From Enactive Phenomenology To Biosemiotic Enactivism

Paulo De Jesus
Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London
(Forthcoming in Adaptive Behavior - Penultimate Draft)

Abstract
Autopoietic enactivism (AE) is a relatively young but increasingly influential approach
within embodied cognitive science which aims to offer a viable alternative framework
to mainstream cognitivism. Similarly in biology the nascent field of biosemiotics has
steadily been developing an increasingly influential alternative framework to
mainstream biology. Despite sharing common objectives and clear theoretical overlap
there has to date been little to no exchange between the two fields. This paper takes
this under-appreciated overlap as not only a much needed call to begin building bridges
between the two areas but also as an opportunity to explore how AE could benefit from
biosemiotics. As a first tentative step towards this end the paper will draw from both
fields to develop a novel synthesis - biosemiotic enactivism - which aims to clarify,
develop and ultimately strengthen some key AE concepts. The paper has two main
goals; (i) to propose a novel conception of cognition which could contribute to the
ongoing theoretical developments of AE and (ii) to introduce some concepts and ideas
from biosemiotics to the enactive community in order to stimulate further debate across
the two fields.

Key Words; Anthropocentrism; anthropomorphism; autopoietic enactivism;

biosemiotic enactivism; enactive cognitive science; semiosis; strong life-mind
continuity thesis; Umwelt.

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1 Introduction
Enactivism has in a relatively short period of time developed into a serious alternative
to traditional cognitive science. Drawing inspiration from a number of closely related
fields, enactivism has developed a sophisticated and innovative phenomenological
reconstruction of the systems theory/second-order cybernetics of Humberto Maturana
and Francisco Varela (1980), which seeks to challenge the hegemony of cognitivism by
proposing a radical alternative conception of life and mind.

This interdisciplinary weaving together of distinct fields and ideas, framed around the
conviction of a “strong” continuity amongst autopoietic living systems, has culminated
in so-called autopoietic enactivism (AE) acquiring the status of canonical enactive
approach. In stark contrast to mainstream cognitive science, AE argues that organisms
are not passive “objects” which represent and compute the world internally but rather,
autonomous agents (living beings of all kinds and not humans alone) which “enact” or
“bring forth” intrinsically meaningful and significant worlds through dynamic patterns
of embodied interaction with the environment (Di Paolo 2005; Froese and Di Paolo
2011; Thompson 2007; Stewart, Gapenne and Di Paolo 2010).

In similar fashion, biosemiotics, the study of natural sign processes within and between
living organisms, has been gradually gaining popularity within theoretical biology.
Similar to AE, biosemiotics presents a non-dualist/non-mechanistic approach to the
understanding of living systems which emphasises their agentive semiotic (sense-
making) nature (Favareau 2007: Hoffmeyer 2008: Kull 1998; Kull et al., 2011). Both
approaches can be said to share a core number of closely related ideas, intuitions and
insights regarding the fundamental nature of agency, mind, life and signification.

The general philosophical outlook shared by both approaches can perhaps be best seen
in an ontological commitment to a continuity between life and mind1 and the
importance of meaning/signification within this continuity. These two ideas are not

1 It should be noted from the outset that, while AE is explicit on its commitment to a continuity between
life and mind, biosemiotics is not always clear on this issue. See Section 5 for further discussion of this
issue.

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only central to biosemiotics they also play a key role in the AE strand of enactivism and
indeed set it apart from other closely related so-called 4E approaches. Where these
diverge, as the paper will show, is on how they conceptualise these ideas and the
theoretical resources deployed to argue for them.

Like any nascent field in its infancy, as indeed is also the case with biosemiotics (Kull
et al., 2009) AE contains a number of open problems and several insufficiently clear or
underdeveloped ideas and concepts. Some of these have gradually come to the fore
while others remain unappreciated or yet to be fully addressed (De Jesus 2015; Di
Paolo 2009; Hutto and Myin 2013; Thompson 2011b). Complicating matters further is
also issues of fragmentation and potential ambiguity brought about by an increased
proliferation of various loosely connected approaches labelling themselves enactivist.
It is in the context of these “open problems” and the aforementioned theoretic overlap
that this paper argues that biosemiotics can make a positive contribution.

This paper will draw from both biosemiotics and AE to develop a novel synthesis -
biosemiotic enactivism (BE) - which aims to clarify, develop and ultimately strengthen
some key AE concepts. At its core is a proposed non-anthropocentric
reconceptualisation of the notion of cognition as, the active and creative process of bio-
semiosis by bio-semiotic systems, which is argued to be better placed to accommodate a
number of important AE insights. Thus, biosemiotics is used here not only as a
possible means for bringing the two fields into dialogue with each other, but also to
show how it can help address a number of concerns (De Jesus 2015; Di Paolo 2009;
Hutto and Myin 2013; Oyama 2011; Wheeler 2010; Welton 2011) which have been
raised against AE.

Situating itself in the context of Enactive Cognitive Science the paper proposes that a
BE conception of cognition can constructively help clarify and therefore strengthen
three core AE ideas: life-mind continuity, meaning and sense-making. Furthermore, it
is also argued that giving these ideas the suggested biosemiotic re-tweaking, will not
only place AE on a theoretically sounder footing but also leave us better equipped to

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address concerns regarding anthropocentrism/anthropomorphism (De Jesus 2015)
idealism (Hutto and Myin 2013) and the neglect of sociality amongst other living
systems (De Jesus 2015) raised against AE.

The strategy for the paper is as follows: it starts with an introduction to Enactive
Cognitive Science, provides an in-depth discussion of key AE ideas and concludes the
first half of the paper with a discussion of some of the more pressing difficulties facing
AE. The second half of the paper is dedicated to developing an approach to cognition
which could help address some of the difficulties within the AE framework and place it
on a sounder theoretical footing.

2 The Enactive Approach to Cognitive Science

2.1 Enactive Cognitive Science

Enactivism broadly construed belongs to a wider so-called “4E” (embodied/embedded/
extended/enactive) approach in cognitive science (Menary 2010) which situates itself in
opposition to traditional cognitivism. For these researchers cognition is an
environmentally situated embodied activity and not abstract, disembodied
computational processes in the head. While some "conservative" researchers within the
4E camp take insights from enactivism as a means to extend cognitivism (e.g. Clark
2008; Wheeler 2005) others take a more distinctive "revolutionary" line and insist that
enactivism can provide the necessary theoretical and methodological tools for a clean
break with the cognitivist hegemony (e.g. Froese 2007; Hutto 2011; Di Paolo 2009;
Thompson 2007).

From a biosemiotic perspective it is important to highlight at this point that enactivism

is itself a rather “broad church” and not all of “enactivism” will be compatible with

4
biosemiotics or share many of its central concerns.2 Due in great part to its increasingly
heterogeneous use, the term enactivism can and has been a source of much ambiguity.
Dan Hutto and Erik Myin’s (2013) identification of two distinct branches of
enactivism; sensorimotor enactivism (SE) and the already mentioned autopoietic
enactivism (AE), to which we can add the authors’ own radically enactive cognition
(REC) can help clear-up some of the ambiguity (see also Thompson 2004; Torrance
2006).

While SE and perhaps REC are all "branches" of enactivism, it is less clear that AE can
or should be fully understood as a branch in the same sense that these are said to be
branches. This is because AE differs from the other enactive branches in one very
fundamental respect. For AE the “enactive” refers to a systematic unified theoretical
framework - a novel paradigm - for understanding cognition in its complex entirety
(Steward et al., 2010). In contrast to SE, which focuses on the nature of perception
(e.g. Noë 2004) and REC on “basic cognition”, AE is interested in accounting for
cognition as a whole and not just some particular aspects thereof. Subsequently AE
self-consciously rebukes the conservative camp of 4E cognition and deploys a
revolutionary critical attitude to all forms of cognitivism.

In this paper it is argued that it is AE with which biosemiotics shares the most affinities
with. Unlike the aforementioned branches of enactivism AE and biosemiotics both
share two fundamental concerns: the continuity between life and mind, and the role that
meaning and signification plays within this continuity. Thus, given AE’s broader more
radical ambitions and wider theoretical scope, this paper takes it as providing the wider

2 Like enactivism, biosemiotics is not only in its infancy, but equally something of a “broad church”.
Similarly, although we can distinguish between several distinct approaches to biosemiotics and how it
should be further developed, the central ideas are nonetheless more or less common to them all. All are
committed to the idea that signs are co-extensive with life or as Sebeok puts it “semiosis presupposes
life”. Barbieri (2009) has helpfully made a cursory distinction between four different theoretical
approaches or branches of biosemiotics. There is physical biosemiotics and Darwinian biosemiotics
(Howard Pattee, Terence Deacon), zoosemiotics and sign biosemiotics (Thomas Sebeok, Jesper
Hoffmeyer), code biosemiotics (Marcello Barbieri) and finally hermeneutic biosemiotics (Anton
Markoš). The approach developed here does not follow any of these approaches in detail, but is merely
inspired by and draws loosely from its various concepts insofar as they can contribute to the broader
aims of the current work Note furthermore that, when referring to biosemiotics in this paper, I am
referring exclusively to the aforementioned field of theoretical biology and not to Dan Hutto’s (2008)
reconstruction of teleosemantics. Although BE has much in common with Hutto’s approach it is distinct
primarily due to its use of semiotics.

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theoretical core of so-called “Enactive Cognitive Science” which subsumes its various
other branches. With these clarifications in mind we can now turn to a more in depth
account of AE and draw out some of its affinities with biosemiotics.

2.2 Autopoietic Enactivism

Like biosemiotics, AE is a non-reductive yet naturalist framework but within cognitive
science rather than biology, and with its origins in the seminal work of Varela,
Thompson and Rosch (1991). A central focus of this work and the subsequent branches
of enactivism is on the dynamic embodied interaction between a cognitive system and
its environment. In contradistinction to mainstream cognitivism which sees cognition as
a type of brain-centred computation involving the manipulation of (symbolic) mental
representations, AE sees cognition as the spatial-temporal and extended self-organising
activity of situated embodied cognitive systems. Cognition is understood as an
essentially embodied, embedded, dynamic, non-representationalist, non-linear
interaction between a system and its environment. So far this sounds very much like a
general 4E conception of cognition and somewhat removed from central biosemiotic
concerns. Clearly missing from these accounts, as biosemioticians are bound to point
out, is an account of agency and more importantly meaning and signification. And this
is indeed something which AE, unlike other enactive branches or the wider 4E
movement in general, does provide.

Thus, AE fundamentally differs from other 4E approaches (and the other branches of
enactivism) in three further key respects, all of which have echoes in the biosemiotic
community: (i) it argues that there is a continuity between life and mind, (ii) that
cognitive systems are constituted through adaptive biological-autonomy and as a
consequence (iii), cognitive systems’ are agents whose worldly interactions transform
environments into inherently meaningful places of value and significance for the
system itself (Di Paolo 2005; Thompson 2004; 2007; Varela 1997). These worldly
interactive processes are called “sense-making” by AE.

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At the centre of the AE framework is its so-called strong life-mind continuity thesis
(SLMCT). As Froese and Ziemke (2009) make clear, the SLMCT “forms the very core
of the theoretical foundations of Enactive Cognitive Science”. The general idea behind
this thesis is that life and mind are continuous and therefore mentality is not something
to be identified exclusively with human beings. In the words of Evan Thompson
(2007: 128) “life and mind share a set of basic organizational principles, and the
organizational properties distinctive of mind are an enriched version of those
fundamental to life. Mind is life-like and life is mind-like”. The basic principles
required to understand and describe the organisation and behaviour of living organisms
are also those required for understanding mental phenomena itself, or in other words,
sense-making itself (Colombetti 2014; Di Paolo 2009; Di Paolo et al., 2010; Froese and
Di Paolo 2009; Froese and Ziemke 2009; Thompson 2004; 2007; 2011a,b; Weber and
Varela 2002). These basic organisational principles are provided by autopoietic theory.

Maturana and Varela (1980) coined the term “autopoiesis" to conceptualise living
systems which they saw as biological, self-organising autonomous networks, which
produce and recursively sustain themselves in order to preserve systemic cohesion. Such
systems are said to be organisationally closed but structurally open. A living system is
organisationally closed insofar as it is constituted by a network of recursively mutually
interdependent/interconnected components which produce the very network, including a
boundary, which individuates it from its surrounding medium. It is structurally open
insofar as its organisational requirements allows it to exchange matter and energy with
the environment. It is this basic biological autonomy which for AE forms the basis for
(i) the emergence of a distinct identity (an agent) which because of constant threat from
the environment develops a (ii) teleological and hence normative perspective that is
grounded in (iii) self-generated, goal-directed behaviour.

However, according to AE autopoiesis as originally formulated is an all-or-nothing

category unable to account for points (ii) and (iii), the gradation of concern apparent in
living organisms which allows for norms and teleology (Di Paolo 2005). For this
reason AE argues that the original conception of autopoiesis needs to be further refined

7
in order to allow for the introduction of teleology and the gradation of norms, value and
ultimately an experientially endowed sense-making being. As Di Paolo (2005)
highlights, to do this one needs to take into account that autonomous autopoietic
systems maintain their systemic identity under “precarious conditions”. What this
implies is that, due to the system’s intrinsic fragility, it not only persists under constant
threat of disintegrating back into the environment, but also, as a consequence, needs to
adaptively regulate its interactions so as to actively maintain its systemic cohesion and
increase its chances of self-preservation. It is this “concern” for self-preservation and
self-interest which leads to normativity and allows adaptively autonomous systems to
develop a unique point of view on the world from which environmental properties and
interactions are evaluated and acquire meaning and value (Barandiaran et al., 2009). As
noted above, such interactive processes are what AE theorists call the system's sense-
making activities, whereby it "enacts" or "brings forth" its “own world of meaning and
significance” (Thompson 2007).

Drawing from these considerations, AE goes on to propose a SLMCT which is

distinctively different from other continuity theories (e.g. Godfrey-Smith 1994;
Maturana and Varela 1980; Wheeler 1997). The difference, as Thompson points out,
stems from the fact that previous advocates of life-mind continuity have exclusively
focused on the organisational, functional/behavioural properties and as a consequence
have ignored the "phenomenological dimension” (sense-making), crucial for an
adequate understanding of this continuity. Thus according to Thompson "certain basic
concepts needed to understand human experience turn out to be applicable to life
itself" (2007: 129, emphasis added). The general idea here is that some existential
structures of human life are simply enriched aspects constituting all life (Di Paolo 2005;
Thompson 2007; Weber and Varela 2002).

The sentiment here should undoubtably resonate well with biosemiotics; as

biosemioticians will agree, functional/organisational properties, although necessary, are
not sufficient for an adequate understanding of living systems since these cannot
account for semiosis. But unlike biosemiotics which draws from semiotics to account

8
for the continuum of meaning in nature and culture, AE draws from the existential bio-
phenomenology of Hans Jonas.

While existential phenomenologists were exclusively concerned with characterising

human experiences, Jonas by contrast takes this as his point of departure and attempts
to locate the first manifestation of phenomenal experience in animate nature at large.
Jonas (1966) draws on two disparate sources, namely Darwinian evolution and the
phenomenological tradition respectively, to support the claim that all lifeforms, not
humans alone, are endowed with a subjective phenomenal interiority. In bringing
evolutionary theory and phenomenological insights closer together Jonas attempts to
provide a bridge between human forms of experience and cognition and the
evolutionary emergence of these experiences in other lifeforms which begins with life
itself. What this ultimately means for Jonas is that “only life can know life” (Jonas
1966: 91). But what exactly does this rather evocative slogan mean?

The central idea is that in order to fully know life one needs to start from our own
embodied first-person perspective of it. Human beings have an intrinsic acquaintance
with what it is like to be an embodied living agent, to paraphrase Di Paolo (2003) we
have insider knowledge. Although Jonas identifies metabolism as being the source of
intrinsic teleology, meaning and value, he goes on to insist that this interiority is only
known to us because we too are such living beings. This point is reiterated by
Thompson (2004: 90), who argues that “To make the link from matter to life and mind,
from physics to biology, one needs concepts like organism and autopoiesis, but such
concepts are available only to an embodied mind with firsthand experience of its own
living body”. In other words, according to Jonas and AE who follow him in this
respect, without our own unquestionable firsthand embodied experience of life, other
lifeforms would appear to us as just any other lifeless physical system in the universe
(Thompson 2007; Weber and Varela 2002; Wheeler and Di Paolo 2011).

Jonas’ phenomenology thus provides the impetus for what De Jesus (2015) has dubbed
the “SLMCT+” whereby Jonas is used as the main inspiration for grounding the

9
neglected interiority and subjective dimension of sense-making argued to perfuse
animate organismic life more generally and not human beings exclusively. It is with the
help of Jonas that AE links autopoiesis to phenomenal experiences and in the process
moves beyond a mere “objectivist” behavioural/functional life-mind continuity towards
a richer and more radical phenomenological/subjective one. This is a move which goes
from biological autonomy (the functional/organisational dimension of organisms) to
sense-making agency (the phenomenological subjective dimension of organisms).
However, the reliance on Jonas to ground meaning, sense-making and the SLMCT
leaves AE vulnerable to certain difficulties which threaten the theoretical coherence of
its framework.

Whereas biosemioticians do not generally speak of a continuity between life and mind
as such, they do explicitly argue that there is a continuity/co-extension between life and
semiosis (see Kull et al., 2011). As I will argue below, if semiosis is conceived in
enactivist terms, it can be understood as a basic form of cognition. More specifically,
cognition can be redefined as the active and creative process of bio-semiosis by bio-
semiotic systems, which can serve to ground a SLMCT and the role of meaning and
sense-making therein. First, however, we need to explore why Jonas is problematic for
AE and other difficulties.

3 Some Problems With AE

In this section we introduce a number of concerns raised by different theorists against
AE all of which can be seen to have some roots in its use of Jonasian phenomenology.
The purpose of this section is not to give an exhaustive review of all the problems
facing AE but rather to highlight currently unresolved issues and ambiguities which BE
could help address.

3.1 Anthropocentrism, anthropomorphism and the SLMCT

As AE theorists themselves are quick to point out, AE is a developing framework and as
such cannot be taken to be a finished theory. Moreover, like any other developing
theory, its central concepts need to be critically assessed and if needed reformulated/re-

10
interpreted accordingly. This paper in effect takes its point of departure from this
critical assessment and attempts to constructively contribute to the reformulation/re-
interpretation of key AE concepts.

In a recent paper Paulo De Jesus (2015) argues that AE is implicitly anthropocentric and
anthropomorphic (see also Villalobos and Ward forthcoming). The author argues that by
uncritically drawing from the phenomenology of Hans Jonas to justify its SLMCT+, AE
inadvertently prioritises human experience and as a consequence undermines the
possible experiences of other living organisms. The experiences of other organisms are
said to be undermined by AE because it casts the idea of life-mind continuity in
anthropocentrically phenomenological terms which leads to an anthropomorphic
conception of other living organisms. Clearly, if this criticism is correct, then AE and
biosemiotics would be mutually incompatible from the beginning.

The issue here appears to have both epistemic and ontological components.
Epistemically speaking, the phenomenological approach appears to lack an appropriate
conceptual framework with which to articulate the idiosyncratic and nuanced
experiences of nonhuman organisms. This can be seen to be an historical quirk in the
development of the phenomenological tradition itself which has by and large
exclusively focused on understanding human experiences (Calarco 2008). However, the
issue also seems to have a more fundamental ontological component which is informing
the epistemology. Even if we agree that on a fundamental level all organisms share a
common experiential/phenomenal aspect, we still need to know in what ways they also
differ (Clark 2001). Due to the phenomenological approach’s anthropocentric bias it
appears to be incapable of accounting for the differences and as a consequence is likely
to anthropomorphically homogenise and hence negate, the idiosyncratic experiences of
nonhuman organisms. As De Jesus points out, AE’s reliance on Jonas ultimately runs
the risk of simply projecting the analogues of human experiences down the phylogenetic
scale.

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In retrospect the claim that AE harbours anthropocentric/anthropomorphic tendencies
should perhaps come as no great surprise. After all as Froese (2011b) notes, from its
first clear articulation in Varela et al’s (1991) original proposal, “the enactive approach
is presented as a human experience-centred alternative to the computational theory of
mind in the cognitive sciences” (emphasis added). As this quote clearly highlights,
from its very beginnings there has been an implicit anthropocentrism at the very core of
the enactive proposal, a commitment which while perhaps unproblematic on its own
sits very uncomfortably both with SLMCT and biosemiotics.

These concerns, particularly relating to the differences among living systems within the
context of a SLMCT, is similar but importantly distinct to the one raised by Andy Clark.
Clark (2001: 118-119) points out that by exclusively focusing on unity and similarity,
that which is “special and distinctive” is lost sight of. Clark is here raising a common
cognitivist criticism of 4E cognition which argues that though it might be capable of
explaining “lower” forms of cognition it cannot account for the complexities of “higher
level” human cognition. This criticism however is based on a distinction which is itself
premised on an anthropocentric bias and so needs to be carefully considered before
addressed. Unlike Clark, the worry here does not assume this problematic distinction
(human higher-level vs animal lower-level), but questions whether AE has the
theoretical resources to account for or simply recognise the differences among living
systems of various kinds in a non-anthropocentric and non-anthropomorphic manner.

3.2 Idealism and internalism

A number of theorists (e.g. Bains 2006; Hutto and Myin 2013; Pascal and O’Regan
2008; Oyama 2011; Riegler, 2005: Wheeler 2010; Welton 2011) have criticised AE for
being “internalist”, “idealist” or both. An underlying theme of these concerns relates to
an alleged overemphasis enactivism places on the role of the solitary living system - the
autonomy of the organism - to the detriment of its environmental embedding. Michael
Wheeler (2010) for example, argues that because AE conceives cognitive systems as
living system, and living systems are bounded by a self-constructed boundary that
therefore cognition must be implemented solely within this organismic boundary (see

12
also Oyama 2011). While Pascal and O’Regan (2008) argue that because AE rejects
materialism and claims that organisms “construct their worlds”, it is committed to
idealism.3

While AE has gone someway towards addressing these sorts of worries (e.g. Di paolo
2009; Thompson 2011a), the vocabulary used in this context remains somewhat
unhelpful. Phrases such as “enacting”, “constructing”, “constituting” and “bringing
forth” a world, not only can carry highly idealist and internalist overtones but also
remain critically underdeveloped and as a consequence potentially vague and
misleading. Moreover, as Hutto and Myin (2013) point out, the real danger here is that
rather than being innocuous these sort of ambiguous phrases could be understood as
pointing towards deeper unexamined and unwanted theoretical commitments.

AE has tended to respond to accusations of internalism and idealism by arguing that

meaning and cognition are relational processes (Di Paolo 2009). But, as the previous
paragraph indicates and the following section supports, it is questionable whether AE
currently possesses the adequate theoretical/conceptual resources to fully justify this
claim. This perhaps goes some way in explaining why critics have never been
persuaded by this response (see Wheeler 2011).

3.3 The neglect of the social nature of organisms

A further issue for AE, one briefly hinted at by De Jesus (2015) and yet to be fully
recognised in the AE literature, relates to its neglect of nonhuman sociality. This is
particularly important in the context of the SLMCT and could partly be understood to be
a direct consequence of Jonasian phenomenology.

3 Throughout the rest of this paper, when referring to “idealism”, I have in mind the rich and complex
philosophical doctrine which variously take only ideas, spirit or mentality to be real (Guyer and Rolf-
Peter 2015). The above criticism notwithstanding, in this paper it is taken for granted that AE does not
slide into such a position but only that the phrasing of certain key ideas have the potentiality to give raise
to such interpretations. See Vörös, Froese and Riegle (forthcoming) for a more in depth discussion of
enactivism's complex relationship to idealism, anti-realism and metaphysical realism. Many thanks to a
reviewer for pressing me to clarify these points and drawing my attention to this work.

13
The issue here relates to the fact that, although AE has taken giant (and important)
strides in accounting for human sociality (e.g. De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007; De
Jaegher and Froese 2009; Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009; Gallagher 2012; Torrance and
Froese 2011) it has failed to say anything at all about the social lives of nonhuman
organisms. As De Jesus (2015) points out, the only other nonhuman organism discussed
by AE is the E. coli bacterium4, a discussion which is itself always presented in highly
individualistic and asocial terms (Cummins and De Jesus, submitted).

In stark contrast to how it understands human sociality, AE envisions bacteria in highly

individualistic terms as solitary creatures with no communicative or social abilities
inhabiting a socially deserted world. All examples of minimal forms of cognition,
presented courtesy of the E.Coli bacterium, is commonly cast in terms of a single
organism engaging in an environment emptied of other organism (e.g. Thompson 2007).
This is a particularly striking omission since bacteria are highly “socially” dependent on
each other for their survival (see Lyons 2007; Shapiro 2007).

Moreover, given this apparent lack of interest in other nonhuman organisms more
generally (not merely in their sociality), it becomes difficult to see what role the
SLMCT actually plays in the AE framework. One would be forgiven for thinking that,
not unlike a certain interpretation of phenomenology, AE is merely interested in
nonhuman organisms only insofar as they can possibly provide insights for
understanding human mentality. This accusation would certainly fit in with the concerns
over anthropocentrism/anthropomorphism and needs to be addressed.

To conclude this section, we have presented a number of interrelated concerns raised

against AE which require some attention. While some of these concerns have been
previously addressed in the literature by the AE community they have not convinced
everyone. Furthermore, the concerns over anthropomorphism/anthropocentrism and the
neglect of the sociality of other nonhuman organisms, have yet to be fully addressed and

4 This is, as point of fact, not strictly accurate. Di Paolo (2009) briefly considers the water boatmen
which is an aquatic insect. Notwithstanding this extra example, I think the point that AE has very little to
say on nonhuman organisms let alone their sociality, remains a valid one (but see Merritt (2015) for some
recent work aiming to address this issues.

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remain the most challenging for the AE framework. Motivated partly by these concerns
and partially by the desire to put AE and biosemiotics into a mutual beneficial dialogue,
I will in the rest of this paper draw from biosemiotics to provide an account of cognition
which can help address not only these concerns but more importantly strength some key
AE ideas.

4 From Enactive Phenomenology to Biosemiotic Enactivism

The purpose of the following subsections are to begin laying the foundations for BE.
We begin by introducing the Umwelt theory followed by the concepts of signs and
semiosis. These concepts will provide the foundations for developing the central thesis
that cognition is the active and creative process of bio-semiosis by bio-semiotic systems
which in turn will help us address the concerns raised against AE above.

4.1 Umwelt theory

The Estonian theoretical biologist/ethologist Jakob von Uexküll has retrospectively
acquired the status of founding father of biosemiotics. Magnus and Kull (2009: 125) go
so far as to claim that to understand biosemiotics “one needs to comprehend Uexküll”.
For our propose here we need to understand what Uexküll termed the Umwelt 5 and how
this concept could potentially help overcome the anthropocentric bias, tacit
anthropomorphism and account for meaning as a natural phenomena.

Uexküll’s primary concern was the perceptual “worlds” of living organisms which he
maintained can only be adequately understood when biology acknowledges the
importance of agency and meaning (Rüting 2004; Bains 2006). Uexküll was very

5 It is important that, as Bains (2006) notes, we distance ourselves from Uexküll’s overly
“subjectivists” (Kantian) construal of the Umwelt. In this section we thus present a necessary
reformulation of the Umwelt theory which sidesteps Kantian subjectivism (idealism). We might note here
that a failure to reformulate the Umwelt theory accordingly would lead to accusations of idealism similar
to those faced by AE. Thus, pace Uexküll, the Umwelt is not regarded as the "inner" subjective
appearance of exclusively subjective phenomena but a relational domain constituted through interactive
sign processes which are irreducibly triadic (see Bains 2006: 64). Furthermore, whereas Uexküll tended
to emphasise the disparity in animal “worlds”, a disparity succinctly captured in his “soup bubble”
metaphor which also further highlights another subjectivist facet, here we will place a greater emphasis
in the commonality and interconnectedness of animal worlds. Finally, it most also be recognised that
Uexküll has also been a source of much inspiration for enactivism itself, though peripherally so
(Thompson 2007). For BE however, Uexküll plays a more central role and in a crucial sense takes up the
role occupied by Jonas within AE.

15
critical of the "mechanistic biology" of his day which regarded organisms as inert
machines. By contrast, Uexküll regarded organisms as integrated holistic "subjects
whose essential activity consists of perceiving and acting" (Uexküll 1957: 6). Living
organisms do not merely passively conform to the laws of material causality but
respond and act in the world.

The concept of an Umwelt originates from Uexküll's detailed empirical investigations

into the nature of the relationship between organisms and their environment. According
to Uexküll all living organisms form a coupled system - the Umwelt - with an inherently
meaningful environment. The concept can be understood to loosely serve two
interconnected aims in Uexküll’s overall approach to biology: (i) it serves as the basis
for an innovative non-anthropocentric, biologically grounded, theory of meaning and (ii)
it serves to illustrate how organisms as agents in their own right act meaningfully and
have a unique perspective, a point of view, on their environment (Bains 2006).

To fully appreciate the notion of an Umwelt it might be helpful to contrast it with two
related but distinct concepts: that of a habitat and that of a niche (Emmeche 2001).
Very roughly, the habitat refers to those aspects of an organism's environment that are
"objectively" specified by an external observer while a niche refers to the organism's
ecological functions within the ecosystem (Odling-Smee 2009). Like the notion of an
Umwelt both these concepts make the importance of organism-environment interaction
clear, but unlike the Umwelt this is done “from the outside”, from an observer’s point of
view. The concept of an Umwelt highlights the world of the organism “from the
inside”; not only do organisms actively contribute to the construction of their own
worlds, but also that these “worlds” are in fact infused with unique meaning,
signification and value for the organism. Living organisms do not encounter neutral
objects when they interact with them only meaningful ones. The Umwelt thus
emphasises that the organism has a unique and meaningful point of view on its world
whereby things matter. These are characteristics not (always) recognised or
acknowledged by the other two concepts.

16
There is then an experiential dimension of the organism which is acknowledged by the
notion of the Umwelt, as it emphasises the world around an organism which has unique
salience for the organism by virtue of its perceptual experiences. According to Uexküll,
this perceptual world emerges through "functional cycles" which are the processes that
connect "receptor and effector cues” or what we now might call self-organising
sensorimotor loops. It is by virtue of these dynamic functional cycles of action-
perception integration, that organisms actively transform physical environments into
worlds of meaning. However, it is important that we do not confuse functional cycles
with mere sensorimotor loops, as they are distinctively different. Functional cycles
unlike sensorimotor loops are intrinsically connected with biological meaning and
signification which is the cumulative result of the organism's history, its species-specific
sense-organs, its morphological structural organisation, its biological needs, currant
state within its environmental context and its dynamically unfolding worldly activities.
Note that this provides us with a Uexküllian phenomenology6 (Tønnessen 2015)
necessary for replacing Jonasian phenomenology.

To illustrate the idea consider the female tic: A female tick's skin is sensitive to light and
this guides her up from the ground to a brighter position on a branch or blade of grass.
Once up she will hang there until butyric acid emanating from a mammal reaches her.
Upon sensing the butyric acid she will drop and plunge straight into the mammal. Here
the perceptual cue of butyric acid triggers an effector cue which results in the release of
the tick's legs and enables it to drop onto the mammal. When the tactile cue of hitting
the mammal's coat is triggered, she begins to move around, searching for warmth, upon
encountering the skin she will trigger a burrowing behaviour, after which she starts to
burrow in and suck the warm nourishing blood. When she has finished her first and last
meal, she will drop down, lay her eggs on the earth and die.

6 Although generally unacknowledged Uexküll has had a great influence on the development of
existential phenomenology through the work of its two central figures; Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty
(see Buchanan 2008). Thus what makes this a Uexküllian phenomenology is its concern, equally shared
in part by the existential phenomenologists, in accounting for the unique perspective organisms have on
their world. The world as experienced by the organism itself.

17
As Uexküll notes practically everything in the world which engulfs the tick has
absolutely no salient value or meaning for it. The stars, weather, noises, smells, leaves,
shadows, and much more besides, do not matter and are “ignored”. Certainly they will
belong to the Umwelten of certain other organisms living amidst the tick, but they do
not "carry" any meaning for our female tick. None of these are salient or convey any
meaning for the tic itself, its Umwelt consists merely of three cues which are of intrinsic
significance.

The above example suggests that even relatively “simple” organisms can autonomously
“decide” which environmental information to respond to and which to ignore based on
history, current goals and context. Even a once meaningful stimulus need not
necessarily lead to the formation of a functional cycle at a different time or place. This
suggests that organisms anticipate relevant perceptual cues not only due to internal
states but also due to context, current needs and wider goals. Thus, when the tick was
on the branch, the smell of butyric acid acted as a perceptual cue, but when the tick was
in the fur, this was no longer the case. The important point here is that biological
expectation or anticipation is thus determined not only by the organism particular
embodiment and history but also by its particular goals in the current context.
Anticipation and expectation unfold over time and against a wider backdrop of the
organism’s goal-driven activities. This further illustrates why functional cycles cannot
be reduced to sensorimotor loops

The Umwelt also highlights another important characteristic of all living beings; they
are not discrete predefined static bounded units but contingently developing,
dynamically unfolding, interactive agents. Organism and Umwelt form a single
integrated coupled system of mutual specification and as such, subject and object cannot
be viewed as two separate entities since they are mutually, though asymmetrically,
interdependent. Here the traditional inside/outside dichotomy simply falls away, an
organism is nothing without its Umwelt, and an Umwelt does not exist without an
organism. The Umwelt therefore needs to be understood as thoroughly relational; it is

18
not something in the organism nor outside independent of it but that which emerges in
the middle so to speak (Bains 2006).

Finally, unlike AE, this biological theory of natural meaning provides an explanation of
animal behaviour - the behavioural unity of organisms and their environmental
embedding - in a non-anthropocentric/non-anthropomorphic biologically grounded
manner where the organism itself is the starting point.

A central insight of Uexküll, one which goes to the very core of BE, is that in order to
understand the natural environments (the Umwelt) of living organisms we need to
overcome the overwhelming tendency to conceive it through a human lens. For Uexküll
it is important that we try to understand natural environments as a space of signification
and meaning for the organism itself. The important point, which warrants being
emphasised once again, is that we must begin with the organism itself. Only in so doing
do biologists forego an anthropocentric bias and so stand a better chance of not
completely anthropomorphising the Umwelten of organisms.

To highlight the importance of this point it is worth briefly introducing Froese and
Ziemke (2009) enactivist, and ultimately anthropocentric and anthropomorphic,
reconstruction of the Umwelt.7 In a thought-provoking paper outlining a framework for
an “Enactive Artificial Intelligence” Froese and Ziemke offer the following three-step
argument for why Uexküll was justified in claiming that all organisms have a Umwelt.

“(i) if we choose to accept as evidence our own lived experience of a world that we
perceive as a meaningful basis for intentional action, then it is possible to reject the
claim that our being is exhausted by its external mechanical structure, and (ii) if we
choose to accept the evidence for (i) as well as our own lived experience of a world in
which we perceive other animals as intentional agents in their own right, then it is also
possible to reject the claim that another animal’s being is exhausted by its mechanical
structure, and (iii) if we accept the evidence for (i) and (ii), it becomes reasonable to

7 Froese and Ziemke (ibid) in effect offer a Jonasian reading of Uexküll which for the reasons noted
above needs to be avoided at all costs.

19
assume that what can be scientifically described as an animal’s sensorimotor behavior
constitutes for the animal its own lived world, or Umwelt” (Froese and Ziemke 2009:
488).

Froese and Ziemke (ibid: 488, emphasis added) argue that it is Uexküll’s “appeal to the
evidence of our own lived experience, which directly reveals us and other living beings
as embodied subjects, that forms the basis for his research”. Despite its intentions, this
is not only a problematic interpretation of Uexküll’s work, but more importantly, it
undermines Froese and Ziemke’s own wider aims of a non-anthropocentric/non-
anthropomorphic Enactive Cognitive Science. As we have already pointed out above,
taking human experiences first - as the ultimate grounds for granting embodied
subjectivity and meaning to other living organisms - contains a critical anthropocentric
and anthropomorphic bias. Unlike what Uexküllian phenomenology implies and indeed
what Froese and Ziemke intend but their argument actively undermines, biologists need
to begin with the organism first on its own terms and not human experiences.

To conclude this section, the Umwelt theory has first and foremost helped us understand
meaning as a natural biological phenomena common to all living organisms. But, four
further features of the Umwelt theory are worth emphasising once again: (i) that it
provided a phenomenology grounded in the organism because (ii) organisms are
embodied agents which live in meaningful environments and therefore (iii) not static
units cut-off from the world but deeply embedded in it to the extent that it collapses the
subject/object dichotomy and that (iv) in order to fully appreciate points (i) to (iii)
biologists need to reject anthropocentrism and avoid anthropomorphism. But to fully
understand these four features we still need to understand signs and semiosis.

4.2 Signs and semiosis

BE endorses AE’s SLMCT but replaces Jonasian phenomenology with Uexküllian
phenomenology and re-tweaks the notion of sense-making with that of semiosis and
signs to which we now turn. This should go someway towards addressing potential
accusations of internalism and idealism and to add a more systematic dimension to the

20
notion of sense-making. From a BE perspective the Umwelt is constituted by the
organism's sign relations through semiosis. The salient environmental cues/information/
stimuli, which the organism identifies, selects and either correctly or incorrectly
appropriates, are understood as signs. A sign is thus simply “something which stands for
something else.” From a BE standpoint signs are that on the basis of which a certain
class of system gets to “know” the world and not that which they know.8

It is important to note that a sign as introduced here is not confused with some
independently existing entity, as it only emerges through irreducible interpretative
processes. Signs are therefore essentially non-reducible triadic processes, not
something which we can point at with the index finger or identify with some objective
thing or physical entity in the world even though they are rooted in the world (Deely
2009). There are only "independently existing entities that are used as signs by the
agents that act upon them as such" (Favareau 2007b: 69). What this implies is that the
notion of a sign cannot be understood apart from the broader concept of semiosis,
whereby A interprets B as "standing-for" C. Thus semiosis "is the sign process — the

fundamental process that carries meaning and in which meaning is created" (Kull et al.,
2011). This should help clarify that it is the sign which makes the Umwelt truly
relational. Crucially, signs should not be confused with “mental representations”, since
the unit of analysis is the irreducible triadic process and not something in the head.

To clarify these points we can loosely draw on the work of Charles S. Peirce
(1839-1914).9 According to Peirce every sign involves a three-place relation which
presupposes three elements; the sign vehicle, the object and the interpretant (SV-O-I).
The “relation" linking all three elements is in effect the semiotic process which is an
irreducible triadic phenomena whereby something (the sign vehicle) comes to stand for

8 Although, as will be explained below, there is a class of system which can know signs as signs.
9 Note that BE as developed here is not committed to any specific interpretation of Peirce, nor his
broader metaphysical/cosmological philosophy, but only draws inspiration from his pragmatic approach
and his distinction between icon, index and symbolic signs.

21
something else (the object) to an agent in some respect or other (the interpretant).10
This implies that something can function as a sign only if it is a sign vehicle of an object
with respect to an interpretant. Which in turn implies that the unit of analysis here is a
three-placed semiotic relation which cannot be decomposed into dyadic relations
between sign vehicle and object. Furthermore, Peirce also noted that there are
fundamental differences in the ways in which something can “stand for” something
else.

The semiotic relation itself was further elaborated by Peirce as triadic processes
involving a relation of causation between signs and their users, a grounding relation
between signs and that for which they stand, and an interpretant relation between signs,
what they stand for, and the users of signs. As already noted every sign needs to be
interpreted to be related to its object otherwise it is not a sign. It is because signs are
meaningful in this manner that they enable organisms to respond flexibly and
communicate effectively with other organisms in ever-changing environments.
Furthermore, Peirce also draws a fundamental distinction between three kinds of signs,
indices, icons and symbols, on the basis of what he calls their "grounding" (Short 2007).
That is on the ways in which these signs are able to stand for things other then
themselves.

Icons are signs that stand for something else by virtue of a similarity or resemblance to
that which it stands for. For example photographs, maps, paintings and sculptures are
types of icons. Indices are signs that are causes or effects of that which they stand for.
Smoke in relation to fire, footprints on snow, red spots in relation to measles are all
examples of indices. They have a "direct physical connection" between them. Finally
there are symbols, which are signs that are merely habitually and by convention
associated with that for which they stand. The most common examples are words of

10 The notion of the interpretant is a very contentious one in biosemiotics which this paper cannot
address. For our purpose here the interpretant can roughly be understood as what we usually take as the
sign's meaning which is manifested through embodied functional cycles by an interpreting bio-semiotic
system in the presence of signs. While there is a distinction drawn between an interpretant (the action of
the system mediated through signs) and an interpreting agent (the acting system as a whole), here we
apply the general pragmatist maxim which states that to know is to know what to do in a particular
context. And this “knowing” necessarily presupposes an interpretive bio-semiotic system. See next
section for more on bio-semiotic systems.

22
natural languages such as English or Portuguese. The words of ordinary languages,
such as "table" and "chair", unlike the other two types of signs, neither resemble nor are
causes or effects of that for which, as symbols, they stand.11 12

With these various ideas and concepts in hand we are now better placed to see that both
the BE notion of (bio)semiosis and the AE notion of sense-making have considerable
overlap. Indeed, as AE theorists have long acknowledged, the constitution of an
Umwelt (semiosis) simply is the organisms’ sense-making. But it should also now be
clear that there are some important difference too. So what exactly, if anything at all,
does the notion of a sign add to our already rich conception of sense-making? In the
previous section we showed that the Umwelt, appropriately understood, enables us not
only to understand meaning as a natural phenomena but also to overcome a pervasive
anthropocentric bias and be made wary of anthropomorphism, while this section has
gone on to argue that the Umwelt is constituted through natural sign-relations.
Furthermore, from the perspective of BE the sign; (i) anchors the organism deep into
the fabric of the world with other organisms and not confine it to a secluded inner realm
and (ii) it helps differentiate organisms’ worldly-engagements in terms of sign usage and
(iii) it acts as the “thread” connecting all living organisms and serves to ground
SLMCT. In the next section we will flesh-out these three points further by introducing
the notions of bio-semiosis and bio-semiotic systems and placing these in a broader
social evolutionary context

Before doing so it is worth noting that although it has just been argued that the notion of
sense-making could be enriched with the concept of the sign, it remains the case that an
adaptive autopoietic agent which can give rise to normative sign relations and their
unfolding dynamics remains essential for any form of semiosis. Thus while AE can

11Note also that certain signs may have iconic, symbolic and indexical elements. A traffic light would be
a good example of a sign (symbolic) containing other (icon, index) elements.
12 Note that the notion of "symbol" used here is not to be confused with "symbol" used in computational
theories of mind (e,g. Fodor 2008, Newell and Simon 1976), which are simply meaningless syntactical
marks. By contrast, all sign using systems - all (bio)semiosis - presupposes an interpretive point of view.
Thus even the usage of icons presupposes a point of view with respect to the various ways in which one
thing resembles another (see Section 5 for further discussion). This is seemingly lacking in
computational theories where the symbols involved only stand for something other than itself for an
outside observer not for the system itself.

23
benefit from adapting the notion of the sign biosemiotics can benefit from adopting
AE’s notion of agency. BE recognises that organisms are active agents continuously
reshaping and being reshaped by on-going normative dynamic sign relations. Drawing
on the Peircean sign should therefore not be seen as undermining this point, as a relapse
into focusing exclusively on structural properties of sign relations or sign logic, but
enriching it (see Sharov et al., 2015).13 This will become more apparent in the following
section.

5 Bio-Semiotic Systems and Their Evolution Through Semiotic Freedom

The last two sections introduced an account of meaning as a natural phenomena which
enables organisms to make their way in the world. In these remaining sections we will
first propose that this ability be understood as a basic cognitive process and then go on
to consider it in the context of sociality and evolution.

5.1 Bio-semiotic systems and cognition

As noted above, biosemiotics is committed to the continuity/co-extension between life
and semiosis. This continuity is developed within the broader context of evolution and
the role signs and semiosis plays therein. Unlike AE however, biosemioticians have not
always been clear on the exact relationship between semiosis on the one hand and
cognition on the other. Drawing from the preceding discussion I now want to propose
that semiosis, or what I will call bio-semiosis to emphasise the natural (organic)
dimension of cognition, can be understood as a basic cognitive process. Any system can
be said to be a cognitive system if it has the ability to use signs. It is this ability to use
signs which I maintain ultimately explains the cognitive continuum, the strong life-
mind continuity, among and across the animal kingdom.

13 Both reviewers to this paper raised the concern that the notion of a "sign" could very easily be accused
of harbouring latent anthropomorphism. I am very sympathetic to these concerns, but I do however think
they can be abated by taking a closer look at the definition of a sign introduced here. Because we are
language using organisms we are inclined to think that (i) language is the only sign-system and (ii) that
human are the only language users and therefore the only sign users. The notion of a sign introduced here
shows that (i) is simply false and as a consequence undermines (ii). If we look at the definition of the
sign itself as a three-placed relation, there is nothing which requires or implies that the interpretant (the
bio-semiotic system) be a human being.

24
Incorporating what I have argued regarding BE with a similar proposal by James Fetzer
(1988; 1997; 2001), we can now define cognition as the active and creative process of
bio-semiosis by bio-semiotic systems.14 Whereby different types of cognitive systems
and their respective cognitive abilities can be identified on the basis of the types of signs
(all signs and not just language or symbolic signs) they have the capacity to interpret
and, due to the normative nature of semiosis, misinterpret. Grounded on the emergence
of adaptive autopoietic agency, these systems can identify, make distinctions, select and
appropriate or misappropriate that which is relevant in a given context for their own
continued persistence. Thus, Iconic bio-semiotic systems have the capacity to utilise
icons, Indexical bio-semiotic systems have the capacity to utilise indices and Symbolic
bio-semiotic systems have the capacity to utilise symbols.

The most basic and perhaps the most pervasive of bio-semiotic systems in nature are
those which can only utilise iconic signs. Such systems will be referred to as Iconic bio-
semiotic systems. According to Sebeok (1989: 121), “iconic signs are found throughout
the phylogenetic series, in all modalities as circumscribed by the sense organs by which
members of a given species are able to inform themselves about their environment”.
Iconic bio-semiotic systems are a subclass of bio-semiotic system which have the
capacity to recognise/detect certain properties/features of their environment as relevant,
having a valance or repulsion. These properties/features are iconic signs for these
systems by virtue of a resemblance or similarity to something other than themselves
(Hoffmeyer 2008). A frequently used example within the AE literature of a basic Iconic
bio-semiotic system is the E Coli bacterium (see Thompson 2007).

Moving on considerably along the phylogenetic scale we have systems which have the
capacity to utilise not only icons but also indices. These systems are Indexical bio-

14 Note here that I introduce a distinction between biosemiosis and bio-semiosis. The hyphen serves to
illustrated that BE unlike biosemiotics is committed to the thesis that bio-semiotic systems are not only
semiotic but also cognitive. The point is neither that life and semiosis nor life and cognition are co-
extensive, but rather that bio-semiotic system as adaptive autopoietic systems (a subclass of living
systems) are cognitive in their own right. Bio-semiosis is thus considered a systems’ level property
which requires adaptive autopoiesis and leaves open the possibility that biosemiosis/semiosis (but not
cognition) can go on below the level of integrated organisms, what biosemioticians call
“endosemiosis” (Barbieri 2009). It is beyond the scope of this paper to address the topic of endosemiosis
any further,

25
semiotic systems and they have the distinct ability to recognise connections and
correlations. When a SV is a sign of O by means of “a direct physical connection”
between them, then the SV is said to be an index of O. In this case, the SV is
determined by O, and both need to exist as events: Spatio-temporal co-variation is thus
the most fundamental characteristic of indexical sign processes. Common examples are
fire and smoke, dark clouds and rain, tree rings and the age of the tree. These are
natural regularities which occur throughout nature and certain systems have evolved the
ability to exploit them for their own needs. It is likely that it is here that the capacity for
associative learning first entered the evolutionary scene (see Kull 2014; Hollis and
Guillete 2011).

Symbols are perhaps the most familiar type of sign to us and yet at the same time the
most puzzling and most difficult to understand. Symbols are signs which are arbitrary
in nature in the sense that these require social conventions to be understood. Symbols
are merely habitually and conventionally associated with that for which they stand (O)
and so need not be similar nor causally connected to (O). A system which has the
capacity to use symbols in this sense is a Symbolic bio-semiotic system. In general these
systems also have the capacity to interpret icons and indices.

The paradigm example of Symbolic bio-semiotic systems are human beings. Our social
world abounds with symbols and symbolic sign systems, from table manners to legal
systems to perhaps the must impressive symbol system of all that is language. All of
these require some sort of habitual association or/and social convention in order to be
fully understood. For example a red traffic light means "stop" because we have
arbitrarily agreed through social convention upon that particular meaning. Similarly
the word "chair" bears no inherent relation to "chairness" and the two are arbitrarily
related by convention. As symbols are arbitrary in nature and so need to be established
by social convention it intuitively seems to imply that only human beings are symbolic
bio-semiotic system (Penn et al., 2008). This however is not the case and indeed there
is now plenty of research strongly suggesting that Symbolic bio-semiotic systems are
more widespread in nature than intuition might have us believe (Emery and Clayton

26
2008; Farina 2008; Lestel 2002; Martinelli 2010; Queiroz and Ribeiro 2002). Examples
include bee dances (Gould 1990) and the alarm calls of vervet monkeys (Seyfarth et al.,
1980).

Finally, all bio-semiotic systems are understood to inhabit a space occupied by other
bio-semiotics systems, either of the same or different species or both. In this sense all
bio-semiotic systems are social in their very essence. From the BE perspective sociality
is a fundamental ontological precondition for the evolutionary development of bio-
semiotics systems. As Kawade (2009) points out, because early forms of living entities
were likely incomplete and fragile, those which could interact with others and
developed mutually supporting behaviours would be more likely to increase their
chances of survival. This idea has support from recent research into bacterial social
evolution and has lead Pamela Lyon (2007: 830) to claim that “within this highly
cooperating species natural selection appears to favour the strengthening of sociality
rather than individual autonomy”.

5.2 Evolution, semiotic freedom and sociality

At the heart of the BE proposal then is the thesis that cognitive systems are a class of
adaptive (autopoietic) behaviourally plastic system with the (bio-semiotic) ability to
recognise something as standing for something else. Each subclass of bio-semiotic
system is understood to display a progressive hierarchical complexity (structural,
behavioural and adaptive) with regards to the preceding kind of system. Moreover,
drawing from our discussion above, this complexity can now be understood to imply an
increase in what Hoffmeyer calls "semiotic freedom” which refers to organisms’
“increased capacity for responding to a variety of signs through the formation of
(locally) “meaningful interpretants” (Hoffmeyer 2012: 112).

All bio-semiotic systems of varying complexities have to master a set of meaningful

signs of visual, acoustic, olfactory, tactile and chemical origin in order to first survive
and then evolve. Thus, as bio-semiotic systems evolve and develop, they become
increasingly more sensitive and so more responsively attuned to relevant aspects (signs)

27
of their environment. But as we already noted, if a system can use a sign, it must also
have the potential to misuse it. In other words, bio-semiosis entails that bio-semiotic
systems must be equally open to the possibility of failure, open to the possibility of the
respective system being mistaken/misinterpreting that something else. Moreover note
that bio-semiosis is the goal-directed activity of a bio-semiotic system and not any of its
parts. It is only the activity itself, the process of triadic bio-semiosis, which can
coherently be regarded as either falling or succeeding.

Bio-semiosis is therefore intrinsically normative. At the most primordial level minimal

self-interest can be understood to provide the most basic form of normativity in the
natural world while more advanced forms of normativity emerge with the coevolution of
more advanced types of bio-semiotic systems and the increase of semiotic freedom.
Importantly, as we have already noted above, because bio-semiotic systems also live in
dense webs of interconnections with a diverse host of other bio-semiotics systems this
normativity also has an inherently social dimension (Lyon 2007; Ben-Jakob 2008).
Throughout this paper signs have been understood primarily in terns of signification, but
to understand the social and interconnected nature of bio-semiotic systems, we must
also recognise that signs can also serve for communication. Signs are thus not only used
to guide the behaviour of organisms in the world but also communication and
coordination with other bio-semiotic systems. Because living organisms, by and large,
live in communities and not in isolated hermetic worlds, normative communication
processes become that on the basis of which individual behaviour and the larger
community are structured, organised and coordinated.

This dual-aspect (signification/communication) of the sign can also help explain why
bio-semiotic systems are not only semiotically sensitive to relevant “ready-made” signs
in the environment but also the active creators of meaning. As we have already seen, in
order to maximise survival and reproduction, biological organisms have to develop
increasingly sophisticated behavioural-routines to be able to interpret their environments
in novel ways. Often, and insofar as these novel routines promote survival and
reproduction, they will inevitably effect the course of bio-semiotic evolution. At the

28
same time, in the creation of novel meaning, bio-semiotic systems will as a consequence
create or become further signs for communicative purposes with other bio-semiotic
systems (Markoš et al., 2009).

From this perspective evolutionary processes consist of a growth in the extent and
variety of the manifestations of generic processes of bio-semiosis. It makes good
evolutionary sense to assume that natural selection would favour those organisms with
increased abilities for adaptive decisions based on reliable signs which require the
emergence of increasingly sophisticated ways of communicating with other bio-semiotic
systems and interpreting the world. But it is only with the emergence of bio-semiotic
systems on our planet that evolutionary processes gradually endowed such systems
with the rudiments for Darwinian "strivings" which once in place could ensure natural
selection to occur.

For billions of years semiotic freedom remained understandably low and only very
gradually would there emerge more advanced stages of bio-semiosis corresponding to
the development of increasingly more complex structural and behavioural bio-semiotic
systems. Again, only with the emergence of such systems, could the mechanisms of
natural selection take effect. Only then can such systems actively strive for nutritional
resources, shelter, protection, attempt to avoid predators, seek mates and so on, that
there could be competition, in the absence of bio-semiotic systems with bio-semiotic
capacities there could be no natural selection at all.

Thus with bio-semiotic systems in place, signs can now function to “incite the
generation of interpretants in the form of actions which are future-oriented, inasmuch as
living beings always seek signs for survival and for reproduction” (Hoffmeyer 2008, p.
65). It is signs which function to help guide the behavioural responses (bio-semiosis) of
all bio-semiotic systems as active open-ended creative and communicative processes of
problem solving which always refers back to the self-preservation of the respective
system and the wider group. A self-referential process embodying the systems’ past
through the present and always guiding them towards the future.

29
The idea of bio-semiosis thus offers a more fine-grained, historical (diachronic), and
social analysis of the evolutionary development of sense-making. In so doing it also
goes someway to bridging the nature/culture divide by showing that nature could not
function without signs and that culture is merely an extension of natural bio-semiosis.
BE thus allows for a framework which can provide a fully naturalist and non-
anthropocentric account of meaning and cognition as a central component of strong life-
mind continuity. In contrast to the Jonasian inspired AE, BE takes living systems as
sharing a continuum on bio-semiotic grounds and not by virtue of our own embodied
experience.

To conclude this section, contrary to popular intuitions, human beings are not the only
sign-using organisms, all living organisms, even if only in very limited degree for some,
are capable and indeed must be able to, recognise and create "cues" in their distal
environments in order to make a living. However, BE goes further than biosemiotics
by arguing that bio-semiosis as the activities of bio-semiotic systems is co-extensive
with cognition. The distinctive "uniqueness" of human beings comes from the kind of
bio-semiosis we can partake in. Whereas most other living organisms are only capable
of interpreting iconic and indexical signs, human beings alone are deeply embedded in a
symbolic world of language (Deacon 1997; 2012) which endowed us with a very
distinctive kind of mentality. Nonetheless, this does not separate us from the rest of
nature but on the contrary firmly embeds us deep within it. Nature and culture are
neither inherently different, nor opposed phenomena. From the BE perspective culture
and nature cannot be separated since both are intricately woven into each other by
virtue of the perfusion of sign relations.

6 Conclusion
I would like to conclude this paper by recapping how BE contributes to Enactive
Cognitive Science. The BE perspective introduced above endorsed AE's strong life-
mind continuity but grounds it on Uexküll’s Umwelt theory and the bio-semiosis of
living bio-semiotic systems. The sign, and not Jonasian phenomenology, is the thread

30
connecting all the various bio-semiotic systems while the varying capacity these have
for using different types of signs helps us recognise and appreciate that they are at the
same time also in important respects very different.

The great merit of the BE account is that it retains the core of AE but replaces Jonasian
phenomenology with Uexküllian phenomenology (Tønnessen 2015) and bio-semiosis.
Because BE does not rely on analogy as its primary point of departure it sidesteps not
only anthropocentrism but also unnecessary anthropomorphism. In essence the BE
proposal offers a reversal of the phenomenological argument used by AE to defend the
strong continuity between life and mind. Consequently, it allows us to accommodate
and foolhardily embrace, the rich diversity ubiquitous in living nature and fully
appreciates that all of these have unique perspectives on their world. Importantly, these
are not the "watered-down" human centred variants of an anthropomorphic stance, but
genuinely unique in their own intrinsic ways.

BE also goes someway in helping us bridge the nature/culture divide and presenting a
naturalistically plausible account of meaning and cognition which strongly suggests
that culture is naturally emergent from nature and not something inherently distinct
from it. In placing the question of meaning in a broader non-anthropocentric
evolutionary context, BE avoids the necessity of a miraculous break from the rest of
nature or of its sudden appearance. From a biosemiotic perspective meaning is co-
present with living beings from the start. Meaning is not something which is first
located in human experience then projected onto the rest of nature but rather the other
way round. This is in contrast to what the AE theorist might reasonably be accused of
doing. “Simple” single celled organisms as well as more “complex” multicellular ones
are bio-semiotic beings as evidenced from their communication and interpretation of
their environments and not because we project these characteristics onto them.
Organisms would continue to live and experience the world in their own distinctive
ways whether humans were here or not. Nonetheless, it is equally important that we
maintain AE's account of autonomous agency. Indeed, as Weber (2001) points out, this
is perhaps the greatest contribution AE can make to biosemiotics more broadly.

31
But, by taking AE's account of agency seriously and giving it a biosemiotic re-
tweaking, BE unlike biosemiotics, is committed to the view that other nonhuman
lifeforms are not only semiotic but genuinely cognitive. Importantly, the hierarchical
individuating of bio-semiotic systems by virtue of the signs a system can use, also helps
us to recognise the inherent difference among cognitive systems. This should help
satisfy Clark's (2001) demand that the proponents of a strong life-mind continuity need
to recognise that the mind is not only continuous but also "special". The account
presented above, with certain clarifications, goes some way into accommodating this
point.

From the standpoint of BE it becomes somewhat misleading to claim that organisms

"brings forth a world". The notions of bio-semiosis and bio-semiotic systems
introduced above provide a more systematic, more historical, diachronic and socially
sensitive grounding of the AE notions of sense-making and meaning both in terms of
evolution and specific cognitive abilities. Moreover, the introduction of the sign allows
for a truly relational and so irreducibly "extensive"15 account of cognition. The sign
can thus be seen to resolutely anchor the "sense-making" organism deep into the very
fabric of the world. Note however that despite the introduction of the sign BE does not
lose sight of the active agent and its importance in the creation of normative sign
relations.

This is particularly important because it helps, to a larger extent, sidestep potential

internalist and idealist misinterpretations. Through the BE lens cognition is
fundamentally rooted in the capacity of bio-semiotic systems to create and exploit
external structures through meaningful sign-relations together with other living
organisms. It is not something strictly internal to the system but constituted through
relational triadic bio-semiosis. As we saw a sign is not something internal but nor is it
a “ready-made” external object either.

15The term “extensive” is taken from Hutto and Myin (2013) who introduce it in part to replace the
notion of an “extended mind”. This notion of extensive minds is fully endorsed here.

32
Ultimately, the intention here has been to contribute to the theoretical developments of
AE and not to critique it. In so doing it should have also shed some light on how
enactivism itself could contribute to biosemiotics Thus despite the inherent difference
highlighted in our discussion the similarities are abundant and simply calling out for
more direct engagement. Indeed, I hope it was made evident that there is plenty of
reason to forge links between the two fields since it would undoubtedly be variously
beneficial to establish connections with a research community which share very similar
aims. Here the very first steps were taken in this direction.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Prof Mark Bishop and Fred Cummins for extensive discussions on most
the issues addressed in this paper and for helpful suggestions throughout. A very warm
thank you to Prof Alexei Sharov who read several drafts of the paper and commented
extensively. Finally, I am deeply indebted to two reviewers for their insightful
comments and very helpful suggestions.

33
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