Thomas Sebeok
(1920-)
Thomas Sebeok was a linguist and semiotician. He was a founder of the new discipline of
biosemiotics with
Jacob Johann von Uexküll and Jacob's son
Thure von Uexküll.
Sebeok was a founder and editor-in-chief of
Semiotica, the journal of the
International Association for Semiotic Studies. from 1969 to 2001.
Far from limiting his ideas to human languages, Sebeok coined the term "zoosemiotics" and studied communications and signaling in all animals. He went far beyond those linguists and psychologists (e.g.,
David Premack) who speculated that apes might have language.
Today information philosophers know that signaling between living things and their environment is even true of their cellular components. All organisms are "aware" (a proto-
consciousness), viz, communicating with, of their surroundings.
Jakob von Uexküll's concept of an
Umwelt corresponds to the range of communications around any living being. Umwelt roughly means an environment, with the implication that each living being experiences only a limited part of the universe. It exchanges information only with neighbors to and from which signals are possible.
Uexküll's
Umwelt defines a "world" (German
Welt) surrounding (German
um - "around") a living being that delimits that being's
experiences. He said that the worlds all beings perceive, their
Umwelten, are all different. This helps define their
identities, which depend on their internal information structures as well as their relations and communications with others.
Sebeok and the novelist, semiotician, and philosopher
Umberto Eco edited a volume of essays on advances in semiotics called
The Sign of Three. It focused on three great detectives, two fictional and one real,
C. Auguste Dupin,
Sherlock Holmes, and the logician and philosopher
Charles Sanders Peirce. It has ten essays on methods of
abductive inference (beyond deduction and induction) in Edgar Allen Poe's Dupin, Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes, Peirce and many others.
Sebeok also played a role in the development of
psycholinguistics. Psycholinguistics developed before the end of the 19th century as the "Psychology of Language". The work of
Edward Thorndike and
Frederic Bartlett laid its foundations.
With Charles Osgood, Sebeok wrote the 1954 review of the new discipline,
Psycholinguistics: A Survey of Theory and Research Problems.
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