is defined __ as all of us echo here, after the variegated usage of the Schoolmen, the Latin expression doctrina signorum __ according to Locke in 1690, Berkeley in 1732, Peirce in c. 1897, and others, as a "doctrine" (cf., generally, "On the Notion 'Doctrine of Signs'" Deely, 1982:127-130). When viewed as a "teaching manoeuvre combined with a learning stratagem" (Sebeok 1986d), semiotics is found to be at least as richly infused with content as what is today practised under the label "cognitive sciences," the domain of which is in fact essentially conterminous in gist and problematic, if not necessarily in methodology, with that of semiotics.
In this essay, I juxtapose, as a framing and heuristic device, "sign science" with "life science." The latter is a general phrase "comprehending all the Sciences ... that have to do with the structures, performances and interactions of living things." These are enumerable as the conventional biological sciences but additionally subsume several "interfacial" sciences, such as biochemistry, biophysics, and bioengineering, the last of which, Medawar and Medawar (1977:7), claim, "also establishes a common frontier between biology and communications theory."Ten years ago, I noted a libration in the annals of semiotic inquiry between two seemingly antithetical tendencies: a major tradition, in which semiosis is taken to be a steadfast, indeed bedrock, hallmark of life; and a minor, predominantly glottocentric trend, in which semiosis is tied to human existence alone. As a matter of personal conviction, I then declared myself in the former camp, stating that "the scope of semiotics encompasses the whole of the oikoumene, the entirety of our planetary biosphere," adding that semiosis "must be recognized as a pervasive fact of nature as well as of culture" (Sebeok 1977:180-183). In what follows, I propose to explore this claim further.
I begin with two interlinked queries: what is semiosis (or, as Peirce sometimes put it [5-4731, semeiosy); and what is life?
Peirce adapted the designation "semiosis" (in a variant transcription) from Philodemus's fragmentary Herculanean papyrus On Signs, where the Greek equivalent occurs at least thirty times (1978:140, to represent a type of reasoning or inference from signs. He endowed the term with a definition of his own as an action, or influence, "which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs" (1935-1966:5.484). The "action of a sign" is the semiotic function that sets an inferential process in motion.
Morris gave a somewhat different definition of semiosis, as a sign process, "that is, a process in which something is a sign to some organism (1971:366). His precept gives ample scope for pinpointing the locus where the process takes place, to wit, in anything alive. It follows that the notion of semiosis is yoked to the notion of animate existence and, as a corollary, that there could have been no semiosis before the appearance of life in the universe (or, for all practical purposes, the emergence of terrestrial life).
This leads to the second query, cogently formulated and addressed in Schroedinger's path-breaking book (1946), What Is Life? Elsewhere (see above, Ch. 10) I had occasion to raise this same question, taking Schroedinger's discussion as my lodestar, but also taking duly into account Pirie's strictures (1937), according to which __ especially considering borderline phenomena between the inanimate and the animate __ such an inquiry may not even serve a useful purpose. The crux of Schrodinger's classic formulation has to do with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, particularly with the principle of negative entropy, which is often, if hitherto far from satisfactorily, coupled with a notion of information (more accurately, the lack of it) about the statistical structure of a semiotic system (cf., for example, Brillouin 1950). In any event, Schrodinger's discussion points to the salience of semiotics in the understanding of life processes; or, as Wiener put it (1950:21) __ keeping the common opinion in mind that the subject matter of semiotics is the exchange of messages (that is, time series) __ the amount of information is a measure "of the degree of order which is peculiarly associated with those patterns which are distributed as messages in time."There are several additional noteworthy properties of life. One of these is its hierarchical organization, "a universal characteristic which life shares with the rest of the cosmos and which defines, in the overall architecture of the universe, its position on the genealogical tree." The hierarchy of nature appears as an ontological interpretation of data from the "real world," a pattern of relations which obviously extends up through semiotic systems, including particularly the verbal (cf. Jakobson 1963). This problem usually appears in the guise of messages in the superimposed context, where the terminal noun is to be read as the equivalent of Leibnitz's metaphysical concept of a monad, involving an indefinite series of perceptive acts coordinated by a unique point of view; or of Jakob von Uexküll's (1982:3) semiotically more patently pertinent biological concept of Umwelt.
Another conspicuous property emerges from the interplay between the fundamental invariance in life's subjacent biochemistry and the prodigal variability of singular realizations thereof, paralleling the conjugate ideas of global semiotic universals and local, or so-called cultural, variables.
"Meaning," the cosmologist Wheeler argues (1986a:vii) __ or, better, "significance" (Saussure's significativité, or pouvoir de signifier, as in Goedel 1957:276; cf. Peirce 1935-1966:8.314) __ "is important, is even central"; and "meaning itself powers creation" (Wheeler 1986b:372; Wheeler 1984 develops this productive idea further). In semiotics, then, a fortiori, significance is at once the cardinal and the most haunting of concepts, yet the significance circuit must, in turn, be based on construction by the observer participancy of some carbon-based life.
The first traces of fife detected so far date from the so-called Archaean Aeon, which began 3,900 million years ago; the progress of the animation of inert matter is expertly portrayed by Marguhs and Sagan (1986:47-57). In the course of evolution, according to the convincing, if speculative, metaphor of Dawkins 0976, Ch. 2), DNA replicators-a replicator being anything in the universe of which copies are made, thus any portion of chromosome, as well as a sign-and-its-interpretant, or, for that matter, a printed page and a facsimile thereof-cocoon themselves in "survival machines." These comprehend all prokaryotes, that is, cells, such as bacteria, in which the genes are not packaged into a membrane-bound nucleus; and the four eukaryotic super-kingdoms, unicellular and multicellular organisms, such as plants, animals and fungi, in which they are. Such molecular replicators behave as nonverbal signs, which constrain and command the behavior of all living organisms, including ourselves (Sebeok 1979b:xiii), who are members of one genus, Homo, only a sole species of which, homo sapiens sapiens survives, endowed with the unique propensity to call additionally into action, when needed, an interwoven repertoire of verbal signs. Bodies, Dawkins's survival machines, were in due course equipped by evolution with on-board computers called brains, the function of which is to facilitate message exchanges with comparable equipment in other bodies. (Dawkins also coined the word "meme" [1976:296] to designate non-genetic replicators, capable of flourishing only in environments provided by communicating brains.) Although this hypothesis is not yet proven, the brain does appear to be a highly complex amalgam of microscopic spirochetes, densely packed together in a symbiotic existence, a colony which itself feeds and thrives on a ceaseless traffic of sign input and sign output.The universal RNA/DNA-based genetic code is commonly referred to as a "language," as, for instance, by Beadle and Beadle (1967:216): "the deciphering of the DNA code has revealed our possession of a language much older than hieroglyphics, a language as old as life itself, a language that is the most living language of all-even if its letters are invisible and its words are buried deep in the cells of our bodies." But this figurative equation is unfortunate, for it would be more accurate to call both the molecular code and the verbal code semiotic systems or, in Jakobson's parlance [1974:501, "two informational systems"), explicitly recognizing that they radically differ from one another on, to use Hjelmslev's terminology, the expression plane: the former is an object of study in chemistry, the latter in phonology.
The genetic code is but one of several endosemiotic systems. Bodies are made up of semiotically intertwined subsystems, such as cellular organelles, cells, tissue, organs, organ assemblages. Endosemiotic sign processes, Thure von Uexküll (1986:204) amplifies,
use chemical, thermal, mechanical and electrical processes as sign carriers. They make up an incredible number. If one reflects upon the fact that the human body consists Of 25 trillion cells, which is more than 2000 times the number of people living on earth, and that these cells have direct or indirect contact with each other through sign processes, one gets an impression of the amount. Only a fraction are known to us. Yet this fraction is hardly comprehensible.... The messages that are transmitted include information about the meaning of processes in one system of the body ... for other systems as well as for the integrative regulation systems (especially the brain) and the control systems (such as the immune system).
Semiosis is the fulcrum around which another emerging interfacial discipline-recently dubbed "semio- immunology" or "immunosemiotics" turns. The central problem immunologists keep struggling with is how the healthy immune system manages to recognize and respond to an almost infinite number of alien organisms and yet fails to assail components of self. What has become reasonably clear is that a single line of defense against potential pathogens is not enough and that there are dissimilitudes between antigen recognition by T cells and that by B cells. Jerne has proposed (1985:1058) a model of particular interest to semioticians, including especially linguists, with his claim that the immense repertoire of the vertebrate immune system functions as an open-ended generative grammar, "a vocabulary comprised not of words but of sentences that is capable of responding to any sentence expressed by the multitude of antigens which the immune system may encounter." The human immune system consists of about 1012 cells, dissipated over the entire body, excepting only the brain, but the former and the nervous system are known to exercise pervasive mutual sway one over the other by means of two-way electrochemical messages.The metabolic code constitutes still another fascinating set of endosemiotic properties, because, as Tomkins (1975) showed in his brilliant article completed just prior to his death, complex regulation is characterized by two entities not operating in simple mechanisms: these are metabolic symbols and their domains, where the former "refers to a specific intracellular effector molecule which accumulates when a cell is exposed to a particular environment" (ibid.:761). For example, cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) acts, in most micro-organisms, as a symbol for carbon-source starvation, or ppGpp acts as a symbol for nitrogen or amino acid deficiency. Without going into details, the conspicuous point to note here is that, while a simple regulatory mode, that is, a direct chemical relationship between regulatory molecules and their effects, is a clear instance of Peirce's "secondness, or dependence," the complex mode is an instance of "thirdness, or mediation" (3-422). This insight was foreshadowed by Peirce himself in his observation that a "rhema is somewhat closely analogous to a chemical atom" (3-421). Tomkins's reasoning (1975:761) is highly semiotized: "Metabolic symbols need bear no structural relationship to the molecules which promote their accumulation," and, since a particular environmental (or contextual) condition is correlated with a corresponding intracellular symbol, the imputed "relationship between the extra- and intracellular events may be considered as a 'metabolic code' in which a specific symbol represents a unique state of environment."
The endocrine and the nervous systems, as noted above, are intimately fastened together via signs. As for the neural code itself, semiosis is what neurobiology is all about. "The modes of communication include membrane conductances, patterns of neural spikes and graded potentials, electric coupling between cells, electrical and chemical transmission at synapses, secretion, and modification of neural function" (Prosser 1985: 118). The basic principle for understanding most sign use by neurons comes down to the selective permeability of their plasma membrane to ions (charged atoms), which seem to penetrate through specific pores, or channels, in the membrane. Another newly labeled interfacial field of research is "neurocommunications," which aims to portray in a current jargon the (human) mind, or "software level," and brain, or "hardware level," as a pair of semiotic coupled engines, namely, computational devices for verbal-nonverbal sign processing.
Beyond endosemiotics, the literature of biosemiotics distinguishes among phyto-, cyto-, and zoosemiotics, the latter comprising a specially marked branch, anthroposemiotics, to reflect its predominantly glottocentric emphasis, amounting at times to an obsession. These distinctions correspond exactly to the standard classification of eukaryotic multicellular organisms into the plant, fungus, and animal super-kingdoms, the last including the animal loquens. The minor tradition I cited above concentrates on anthroposemiotics to the exclusion of all the other divisions; it excludes, that is, almost all of the rest of nature.
The plant-animal-fungus trichotomy (see also other chapters this book) is based on the manifold but complementary nutritional pattern of each group, which is to say on the manner in which information, or negentropy, is maintained by extracting order from the environment. It is therefore at bottom a semiotic taxonomy. Plants, deriving their food from inorganic sources by means of photosynthesis, are producers. Animals, ingesting their food-performed organic compounds-from other organisms, are transformers. Fungi, breaking their food down externally and then absorbing the resulting small molecules from solution, are decomposers. On this macroscopic scale, plants and fungi are two polar-opposite life forms: the composers, or organisms that build up, and the decomposers, or the organisms that break down. Animals are the mediators between the other two. By reason of their go-between status, animals have become incomparable virtuosi at semiosis, and that on several levels: in the interactions among their multitudinous cells; among members of their own species; and with members of all other life forms extant within their Umwelten. It is even possible to postulate provisionally a fruitful analogy between the systematists' P-A-F model and the classic semioticians' O-S-I model: according to this, in general, a fungus/interpretant is mediately determined by an animal/sign, which is determined by a plant/object (but plant/fungus are likewise variant life forms, of course, just as object/interpretant are both sign variants; cf. Peirce to Welby, in Hardwick 1977:31, 81).
As one would expect, the literature of zoosemiotics (a surprisingly productive term coined in 1963), dealing with both semiosis in the speechless animals and nonverbal semiosis in Homo, is immense. (Two encyclopedic overviews are to be found in Sebeok 1968 and Sebeok 1979b.) Many investigators consider separately aspects of intra-specific animal communication (see, for example, Lewis and Gower ig8o; and Bright 1984) and aspects of interspecific communication, which are further partitioned into communication with members of other animal species and, as a specially elaborate case thereof, two-way communication between animals and men; the latter further impinges on a host of problems of animal taming, training, and domestication. One particular subtopic which, abetted by much media brouhaha, continues to excite the public, but also on which work has now reached a perhaps unsurmountable impasse, has focused on a search for language propensity in three African and one Asian species of apes, and/or also in certain pelagic mammals (for critical reviews, see Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok 1980; Umiker-Sebeok and Sebeok 1981a; and Sebeok 1986b.)
Semiosis in the vegetative world has been accorded much less discussion, but the principles underlying phyto- semiotics are thoughtfully assessed by Krampen (1981; cf. also the remarks of Thure von Uexküll 1986:211-212). Krampen (ibid.:203) argues that their code differs from those of zoosemiotics "in that the absence of effectors and receptors does not allow for the constitution of [Jakob von Uexküll's] functional cycles, of object signs and sign objects, or of an Umwelt," yet that the world of plants "is nevertheless structured according to a base semiotics which cuts across all living beings, plants, animals, and humans alike." For instance, plants, though brainless and solipsistic systems they may be, are capable of distinguishing self/non-self. Plant semiosis incorporates the ancient microcosmos, a circumstance that accounts for botanical success, and they do have significant interactions with both animals and fungi.
Semiosis in fungi, or cytosemiosis, is not yet well understood, although their modes of interaction with other life forms specially algae, green plants, insects, and warm-blooded animals (to which they are pathogenic)-by such means as secretion, leakage, and other methods are basically known. One of the most fascinating forms of semiosis has been described in the cellular slime mold, where the sign carrier turns out to be the ubiquitous molecule cAMP, mentioned above.
There exists a massive and very ramified literature, though shockingly uneven in quality, on the biological bases of human nonverbal semiosis; for two excellent general accounts, see Guthrie (1976) and Morris (1977). By contrast, since Lenneberg's masterful (though sadly neglected) 1967 synthesis, there has been no similarly comprehensive discussion of the biological foundations of language. For a recent discussion of the main issues relating to the origin of language, see Sebeok (1986c). That article argues that language emerged as an evolutionary adaptation over two million years ago, in the guise of a mute semiotic modeling system-briefly, a tool wherewith hominids analyze their surroundings-and was thus present in Homo habilis and all successor species. Speech, the paramount linear display of language in the vocal-auditory mode, appeared as a secondary exaptation probably less than 100,000 years ago, the minimum time required to adjust a species-specific mechanism for encoding sentences with a matching mechanism for decoding and interpreting them in another brain. The fine-tuning process continues. The overall scenario sketched out in that article is in good conformity with Thom's (1975:309-311) judgment about the double origin of language, in response to two needs, one personal-"aiming to realize the per- manence of the ego"-and the other social-"expressing the main regulating mechanisms of the social group." And it is likewise so with Geschwind's equivalent view (1980:313) "that the forerunners of language were functions whose social advantages [that is, communicative function] were secondary but conferred an advantage for survival [that is, the modeling function]."
The Stoics were well aware that "animals ... communicate with each other by means of signs" (Sebeok 1977:182). By the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas had concluded that animals make use of signs, both natural and those founded on second nature, or custom. Virtually every major thinker about semiotic issues since, from Peirce to Morris to Thom, and, above all, Jakob von Uexkull, have reaffirmed and generalized this fact to encompass the totality of life. Only a stubborn but declining minority still believes that the province of semiotics is coextensive with the semantic universe known as human culture; but this is not, of course, to deny Eco's dictum (1976:22) that "the whole of culture should be studied as a communicative phenomenon based on signification systems."References
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Publications:
from AddALL
The Sign science and the life science (see also above)
Communication (see also below)
[This essay was originally published in SEMA, an electronic journal of semiotic studies, ed. Christopher Woodill (cwoodill@epas.utoronto.ca), Victoria College, University of Toronto.]
Communication
Thomas Sebeok, Indiana University--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All living things - whole organisms as well as their parts - are interlinked in a highly ordered fashion. Such order, or organization, is maintained by communication. Therefore, communication is that criterial attribute of life which retards the disorganizing effects of the Second Law of Thermodymics; that is, communication tends to decrease entropy locally. In the broadest way, communication can be regarded as the transmission of any influence from one part of a living system to another part, thus producing change. It is messages that are being transmitted.
The constitution of messages forms the subject matter of semiotics: their ebb and flow, how they are organized and styled, how they get from here to there and back again, how they are formulated and packaged by the orginating source, and how they are unwrapped and processed when received by the terminal destination. How does the context in which the entire transaction takes place control the makeup of messages, their generation and interpretation?Semiotics is further concerned with two sets of interrelated historical problems: the course of development of appropriate mechanisms for processing messages by individual organisms in ontogenesis; and the evolution of such mechanisms in a species in phylogenesis. Finally, the historiography of communication studies has become a focus of attention in its own right.
The process of message exchanges, or semiosis, is an indispensable characteristic of all terrestial life forms. It is this capacity for containing, replicating, and expressing messages, of extracting their signification, that, in fact, distinguishes them more from the nonliving - except for human agents, such as computers and robots, that can be programmed to simulate communication - than any other traits often cited. The study of the twin processes of communication and signification can be regarded as ultimately a branch of the life science, or as belonging in large part to nature, in some part to culture, which is, of course, also a part of nature.
When dissolved into their elementary constituents, messages are found to perfuse the entire biosphere, the system of directed and responsive matter and energy flow which is the entirety of life on Earth.
An implication of this way of looking at communication is that the capacity for message generation and message consumption, which are commonly attributed only to humans, is here assumed to be present in the humblest forms of existence, whether bacteria, plants, animals, or fungi, and, moreover, in their component parts, such as subcellular units (for example, mitochondria), cells, organelles, organs, and so forth. The global genetic code, too, can (as it has been) quite fruitfully analyzed in communicational terms: the message orginates in a molecule, the master blueprint called DNA, its end being marked by a protein. The intricate interplay of nucleic acid and protein, the essence of life on earth, provides a prototypical model for all forms of communication.
While thus widening its angle of vision to encompass a great deal more, attention here is focused on messages emitted and received by human beings.
All human messages fall into two distinct categories: verbal messages and nonverbal messages. Language - as the array of verbal messages is collectively referred to - has, so far, been found only in the genus Homo, of which only our own subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens, remains extant. Biologists would thus say that language is a "species-specific" trait. The study of this unique yet "species-universal" attribute of humanity, language, is the subject matter of linguistics, which is one of the most sophisticated, partially formalized branches of semiotics.
A message is a sign, or consists of a string of signs. According to a classic definition, a sign is something that stands for something else (aliquid stat pro aliquo) for some organism, and has two facets: a sensible signifier - or a perceptible impact on at least one of the sense organs of the interpretting organism - and something intelligible (the content) being signified by the former. The signified (also called the designatum) is capable of being translated, whereas the signifier (also called the sign vehicle) is not.
The human's rich repertoire of nonverbal messages - by sharp contrast with language - never constituted a unified field of study, and therefore lacks a positive integrative label. What all nonverbal messages have in common is merely that they are not linguistic. This negative delineation has led to terminological chaos in the sciences of communication, which is manifoldly compounded when the multifarious message systems employed by the millions of species of languageless creatures, as well the communicative process inside organisms, are additionally taken into account.
Nonverbal messages can, however, be distinguished from one another according to several criteria of semiotic relevance. As further discussed below, this point can be illustrated by going back to a classic discussion foud in the Hippocratic writings on medical communication, describing how the physician, relying on the patient's verbally and nonverbally reported "symptoms" combined with the "signs" observed by the physician, identifies a disease ("makes a diagnosis") and forecasts its eventual course ("make a prognosis"). In other words, a symptom belongs to a category of signs the physician elicits from the patent (for example, the verbal string "I have a stomachache," or a moan accompanying a pained facial expression as the patient points to his abdomen, or both), whereas a "sign", as this term is used in a clinical context, belongs to a category which derives from the physicians's own experience (for example, when the physicians palpates the patient's abdomen and feels a tumour). A proper diagnosis is arrived at by a summation of both reported symptoms (or "subjective" signs) and observed ("objective") signs.
The binary classification of signs (in the generic sense) into subjective symptoms and objective signs (in the specific sense) in only one of many. Cassirer, for example, had a quite different binary classification, signs and symbols, the latter being a characteristic only of humans. The most widely accepted classication today, however, is not binary but one based on a trinary principle, established by Peirce. Peirce's classication is complex and has many far-reaching ramifications, but it is rooted in a three-way distinction between icon and index, with both opposed to symbol, all of which are really different facets of one generic sign.
The context determines the predominance of this or that facet. Thus the "Stars and Stripes" is a sign in which the iconic aspect is paramount when the interpreter focuses on the number of stars (representing the fifty states now composing the Union) or the number of stripes (representing the thirteen states that origally formed the Union). If the flag is used for signaling, for example, in a race, or to reflect the country in which a boat is registered, the indexical aspect becomes ascendant. If, however, the flag is ceremonially raised or lowered, say at a funeral, we consider it to be primarily symbolic.
The standpoint of Hippocrates - whom medical historians have sometimes reverentially also labelled "the father and master of all semiotics" - hinges on an ancient but still widely prevalent distinction drawn between two types of messages: "conventional" and "natural". Conventional messages are those whose power to signify is thought to depend on some prior agreement, presumed to have been reached at some temporal juncture and thereafter accepted as a matter of custom. Such are, most importantly, messages cast in spoken or written utterances, but also frequently messages that are embodied in the shape of a parochial gesture, a tradition exercised and understood by one group of persons but not necessarily by its neighbors. The meaning of a conventional message, whether verbal or not, is invariably circumscribed by a time and a place.
So-called natural messages, on the other hand, have a power to signify the same things at all times and in all places precisely because their interpretation does not presuppose a familiarity with the conventions of a particular group. After describing certain nonverbal symptoms, Hippocrates went on to say that they "prove to have the same significance in Lybia, in Delos, and in Scythia" (Prognostic XXV). Given the quasi universality of that class of nonverbal messages physicians call symptoms, he deems it evident "that one should be right in the vast majority of instances, if one learns them well and knows how to estimate and appreciate them properly."
By contrast, what is sometimes designated as a "multimessage," or conventional gesture, is one that has a number of totally distinct meanings, the choice of interpretation depending on the time and place. Thus all Americans are familiar with the raised-hand gesture, such that the thumb and forefinger delineate a circle, which essentially signifies that something is OK. In other countries, however, the same configuration may mean something totally different: for example, "money" in Japan, "zero" or "worthless" in the South of France. In other places, the same confuration may convey an obsene comment or an insult, as it did Greece more than two thousand years ago. Again, in yet other areas, it may suggest nothing at all.
These examples illustrate just one feature by which human nonverbal messages can be distinguished in terms of their temporal and spatial distribution. Other criteria will be mentioned below.
It is convenient to being a general preliminary consideration of messages where they are assumed to originate. Their inception can be pictured as in a box, designated the source. A message can now be provisionally defined as a selection out of a code by a source. The concept of a code will be explained later, but one should immediately note that many of the rules of probability governing this act of selection are unknown.
The source box is nothing more than a formal model used for facilitating the comprehension of hypothetical constructs: given a certain input, one must, more or less, guess at what takes place to account for the output. When psychologists speak of a "black box," they assume that nothing is known about what is inside the organism or about the functioning, say, of the central nervous system. However, correlations between input and output may enable certain interferences to be made, if not about the mechanism inside the box, about how it works.
The input process is usually referred to as the formulation (or, in a particular linguistics context, the generation) of the message. A source, we say, "formulates" a message, but precisely how a human does so is not known and will remain rather enigmatic until the electrochemical machinery of the brain/mind, in its immense complexity, is far better understood. The human being, it seems reasonable to postulate, follows, by and large, generative rules to create an enormous number of novel messages appropriate to an indefinite variety of contexts, but how the human being is able to acomplish this is still an utter mystery. Detailed charting of the highly intricate and continuously readapting pathways within the three-and-a-half pound globe of tissue under the skull known as the human brain remains a task for the future.
The table shown here (Fig. 2.1) [left out in the ASCII version] summarizes possible sign sources. Engineers sometimes speak of two kinds of sources: discrete and continuous. A discrete source produces messages ("letters") selected out on an enumberable set of possibilities (called an "alphabet"); such a source might produce, for example, a communication in written English. A continuous source is one that is not discrete - say, one that produces a communication in spoken English or as a piece of music.
In the communication disciplines, as throughout the life sciences, it is both legitimate and necessary to raise questions teleonomic in aspect. Accordingly, it is proper to ask: for what purposes do sources formulate messages? The functions of messages are various. They are end-directed in the same objective sense in which all animal behaviour has a goal: an animal ingests food to gain materials and energy; its digestive apparatus and enzymes exist and operate as they do in order to promote that goal of survival. Messages embody information biologically or socially important for organisms; they are formulated, among other reasons, in order to be "transferred" to another entity, here named the destination.
The destination is the area at which the messages flow initiated by the source terminates. Its workings can, once again, be roughly segmented into two temporally sucessive processes, but in reverse: an earlier one, whose characteristics are more or less understood, and an ultimate one - usually referred to as the interpretation of the message - the manner of which shades off into unfathomed dusk; in this case, the rightmost portion, or rear end, of the diagram (Fig. 2.3) would have to be darkened.
The source is normally incapable of launching its message in the electrochemical shape in which we surmise that it was initially formulated. The reason is that each source is linked with each destination via some sort of medium, or channel, a passageway through which the two are capable of establishing and sustaining their communicative exchange. An example of a channel is the link postulated between a pair of communicating Native Americans, such that one, the source, moves a blanket over a fire, while in smoke (a form of electromagnetic energy). Any form of energy propagation can, in fact, be exploited for purposes of message transmission. Possible channels are displayed in Fig. 2.2.
It is not known how, specifcally, the messages are constructed and stacked in a hierarchy, or how their meanings are "agreed to" (that is, coded). Neurophysiologists surmise that, no matter what a message may correspond to in the external world, internally it is linked by chemical exchanges, probably functioning synchronously in various regions, which may be closely adjacent to or quite remote from one another on the two-dimensional cortical sheet of higher animals, including the human. The transformation from this unconscious parallel processing to an externalized serial string, as in speaking or writing or gesturing, must be effected by surface organ systems - in the human being, for example, the so-called organs of speech.
This crucial transduction is called encoding. Encoding happens at the interface between internal and external message systems, which, in a broad sense, stand in a specular relationship, in a homology of spatiotemporal transition probablities.
When the destination receives the encoded message - which, because of entropy (the measure of disorder in the system), can never be identical with the message formulated and launched by the source - another transduction, followed by a series of further transformations, must be effected before this message can be interpreted. The pivotal reconversion is called decoding.
"Transduction" refers to the neurobiological transmutation from one form energy to another, such as a photon undergoes when impinging on the vertebrate retina: we know that it entrains impulses in the optic nerve that change rhodopsin (a pigment in the retinal rods of the eyes), through four intermediate chemical stages, from one state to another. A message is said to be "coded" when the source and the destination are "in agreement" on a set of transformation rules used throughout the exchange.
The kind of code selected by the source depends crucially on the total sensory equipment at its disposal. Plainly, it would be abortive for an animal that is mute - as the great majority of them are - to broadcast accoustically coded messages to its fellows that may be deaf. A normal human being's sense organs are capable of registering only a small portion of ambient stimuli: thus we can generally cope only with frequently between 16 and 22,000 hertz, and are, in this respect, surpassed by the smallest bat, every dog, rodents, and countless other animals.
The range of seeing likewise differs considerably in various animals: the human being, who is incapable (without mechanical enhancement) of perceiving ultraviolet, bordering on the X-ray region to about 100 angstroms, which is readily distinguishable by the honeybee and some other insects, will scarcely encode messages in the - to the human - invisible spectrum, which could be decoded by other humans only with special intrumentation. The same is true of infared, which certain nocturnal mammals, possessing a special organ (the tapetum lucidum), causing reflected night eyeshine, can manage to communicate by "in the dark," as we cannot (save with the aid of recently developed devices). An excursion into the field of sense organs is necessary to understand the wide variety of codes utilized in nature, and by humans, to ensure that reciprocal understanding is achieved.
The very general diagram shown here (Fig.2.3) aims to synopsize the main points made thus far. This model is not to be regarded as merely a piecemeal assemblage of constituents that can be represented as the sum of properties of its several parts; on the contrary, the communicational process indispensably requires that each constituent be conceived of as functioning in relation to every other.
One very important component is omitted from the flowchart model of the communication process depicted in Fig. 2.3. This is the context in which the entire transaction is embedded. The setting in which any message is emitted, transmitted, and admitted always decisively influences its interpretation, and vice versa: the context of transactions itself continually undergoes modifications by the messages being interpreted. Messages are, in brief, context-sensitive. That much is well recognized, but just how an organism takes its environment into account remains unclear. The notion of "context" has been employed differently by various differently by various investigators, but, broadly speaking, the term refers to the organism's cognizance of conditions and manner of appropriate and effective use of messages. Context includes the whole range of the animal's cognitive systems (that is, "mind"), messages flowing parallel, as well as the memory of prior messages that have been processed or experienced and, no doubt, the anticipation of future messages expected to be brought into play.
Some students of communication have consigned the study of contexts to a nebulous area of inquiry called "pragmatics," with complementing fields designated "syntactics" and "semantics," a three-way distinction proposed by Charles Morris (1971). In his usage, "syntactics" refers to the form strings of signs. "Semantics," which presupposed the former, refers to the branch that studies the way which sings signify (or "mean"). "Pragmatics," which presupposes both of the preceding, refers to the branch that studies the origin, uses, and effects of signs.
Context is often the crucial factor in resolving the significance of a message. Thus messages encoded in the chemicals isolaveric acid and methyl mercaptan are components, respectively, of human body malodor and halitosis. This notwithstanding, the same chemicals are responsible for some of the bouquet and flavor of cheese.
The context often determines whether the destination will believe or disbelieve the communication received. For instance, imagine a little boy running up to his mother, exclaiming: "Mummy, mummy, there is a tiger in the backyard!" More likely than not, his mother will reply: "Johnny, stop making up stories!" Suppose, however, that the family lives in Venice, Florida, practically next door to the winter quarters of a famour circus which, the mother is fully aware, features a "big cats" act. Her son's exclamation is more likely to be given credence than not.
Sometimes the actual form and content of the communication are ignored at the expense of the context. A distinguished psychologist, on a whim, once carried out the following informal "experiment". Each morning, as he entered the elevator in the office building where he worked, he was accustomed to greeting his co-workers, students, and employees with a cheerful "Good morning!" in a little ceremony that was echoed by a chorus of the same stereotyped salutation. One morning he said, equally cheerfully, with a broad smile, "Go to hell!" to which everyone responded with the wonted "Good morning!" The routine context sets up certain expectations about the probable range, as the speech signal in the foregoing situation did, the destinations tend to interpret it according to their expectations rather than by the triggering effect of what the exclamations actually signifies.
The diagram pictured in Fig. 2.3 [left out in the ASCII version] might misleadingly suggest that the systems represented are static. All communication systems are, to the contrary, not just dynamic but adaptive; that is, they are self-regulated to suit both the external context (conditions of the environment) and the internal context (circumstances inherent within the system itself, such as the array of presuppositions and implicatures that characterize sentences). At successive points, intelligence mechanisms come into play to check the status of the system which can, accordingly, activate and shape coping responses; their flow is commonly described as a "feed process".
Feed processes typically move, in mutually complementary fashion, forward as well as backward, tending to form loops. Thus the source normally keeps checking whether the launched message stream reaches the destination acccording to expectations ("feedforward"), whereas the desination tends continually to confirm or to disconfirm this to the source ("feedback").
Feedforward islike a trend forecast that both biases perception and enables the source to adjust its performance in anticipation of changeful happenings. In the favourable case, it may facilitate the avoidance of mistakes. Feedback brings into the frame information about the efficacy of the system itself, information that is then "fed back" into the system, thus enabling fine-tuned adjustments on the basis of results accomplished.
Budgetary planning, in familiar organizational surroundings, is an example of feedforward: let's say that my dad (the source) tells me (the destination) by a memo (the message) how much money my academic unit may spend in the coming year, and that I then design, or reshape, my unit's activities based on this "foreknowledge." A different example: many a predator (the source) captures its prey (the destination) by a maneuver called "interception" (the message). This often means that the predator aims, not at where its quarry is, but where it is most likely to be later, at the moment of impact, that is, at a precise point ahead of the victim in its calculated trajectory.
A common example of feedback also comes from a habitual university setting. As I (the source) deliver a lecture (my message) to my class (the destination), I unintermittently monitor the students' fluctuating engrossment or tedium by way of their acoustic and optic messages broadcast back to me, wittingly or unwittingly, via a feedback loop; conscientiously, I endeavor to attune my presentation as guided by their expressions. A different example: my heartbeat (the source) is slowed or speeded up by a complex amalgam of humoral and neural factors (the message) by the vagal and sympathetic cardiac efferents (channels); changes from the normal rhythm are reported ("fed back") by sensitive interceptors (other channels) to my brain (the desination), specifying factors such as timing, volume, and pulse pressure (further messsages). The feedback loop between heart and brain provides an oscillatory input to my central nervous system on the basis of which vital readjustments are then effected. The message received (and at last interpreted) by the destination is, in practice, never identical to the message sent after having been formulated by the source. In other words, the output of the channel isn't at all tantamount to the input. This discrepancy may be due to random but persistent disturbances that variously intrude into the system and thus obscure the clarity or quality of the communication or, in extreme cases, obliterate its comprehension entirely. A channel might also, say, for secrecy, contain an interposed scrambling device. Such disarrangements, which render the output unpredictable even when the input is known, are collectively called noise.
A message always consists of amalgam of signal and noise, which can be stated as a ratio of the two. If the signal (that portion of the "intended" by the source) is greater than the noise (that portion of the message which intrudes in the course of its transmission to the destination), comprehension is, to a greater or lesser degree, ensured; if, however, the noise is greater than the signal, special techniques must be employed to restore a degree of accuracy in the reception.
To circumvent noise and thereby to decrease the probability of transmissions errors, the source habitually introjects redundancy. There are many kinds of noise and many techniques for overcoming them, but always at a price - such as slowing the source (and thereby the rate of the entire transaction). Imagine, for example, an airport traffic controller (the source) attempting to convey precise landing instructions (the message) to a pilot (the desination) by radio (the channel) during an electrical storm (noisy environmental context). One means - perhaps the simplest - whereby the controller can intromit redundancy to ensure reasonably error-free reception in such a high-risk situation is to reiterate all or parts of the original message, even at the expense of slowing him - and the process of landing - appreciably. After the delivery of every message instance, the controller might ask (feedforward): "Do you copy?" The pilot will repeat what he understands the instructions to be (feedback). If the pilot judges that a satisfactory consensus has been reached, he might so acknoweldge with the code "Roger," and conclude with "out."
A different example: When I utter a sentence in the presence of a light source, I simultaneously engage in a wide array of other bodily movements, some of them audible ("paraphonetic"), most of them visible (non-vocal as well as non-verbal). These parallel communicational strands always partially redundant to one another, a welcome fact which, under noisy conditions, reduces the degree of misunderstanding between the communicants. The force of this mundane example can be appreciated by turning off the sound on your television set or, alternatively, by leaving the sound on but masking the image.
Incidentally, geneticists have found that the relation between the (four-letter) nucleic acid code and the (twenty-letter) protein-code - the genetic code - is replete with redundancy, since several groups of three nucleotides, or triplets, along the nuclei acid chain define the same amino acids along the protein chain (that is, these groups are synonymous.
Since the question whether there is life elsewhere in the universe remains as yet wide open, communication is assumed to be confined to the terrestrial biosphere, as well as to be a universal property of life on earth.
The first traces of life, hence the phylogenesis of communication, date from the Archaean Aeon, of 3,900 to 2,500 million years ago. The earliest living world consisted of prokaryotes, such as bacteria, made up of cells in which the genes are not packaged into a membrane-enclosed nucleus. These vastly multiform micro-organisms exclusively populated Earth until about 800 million years ago.
According to a current view of biologists, different species of microbes came to form symbiotic unions among one another, which subsequently co-evolved into wholly integrated and perduring collectives of higher life forms composed of eukaryotic unicellular and multicellular organisms in which they live. Symbiotic alliances - subsuming concepts such as parasitism, mutualism, commensalism, and the like - depend crucially on communication between individual particpant of two or more species for most of the life cycles of each; such alliances eventually become permanently interwoven communities, harmoniously coordinated by means of a steady ebb and flow of electrochemical signs.
Each of the three major groups of eukaryotic organisms (in addition to a fourth, the unicellular protocists) has evolved a particular type of communication, technically and respectively called phytosemiotic, zoosemiotic, and mycosemiotic. Animals form an intermediate superphylum, mediating between the plants (which they consume) and the fungi (by which they are ultimately dissolved). Because of their pivotal position as message trasnformers, their communicative processes are the most elaborate. They are also much better studied.
All animals, including ourselves, communicate by exchanging nonverbal signs. Verbal signs - that is, language - evolved uniquely in the genus Homo and seems first to have been present in a hominid species named habilis ("handy man") which flourished about 2.4 to 1.5 million years ago. This form was swiftly followed by Homo erectus ("upright man"), dated about 1.5 millions years ago, and soon by at least two subspecies, of which solely a descendant of our own kind, Homo sapiens (about 100,000 years ago), survives. In the early hominids, language was not used for communication, but for "modelling", that is, a refined analysis of their surroundings: the advantages of the forerunners of language were not primarily social, but the individual advantages for survival appear to have been critical. However, our species eventually readapted language into a series of linear manifestations, first speech and later other means, such as script, which flourish as systems supplementary to the more ancient and fundamental ones by which the modern human too communicates. Human verbal and various nonverbal means of communication are now so thoroughly intermingled that they can be disentangledonly by dint of careful scientific analysis.
As to ontogenesis, human infants are born with an array of nonverbal devices they can naturally use to communicate with adults in their immediate environment. They learn context many months before they learn linguistic devices, although the earlier forms (gaze,gesture, and so forth) don't get lost; they merely become contingent and optional. In senility and other circumstances of impairment, language is likewise attentuated and lost before the array of more ancient prelinguistic habits is dissolved.
Attention focused on communication studies, in the West, among the Greeks, in particular among those pioneering physicians who were concerned with describing interaction between themselves and their patients. Patients related verbally and displayed by nonverbal means their complaints (dubbed symptoms, which are kinds of indexical signs, that is, signs such as tracks, footprints, finger pointing, and, in language, pronouns) while reporting "I have a bellyache," or simply groaned while clutching their abdomen. The physicians asked searching questions about their patients' past ("took a case history") and examined them with hands ("palpation"), eyes, and ears, or with intruments measuring, for instance, such "vital signs" as blood pressure, temperature, and so forth. Summating their partient's symptoms, or subjective signs, with their own objective detection of other signs, they pronounced a diagnosis of the syndrome, and, evaluating that in the light of their overall experience, they made a prognosis. These notions and terms were known to Hippocrates and actually spelled out in a treatise by his follower, the prolific Galen.
Both Plato and Aristotle were concerned with problems of everyday communication and its specialized uses, for example, in poetics or the rhetoric of persuasion. For several Hellenistic schools of philosophy, notably the Stoics and the Epicureans, theories of language and of the sign, and of communication, were central preoccupations. The great Ancient rhetoricians, including Cicero and Quintilian, concentrated on the techniques of expression, a field which today focuses on the study of misunderstanding and ways to remedy it. The most outstanding thinker of antiquity on issues such as these was Saint Augustine, who also proposed the first coherent concept of the lie.
During the Middle Ages, studies of logic and language flourished and led to elaborate considerations of a philosophy of grammar and of principles of a "universal grammar." Locke's work of 1690 became enormously influential in examinations of the meaning of "meaning," and he can indeed be considered a forerunner of modern semiotics. Debates concerning universals and other aspects of communication were significantly advanced by Leibniz.
The nineteenth century, and the first decades of the twentieth, were marked by an explosive development of most of the basic communication technologies still in use: photography and telegraphy, the rotary press, the typewriter, the transoceanic cable, the telephone, motion pictures, wireless telegraphy, magnetic tape recording, radio, and television. These rapid changes in mass media and telecommunications (most recently, satellite) technologies, such as interactive TV as well as elecontronic mail and funds transfer, facsimile machines, and computer bulletin boards, are sometimes (for example, Beniger1986) referred to as components of the "control revolution." Because the concept of communication is so central to our contemporary civilization, and because of the intensive social shaping of technology by governments and commercial interests, our age has increasingly come to be characterized as "the information society".
Communication studies have hitherto dealt predominantly with the past and the present, but speculative extrapolations toward the future have also been made. It is clear that such studies are inevitably linked to the biological fate of humankind. In 1980 the U.S. department of Energy created a task force to investigate problems connected with the final marking of a filled nuclear-waste repository - to devise a method of warning future generations, up to 10,000 years hence, not to mine or drill at that site unless they are fully aware of the consequences of their actions. A significant component of this investigation was devoted to the question of how our generation can communicate with up to three hundred generations into the future. The report - which has become particularly relevant in view of the preliminary selection by the U.S. Congress, in 1987, of a site in Nevade - recommended, among other items, that a relay system of recoding messages be launched and that messages to be actually displayed be imbued with the maximum possible redundancy.
In any event, in the future, communication will increasingly depend on developments in biotechnology and computer technology, which already provide humanity with opportunity to redesign itself.
