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The notion of culture implies the relative stability of sets of algorithms that become entrenched in human brains as children become socialized, and, to a lesser extent, when immigrants become assimilated into a new society. The semiotics of culture has used the notion of signs and systems of signs to conceptualize this process, which takes for granted memory as a natural affordance of the brain without raising the question of how and why cultural signs impact behaviour in a durable manner. Indeed, under the influence of structuralism, the semiotics of culture has mostly achieved synchronic descriptions. Dynamic models have been proposed to account for the action of signs (e.g., semiosis, dialogism, dialectic) and their resulting cultural changes and cultural diversity. However, these models have remained remarkably abstract, and somewhat disconnected from the actual brain processes, which must be assumed to be involved in the emergence, maintenance, and transformations of cultures. Semiotic terminology has contributed to a systematic representation of cultural objects and processes but the philosophical origin of its basic concepts has made it difficult to construct a productive interface with the cognitive neurosciences as they have developed and achieved notable advances in the understanding of memory over the last few decades. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that further advances in semiotics will require a shift from philosophical and linguistic notions toward biological and evolutionary models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first issue raised by this paper is whether semiotics can bring any added value to ecology. A brief examination of the epistemological status of semiotics in its current forms suggests that semiotics' phenomenological macroconcepts (which are inherited from various theological and philosophical traditions) are incommensurate with the complexity of the sciences comprising ecology and are too reductive to usefully map the microprocesses through which organisms evolve and interact. However, there are at least two grounds on which interfacing semiotics with ecology may prove to be scientifically productive: (a) the very looseness of semiotic discourse can be an important catalyser for multidisciplinary interactions, an important condition for the emergence of truly holistic ecology; (b) the present semiotic conceptual apparatus is not carved in stone. All its notions, frames of reference and types of reasoning can evolve in contact with the problems encountered in evolutionary ecological research. Semiotics, as an open-ended epistemological project, remains a proactive intellectual resource. The second issue raised by this paper is precisely to call attention to the opportunity provided by recent developments for rethinking and furthering semiotic inquiry. An attempt is made to show that counterintuitive theories such as memetics and new frontiers in technology such as nanotechnology, could help recast ecosemiotics along more intellectually exciting lines of inquiry than the mere rewriting of ecological discourse in terms of the traditional semiotic macroconcepts. It goes without saying that memetics and nanotechnology are not presented here as definitive solutions but simply as indicative of possible directions toward a comprehensive evolutionary ecosemiotics that would radically transform the basis of the 20th century semiotic discourse and its ideological agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the interface between semiotics and psychology, first from the historical point of view of their parallel developments originating in late 18th-century philosophy, then from the theoretical perspective of contemporary evolutionary thinking. Undifferentiated within the speculations of the French `Idéologues', such as Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836), semiotics and psychology progressively acquired distinct epistemological and institutional status with minimal mutual interactions. However, the emergence of cognitive psychology during the second half of the 20th century provided new theoretical grounds for a potential dialogue. As the Darwinian revolution eventually recast many problems common to both semiotics and psychology in evolutionary terms, it is argued that these two parallel approaches to the study of mind, symbolic behaviour and meaning are bound to merge in the foreseeable future. The example of a recent work by Terrence Deacon (1997) is cited in the conclusion of the paper as a symptom of this epistemological restructuration that is currently taking shape. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]