A semiotic theory of life: Lotman’s principles of the universe of the mind

Abstract

Literary scholar, cultural theorist and semiotician Juri Lotman (1922–1993) established the Tartu (and Tartu-Moscow) school of semiotics in the 1960s. Besides his pioneering work in semiotics of culture, he also developed a theory of general semiotics. We attempt to extract some principles from Juri Lotman’s formulations that characterise the core aspects of semiosis, applicable both in semiotics of culture and in biosemiotics. These include: (1) the principle of code plurality; (2) the principle of incompatibility, or non-translatability; (3) the principle of autocommunication, or translation; (4) the principle of semiosphere; (5) the principle of semiotic inheritance; (6) the principle of non-gradual evolution; (7) the principle of boundaries; and (8) the principle of modelling.