A biosemiotic note on organisms, animals, machines, cyborgs, and the quasi-autonomy of robots

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8049458
AutoresClaus Emmeche (0000-0001-6141-7860, autor de correspondencia)
Año2007
Volumen15
Número3
Páginas455-483
Fecha de publicación2007-12-13
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaPragmatics & Cognition (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0929-0907 • E-ISSN: 1569-9943
EditorialJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/pc.15.3.06emm
OpenAlexW2059970452
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas13

It is argued in this paper that robots are just quasi-autonomous beings, which must be understood, within an emergent systems view, as intrinsically linked to and presupposing human beings as societal creatures within a technologically mediated world. Biosemiotics is introduced as a perspective on living systems that is based upon contemporary biology but reinterpreted through a qualitative organicist tradition in biology. This allows for emphasizing the differences between (1) an organism as a general semiotic system with vegetative and self-reproductive capacities, (2) an animal body also with sentience and phenomenal states, and (3) higher forms of anthroposemiotic systems such as humans, machines and robots. On all three levels, representations (or sign action) are crucial processes. The “representationalism” invoked by critiques of cognitive science and robotics tends to focus only on simplistic notions of representation, and must be distinguished from a Peircean or biosemiotic notion of representation. Implications for theorizing about the physical, biological, animate, phenomenal and social body and their forms of autonomy are discussed

Affordance · Biosemiotics · Creatures · Posthumanism · Semiosis · Sentience · Embodied and Extended Cognition · Origins and Evolution of Life · Philosophy and History of Science