Semiotics Beyond the Human

Activity 8.1 — Build an Umwelt ★

Practices: Uexküll's Umwelt, each organism's world is structured by the signs meaningful to it (§8.2).

Pick a Thai animal and reconstruct its Umwelt: the world as signs for that being. Options: a soi dog, a temple macaque, a water buffalo, a tokay gecko (ตุ๊กแก), a water monitor (in the khlong), a mosquito.

Fill in:

For this animal…	Answer
Which signs is it tuned to perceive? (smells, sounds, movements)
Which signs trigger which behaviors?
What is meaningful and what is simply ignored?
How does its world differ from a human’s in the same place?

Instructor notes

• Model after Uexküll’s tick (§8.2): the tick’s world is essentially three signs (butyric acid → warmth → bare skin). A temple macaque’s Umwelt may be described as centered on human hands (food), eye contact (threat), other macaques’ postures, etc. A mosquito: CO₂, body heat, sweat chemistry.
• The key insight (§8.2): meaning is not “out there” objectively; it emerges from the fit between an organism and its own world. The same khlong is a different world of signs for a monitor lizard, a fish, and a commuter.
• Great bridge back to Activity 1.4 (do we touch reality?) and forward to ecosemiotics (§8.5).

Activity 8.2 — Animal Signals: An Observation Task

Practices: zoosemiotics, describing animal communication and its functions (§8.1).

Observe an animal communicating for 15 minutes, e.g. temple or street animals, birds at dawn, a market’s caged birds, a pet. Record (notes, photo, short clip) three distinct signals and for each ask:

• What is the sign vehicle (call, posture, display)?
• What might it stand for (threat, mate, food, contact)?
• What function does it seem to serve (cf. Jakobson: is it phatic contact-keeping, conative, emotive)?
• Is it learned or innate, as far as you can tell?

Instructor notes

• Connect to the book’s cases (§8.1): von Frisch’s bee waggle dance; Cheney & Seyfarth’s vervet alarm calls (different calls for leopard/eagle/snake); birdsong dialects learned from tutors.
• Reinforce the honest caution in §8.1: inferring meaning and intention in animals is genuinely hard; reward tentative, evidence-based claims over confident anthropomorphism (a theme the chapter returns to in §8.8).
• Jakobson’s functions (Ch 5) transfer neatly: many bird calls are essentially phatic (§5.3 notes ornithologists’ view).

Activity 8.3 — Is the Genetic Code Really a Code? A Debate

Practices: the biosemiotic claim that genetics is genuine semiosis vs the "merely chemistry" view (§8.2–8.3).

Biologists routinely say DNA is “transcribed,” “translated,” and “expressed.” Is this a real code or just a metaphor? Split into two teams:

• Team Semiosis: the genetic code is conventional (a codon could have mapped to a different amino acid), tRNA acts as an interpreter, so this is genuine sign activity (Barbieri).
• Team Chemistry: it is all thermodynamics and molecular shape; “reading” and “meaning” are just convenient metaphors.

Each side prepares three points from §8.3; hold two rounds; then map where each student stands and why.

Instructor notes

• Team Semiosis’ strongest card (§8.3): the codon→amino-acid mapping is not chemically necessary (it could have evolved differently; slight variant codes exist), which is precisely what makes it code-like and conventional. In Peircean terms: codon = sign vehicle, amino acid = object, cellular machinery = interpreter, polypeptide = interpretant.
• Team Chemistry’s card: everything is explicable by physics without invoking meaning; the book’s own counter (§8.3) is that speech is also “just acoustics,” yet meaningful; description at one level doesn’t cancel meaning at another.
• Warning: this activity might be too difficult for students without some background in biology; use it only when your students are ready for it or you can provide that background in class.
• No resolution is required; the split itself teaches the “semiotic threshold” question (§8, Eco 1976).

Activity 8.4 — The Rice Paddy as a Sign Network

Practices: ecosemiotics, ecosystems as webs of interpreted signs; semiotic pollution (§8.5).

Choose a Thai ecosystem you know: a rice paddy (นา), a mangrove (ป่าชายเลน)), a khlong (คลอง), or an orchard. Map it as a network of sign relations:

1. List the organisms (plants, insects, birds, fish, buffalo, humans).
2. Draw arrows for who reads whose signs (a heron reads ripples; a frog reads insect movement; a farmer reads the sky and the soil; plants read chemical signals from damaged neighbors).
3. Identify one form of semiotic pollution disrupting the network (artificial light confusing insects/birds, pesticide disrupting pollinators, noise, plastic, etc.) and trace its downstream effects.

Instructor notes

• The core move (§8.5): an ecosystem is not just matter/energy but a web of interpreted signs; every organism reads signs within its own Umwelt and produces signs others read.
• “Semiotic pollution” (§8.5) is a memorable, actionable concept: light pollution, ocean noise, agrochemicals disrupt sign relationships, not just organisms. Thai examples abound (light over paddies, khlong pollution, pesticide effects on bees).
• Ties conservation to meaning (§8.5’s closing point) and connects to the book’s ecological ethics (§8.8).

Activity 8.5 — Two Frontiers: A Message to the Stars / Does the Bot Interpret?

Practices: astrosemiotics (designing an interpretable message) and artificial semiotics (does AI perform semiosis?) (§8.6–8.7).

Choose one track:

Track A: Message to the stars. Like the Arecibo message, design a short signal to communicate “life exists here” to a non-human intelligence that shares no code with us. What can you rely on: mathematics, prime numbers, images, self-explaining structure? Sketch it and explain your choices.

Track B: Does the bot interpret? Have a short exchange with any AI chatbot or a LINE bot. Then debate, using §8.6: is it producing and interpreting signs (semiosis), or only simulating it? Does your answer depend on whether interpretation requires consciousness?

Instructor notes

• Track A dramatizes the semiotic problem of a shared code (§8.7): with no common convention, senders fall back on what might be universal (math, physical constants, self-describing icons). Good link to Jakobson’s code factor (Ch 5) and to the Wow! signal / SETI discussion (§8.7).
• Track B turns on the book’s own framing (§8.6): if interpretation requires consciousness, current AI is not a genuine semiotic agent; if it does not (as biosemiotics allows for cells), then AI arguably qualifies. There is no settled answer: the point is to reason with the criteria.
• Keep Track B grounded in observation of an actual exchange, not sci-fi speculation.