Paul Cobley

For more than 40 years, Jesper Hoffmeyer has been committed to the idea of developing a semiotics of nature, or biosemiotics as he chose to call this effort, that could intelligibly explain how all the phenomena of inherent meaning and signification in living nature - from the lowest level of sign processes in unicellular organisms to the cognitive and social behavior of animals - can emerge from a universe that was not so organized and meaningful from the very beginning (Claus Emmeche, Kalevi Kull, Frederik Stjernfelt (ed.), Reading Hoffmeyer, rethinking biology, Tartu 2002, p. 41).