Abstract
Abstract Thomas A. Sebeok’s name became all but synonymous with semiotics during the last half of the twentieth century. Sebeok located neglected semioticians in antiquity, and convinced many contemporary scholars that they were semioticians. One of his most fruitful encounters was with Juri Lotman of the Tartu–Moscow School of Semiotics, who had published in 1967 an ambitious model of human sign systems in which language would constitute a primary modeling system, and cultural phenomena a secondary modeling system. We inspect how Sebeok amended Lotman’s system, inserting another primary modeling system before language. This brings biological precursors to human language as a syntactic and learned faculty that builds on many nonsyntactic and sometimes nonconscious senses, including emotion, affect, and memory. We note how, in Sebeok’s final book in 2000 on modeling systems theory, co-authored with Marcel Danesi, there is a suggestion that the three layers of modeling systems may be colored by Peircean notions of firstness, secondness, and thirdness; we clarify how these layers are analogue. Finally, the fundamentals of the primary modeling system leak into languaging, as better understood through post-Sebeok cognitive and neurological sciences, and rendering less mysterious some of the strange effects of the COVID-19 pandemic’s proxemics crisis.
Highlights
That Sebeok anticipated those reservations is evident in the particular scientists, social scientists, and philosophers whom he drew into biosemiotics, these including Jesper Hoffmeyer, Claus Emmeche, Kalevi Kull, Terrence Deacon, Søren Brier, John Deely, and others collected into the anthology by Favareau (2010)
While modeling has been integral to sciencing from ancient time, according to Sebeok (1991b [1988]: 35), the notion of semiotic modeling owes much to the Tartu– Moscow School’s notion of modeling system (Lotman 1967, 1990; Zaliznjak et al 1977)
At the twenty-fifth Symposium of the Tartu–Moscow School of Semiotics (Imatra, Finland, 27–29 July 1987), Sebeok proposed a reconfiguration (1988)7 of the notion of primary modeling system developed in Tartu–Moscow semiotics, and in Lotman’s semiosphere
Summary
Very seldom will a classic and already sophisticated field of study be adopted and transformed by a single scholar, as happened in the case of semiotics upon the. According to Sebeok and Danesi, the study of models goes hand-in-hand with the study of their functions or use within the ecologies that generate and differentially maintain their relations They state: “The key concept in semiotics is, that no single form can bear meaning unless it enters into systematic connections with other forms” (Sebeok and Danesi 2000: 14). That Sebeok anticipated those reservations is evident in the particular scientists, social scientists, and philosophers whom he drew into biosemiotics, these including Jesper Hoffmeyer, Claus Emmeche, Kalevi Kull, Terrence Deacon, Søren Brier, John Deely, and others collected into the anthology by Favareau (2010) Another and often unstated feature of models is that they differ from their source inspirations primarily in terms of the most emphatic attributes being modeled! Philosophers of science and scientific practitioners have already documented cultural patterns that may or may not be consonant with Durst-Andersen’s more recent research (cf. Bolton 2015; Conrad 2019; Cowles 2020; Danchin 2018; Danchin et al 2018)
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