Laws of symbolic mediation in the dynamics of self and personality

pp. 445-462

in: Donald Favareau, Essential readings in biosemiotics, Berlin, Springer, 2009

Abstract

Semiotican Myrdene Anderson recalls that biosemiotics founder Thomas A. Sebeok would often identify certain prescient thinkers whose work was deeply involved in, and productive for, semiotic analysis without the thinker being aware of it as such (such as Jakob von Uexküll), as cryptosemioticans – while protosemioticians was the name that he would assign to those groundbreaking ancestors of the field before the field per se had been established, such as Charles Sanders Peirce (Anderson 2003: 301). Biosemiotician Kalevi Kull, in considering the belated discovery of F.S. Rothschild's six decades' worth of work in a self-proclaimed "biosemiotics' by contemporary biosemioticans only at the turn of the 21st century, wonders whether either of these two terms would rightly apply to Rothschild, given that "he both knew semiotics and applied it [to biology]" and had even been had been the first to use the term biosemiotics in a scientific paper, in 1963.