The Springer journal Biosemiotics, for one I am one of three Editors-in-chief along with Alexei Sharov and Timo Maran, has revised its "Aims and scope" section, which now reads:
Biosemiotics is dedicated to building a bridge between biology, philosophy, linguistics and the communication sciences. If it is true that biosemiotics is "the study of signs, of communication and of information in living organisms" (Oxford Dictionary of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 1997, p. 72), it is also true that, in time, it has acquired a more general scope. Today, its main challenge is the attempt to naturalize biological meaning, in the belief that signs are fundamental, constitutive components of the living world. Biosemiotics has triggered revision of fundamentals of both biology and semiotics: biology needs to recognize the semiotic nature of life and reformulate its theories accordingly, and semiotics has to accept the existence of signs in animals, plants, and even individual cells. Biosemiotics has become in this way the leading edge of the research on the fundamentals of life, and is a young exciting field on the move.
By providing both a place for – and access to – exceptional peer-reviewed papers on the emerging discipline of biosemiotics, the journal will offer an instrument of its development by publishing papers in all relevant areas of the natural sciences and the humanities. In particular, the journal is focused on publishing original papers that explore deep links between biology and semiotics. Special issues are dedicated to some of the most interesting and provoking ideas in biosemiotics. In addition, the journal helps the readers to navigate in the current literature by publishing subject reviews and book reviews.
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