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PROGRAM
Plenary lectures:
Umwelt or Umwelten? How Should Shared Representation be Understood Given Such Diversity? It is a truism among ethologists that one must not forget that animals perceive and represent the world differently from humans. Many animals have sensory access to inputs for which human sense organs are relatively or entirely unresponsive. Sometimes this caution is phrased in terms of von Uexküll's Umwelt concept. Yet it seems possible (perhaps even unavoidable) to adopt a common ontological framework when comparing different species of mind. For some purposes it seems sufficient to anchor comparative cognition in common-sense categories; bats echolocate insects (or a subset of them) after all. But for other purposes it seems necessary to find out more about how organisms organize their perceptions into biologically significant and perhaps cognitively meaningful states. Complex animals have high bandwidth sensory channels that feed into high-dimensional nerve networks with very complex dynamics. With the exception of simple animals having fixed numbers of neurons, the odds are very much against any two animals of the same species, let alone different species, having exactly the same couplings to the environment, the same dimensionality in their nervous systems, or the same dynamics. How, given such diversity (which von Uexküll himself recognized) should we think about shared representation, shared meaning, and cognitive similarity between individuals and species? Colin Allen is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science and Professor of Cognitive Science in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he has been a faculty member since 2004. He also holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Philosophy, and is a faculty member of IU's Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior. His main area of research is on the philosophical foundations of cognitive science, particularly with respect to nonhuman animals. Allen has also published on various topics in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, and artificial intelligence. See also homepage (mypage.iu.edu/~colallen/).
From Genetic to Semiotic Scaffolding Unlike lifeless systems, organisms do not passively sit (or flow) and wait for things to happen; instead, they actively search for the resources they need and actively protect themselves against a range of possible dangers. All of this presupposes some kind of anticipation where present cues are employed to tell about future conditions in some sense or other. In a fastchanging world anticipation is a risky business and failure of a species to interpret cues "correctly" (relative to the needs of the organism) may lead to extinction. Species that manage to interpret their surroundings well would have been favored by the process of evolution, thereby initiating an evolutionary dynamics leading to increasing semiotic freedom (Hoffmeyer 1996). The appearance on our planet of biosemiosis thus opened a new agenda for the evolutionary process by providing entities with the agential property presupposed by Darwinian "striving" and thus for natural selection. For billions of years the semiotic freedom of agents remained low, and a bacterium, for instance, cannot by itself chose not to swim upstream in a nutrient gradient. Therefore, at this stage of evolution, semiotic agency is primarily exhibited at the level of the lineage (the species as an evolving unit). Only gradually a more advanced stage of biosemiosis would emerge, in which semiosic activity was no longer only a property of the lineage but also, and importantly so, a property of individual organisms. References
Jesper Hoffmeyer, Cand. Scient (biochemistry) and Dr. Phil. (semiotics), b. 1942. Professor emeritus at Biological Institute, University of Copenhagen. Did work in experimental biochemistry in the 1970s, but research interests gradually turned towards questions of theoretical biology. From 1988 work has focused on the developing field of biosemiotics. Recent publications include A Legacy of Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as Precursor to Biosemiotics, Springer 2008 (as editor) and Biosemiotics. An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs, University of Scranton Press 2008. See also homepage (web.mac.com/jhoffmeyer/Jespers_Site/IntroPage.html).
Attenborough, Colonialism and the British Tradition of Nature Documentary Over more than half a century, Sir David Attenborough has become one of the most recognised faces – and voices – on television. One of the pioneers of TV natural history film, he is universally acknowledged as being one of the world's foremost science communicators, and he remains a leading figure at the BBC, for which, now well into his eighties, he still works. Attenborough has been described as quintessentially English, and his durable, simultaneously authoritative and self-effacing TV persona identifies him in the tradition of the slightly eccentric British gentleman-naturalist, combining amateur enthusiasm with professional scientific knowledge in a curious but undeniably charming mixture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century expository modes. Attenborough's natural history films are similarly modern yet oddly anachronistic, conveying the impression of an effortless mastery of the planet that is redolent of an earlier colonial era, and that seems at odds with their conservationist message about the need to reduce human ecological impact and protect the world's wildlife. In this paper, I will look at the aesthetics of Attenborough's natural history films, especially their uses of the Darwinian sublime and evolutionary epic; I will also gauge the political implications of TV natural history film and 'blue chip' nature documentary, both of which have been criticised for an embellishment of nature that reasserts the very patterns of human domination and cognitive mastery that makers of such programmes, such as Attenborough, vigorously contest. Graham Huggan is Chair of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures in the School of English at the University of Leeds. He is best known for his work in comparative postcolonial studies, including the books Australian Literature (OUP, 2007) and The Postcolonial Exotic (Routledge, 2001); however, much of his recent work is also in environmental and animal studies, including his most recent, co-authored book Postcolonial Ecocriticism (Routledge, 2010). See also homepage (www.leeds.ac.uk/english/staff/pages/huggan.htm).
Animal Music, Animal Aesthetics Music may be a better model for understanding the complex animal communication of songbirds, whales, and insects, because the most complex of the utterances of these creatures are not related to difference and complexity in the message, but more to the form of the performance. Thus a complex bird song, say that of a nightingale, is supposed to 'mean' the same thing as the simple song of the chaffinch: both are sung by male birds to defend their territory and attract mates during breeding season. Then why must one sing for hours throughout the night and the other be content with a simple 'sis sis sis siseeyou?' The difference is one of musical style, or of species aesthetic. Each species has evolved a specific aesthetic sense, and this is what defines the details of their evolved music. If one thinks of such performative animal communication as something closer to music than to language, whole new avenues of inquiry are opened up. Philosopher and musician David Rothenberg is the author of Why Birds Sing, also published in Italy, Spain, Taiwan, China, Korea, and Germany. It was turned into a feature length BBC TV documentary. His work has always been concerned with the relationship between humanity and nature and how music and philosophy might enhance our understanding of the world around us. Rothenberg has also written Sudden Music, Blue Cliff Record, Hand´s End, Always the Mountains, and Is It Painful to Think? Conversations with Arne Naess. Rothenberg is also a composer and jazz clarinettist, and he has seven CDs out under his own name, including On the Cliffs of the Heart, named one of the top ten CDs by Jazziz Magazine in 1995. His latest book is Thousand Mile Song, about making music with whales. It is currently being turned into three different documentary films. His first CD on ECM Records, with pianist Marilyn Crispell, One Dark Night I Left My Silent House was released in 2010 to wide international acclaim. Rothenberg is professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. See also homepage (www.davidrothenberg.net). CONTACT
E-mail: zoosemiotics@semiootika.ee Organizing team: Timo Maran, Jelena Grigorjeva, Morten Tønnessen, Kadri Tüür, Silver Rattasepp, Nelly Mäekivi. |