Signs and Life in a Life for Signs. Thomas A. Sebeok’s Global Semiotics

Thomas A. Sebeok is no doubt a major representative of contemporary semiotics. With Sebeok the boundaries of this discipline have extended beyond historical-natural language, beyond culture. Such amplification is possible largely on the basis of an axiom that is pivotal to the global semiotic perspective: where there is life there are signs, that is, signs are present wherever there is life. Sebeok was the first to point out that semiotics is “global semiotics”, because all lifeforms depend upon the action of signs (semiosis). Moreover, as a “semiotic animal” capable of “metasemiosis,” the human being has a capacity for responsibility and is responsible, first of all, or life and its health over the entire planet. From this perspective semiotics is also semioethics