1337total visits.
Developing and specifying Charles Peirce’s idea that the entire universe is perfused by signs, Charles Morris recognized that semiotics could be extended to the organic in its wholeness: for there to be a sign there must be interpretive activity by the living organism (cf. Petrilli 1999). Following Morris (1971), Thomas Sebeok developed this thesis to claim that the entire life sphere is made of signs. This means that even a microorganism, for example a cell, flourishes insofar as it interprets signs. Sebeok extends the boundaries of semiotics to a maximum degree with his “semiotics of life” or “global semiotics” which posits that life and semiosis converge. Anthroposemiosis is only a small part of the overall biosemiosic network. And within the sphere of anthroposemiosis an even smaller part is represented by verbal semiosis. Like all other animals belonging to the sphere of zoosemiosis, from a biosemiosic perspective human beings too communicate mostly through nonverbal signs (see Sebeok 1998, 2001). Moreover, voluntary communication is wholly subtended by endosemiosic processes such as those relative to the immunitary and neural systems. 
https://doi.org/10.33234/SSR.16.2