Thomas Albert Sebeok, "Biologist Manqué"

          Thomas Sebeok was born in Budapest, Hungary, on November 9, 1920, the only child of Veronica Perlman and Dezso Sebeok. He died in Bloomington, Indiana, USA, on December 21, 2001. Whoever shall undertake to write a full biography is in for a daunting task, even as concerns the family background in Hungary, including an aunt in Paris and the manner in which the family name was spelled by the father.

          There are many standard "biographical entries" extant on Sebeok (Neussel 2001). Two major bibliographical surveys (Deely 1995 and Umiker-Sebeok 2003) are in the "Further Readings". His "books and papers" require five-hundred-seventy-nine entries. "Reviews" and "miscellanea" (forewords, encyclopedia articles, etc.), raise the writings to eight-hundred-thirty-three. Editorial work promoting other scholars adds three-hundred-ninety-five volumes. Translations of his writings form a bibliography in their own right. Besides English, Sebeok may be read in Chinese, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and Vietnamese.

          Sebeok's basic schooling took place in Budapest. In 1936, he moved to Cambridge, England, enrolled in Magdalene College. His father, anticipating the World War, advised him the following year to join him in New York. This the young Sebeok did, taking citizenship in 1944. Already at Magdalene College the influences which would become the telos of his career began their work. There he met I. A. Richards and his work with C. K. Ogden on "meaning". There too he forayed into the hapless 1926 attempt by MacKinnon to render in English the 1920 Theoretische Biologie of Jakob von Uexküll. Sebeok could make no sense of that English. Much later he returned to the work in German, and, at least from the 1982 Seventh Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America (SSA) onwards, von Uexküll's work became pivotal through Sebeok's influence in the North American and global development of semiotics.

          For all his prodigious range of intellectual involvements, positions, acquaintances, presentations and writings - visiting appointments in thirty-five universities of twenty different countries; honorary doctorates in the U.S.A., Hungary, Argentina, Bulgaria, Finland; president of organizations in anthropology, linguistics, semiotics; Fulbright grants to Germany, Italy, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico; Fellow of the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the East-West Center, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, the Smithsonian, the Woodrow Wilson International Center; etc., etc. - it was into his shaping of the doctrine of signs that everything else was gathered and found its place.

          By 1939 Sebeok was enrolled at the University of Chicago majoring in linguistics. His senior year he studied with Leonard Bloomfield, in classes that "were minuscule" in size, as he reports it (in a ms. titled "Summing Up", among his posthumous papers), where he developed the first of his papers to be published in 1942. "I want to stress", Sebeok says, "Bloomfield's scarcely appreciated, withal quite explicit, links with semiotics, especially during his final Chicago years". He then quotes Bloomfield to the effect that "meaning" is a notion "necessarily inclusive, since it must embrace all aspects of semiosis that may be distinguished by a philosophical or logical analysis", what Sebeok would come to call (1975) "the semiotic web".

          The principal influence upon Sebeok at Chicago was Charles Morris, whose Writings on the General Theory of Signs Sebeok would later publish (1971) as Volume 16 in the "Approaches to Semiotics" series. After a falling-out between Sebeok and Richard McKeon resulted in Sebeok's expulsion from the humanities, Morris steered Sebeok to anthropology to complete his BA degree in 1941. (Sebeok considered that "the persevering hostility" to Morris on the part of Robert Hutchins as University of Chicago President, supported by Richard McKeon in the Humanities Division and Mortimer Adler in Great Books, set back the nascent rise of semiotics in the United States "by easily a quarter of a century".)

          Within anthropology Sebeok began to develop a "biological way of thinking". On the second page of an undated manuscript among his posthumous papers, handwritten on stationary of the Washington, DC, Cosmos Club, after the heading "The Tradition I Stem From", he lists as his principal influences the philosopher Charles Morris, the philologist Roman Jakobson, the theoretical and experimental biologist Jakob von Uexküll with his son the medical doctor Thure von Uexküll, and finally the animal psychologist Heini Hediger. Himself he describes as "a 'Biologist Manqué'."

          Jakobson enters the picture especially after Sebeok transfers from Chicago to Princeton in 1942 to continue his graduate studies. His assigned thesis advisor at Princeton Sebeok never mentions, because he found him useless and got along with him not at all. For actual direction he commuted to New York where Roman Jakobson was teaching in exile at the New School for Social Research. This regular consultation Sebeok always regarded as the real guidance he received in linguistics toward his 1943 MA (in anthropological linguistics), the same year he joined the Indiana University faculty at Bloomington. His Indiana activities were prodigious. Initially he worked for the OSS in the Air Force Language Training Program (quickly as Director) for, among other things, preparation of agents to parachute behind enemy lines in the Baltics. ("World War II propelled me to clutch the verbal code rather than the molecular code", he explained in his 1984 SSA Presidential Address, as to how events resolved the agony of his attraction in the 1940s to a career rather in genetics and biology over linguistics and anthropology.) Later he worked along more regular academic lines teaching in Departments of English, Linguistics, Anthropology, Folklore. So it came about that in 1945 he completed his Princeton Ph.D. (in Oriental Languages and Civilizations) and settled in at Indiana in several programs and departments, but especially at one of its several celebrated and unique "research centers", the Research Center for Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics. This name was shortened to Research Center for Language Studies (RCLS). In 1975 Sebeok, as Center Chair, added semiotics (RCLSS).

          Jakobson's influence in Sebeok's linguistic studies was "pivotal", but not in his "gradual evolution as a semiotician". Pivotal here was his Chicago-acquired taste for the "biological way of thinking". 1960-1961, his "priceless period of freedom" at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, was the decisive year. Given his background in linguistics and anthropology, one would have expected Sebeok to approach semiotics from the standpoint advocated by Ferdinand de Saussure and his epigones under the rubric of "semiology". But Sebeok never for a moment fell for the idea that semiosis could be adequately reduced or assimilated to a linguistic model of signifying, an idea he simply brushed aside as a "pars pro toto" fallacy - without denying that the semiological studies had a rightful place within the larger scope of semiotics proper.

          Sebeok devoted that year to "catching up" on biology, animal communication in particular, a study for which he would shortly coin the term "zoösemiotics" (1963). This focus eventually (1984) led him to distinguish sharply between language, as having in itself nothing to do with communication but which, through exaptation, gives rise to linguistic communication as species-specifically human, and communication, which is a universal phenomenon of nature. Events, as he put it, placed him "at the storm center of a foolish controversy about whether animals have language, to which the one word answer is: 'No!'"

          Zoösemiotics was just the beginning. Ironically, in his "Introduction" to The Basic Works of Aristotle published the year after his expulsion of Sebeok from humanities at the University of Chicago, Richard McKeon stated the criterion whereby his erstwhile student would establish himself over the next sixty years as the most important figure in the 20th century development of semiotic consciousness. He observes that a thinker's influence is marked by the "forms of speech, distinctions, and information" that transmute through usage into "the accustomed materials of a culture and tradition". This criterion marks Sebeok as the dominant 20th century influence on the intellectual tradition that goes by the name "semiotics".

Let us start with the word "semiotics" itself. It was by no means the dominant term for discussion of signs over the first three-quarters of the 20th century. That term was "semiology", attributed to the linguistic views of Ferdinand de Saussure (1916). Nor was the term "semiotics" the preferred term of the avowed epigones of Charles Sanders Peirce, that other early 20th century founder of the study of signs. In Peircean circles, common wisdom held that the study of signs should be called "semeiotic ... never semiotics" (Fisch 1978: 322). For Sebeok himself, nonetheless (1971), "semiotics" was always the preferred term that he both adopted and promoted in full awareness of the dominant currents of early and mid 20th century development against which he swam and over which he ultimately prevailed.

          Not only did Sebeok's preferred usage become, by the end of the 20th century, the dominant usage worldwide among students of the action of signs, but he either authored (Sebeok 1991) or inspired (Deely 2003) studies that eventually showed that neither was the term "semiology" original with Saussure (though the assimilation of it to a linguistic paradigm distortive of natural signifyings was), nor was it true "that Peirce never availed himself of the word semiotics" (Sebeok 2001: xvii).

          Sebeok's settlement upon "semiotics" as the "logically proper name", as it were, for the doctrine of signs may well have taken place during his crucial year at the Stanford Center. Immediately in 1962 he takes a first step toward developing a larger paradigm for the study of signs in communication, organizing at Indiana a conference around the theme "paralinguistics and kinesics", bringing together the disciplines of cultural anthropology, education, linguistics, psychiatry, and psychology - still language-dominated but, in Sebeok's mind, nascent with the broader perspective his study of animal communication had convinced him to be necessary for the student of signs. How nascent was the broader perspective is dramatically illustrated in that the conference participants had to wait for the "analogic creation" of the term "semiotics" as proposed by Margaret Mead, near the conference's conclusion, aptly to cover "patterned communication in all modalities", linguistic or not. Considering that "the selection of some single term seemed a persuasive device to advance unified research", Sebeok entitled the volume from that conference Approaches to Semiotics , and used the title again in 1969 to launch his legendary Mouton series.

          The Approaches to Semiotics volume from the 1962 Indiana conference surely marks the beginning in North America of semiotics as an intellectual movement. Already was underway, in the persons of Jakobson and Sebeok particularly, the powerful assimilation of the seminal semiotic work of Charles Sanders Peirce. In his 1984 SSA Presidential Address, Sebeok refers to Peirce as "our lodestar", tracing his "evanescent influence" even upon the work of Ogden and Richards. The SSA was the offspring of "what explicitly was planned and veridically became the First North American Semiotics Colloquium ever held in the United States" at the University of South Florida in the summer of 1975. October of the following year saw the First Annual SSA Meeting.

          Already Sebeok had established the term "anthroposemiotics" (1968) to cover study of the human use of signs, as in 1963 he had established the broader term "zoösemiotics". In 1981 Martin Krampen, in an article published under Sebeok's editorship, in the international journal Sebeok had helped name Semiotica (which would be Latin for "semiotics"), introduced the term "phytosemiotics" for study of the action of signs among plants and between plants and animals viewed from the side of the plants. The three terms - phytosemiotics, zoösemiotics, anthroposemiotics - now completed the naming of the knowledge arising from the action of signs corresponding to the traditional division of living nature into plants, animals, and humans, and soon enough inspired Sebeok (1990) to consider the action of signs as criterial of life. He advanced the further thesis that sign-science and life-science are coextensive, a vision he named "biosemiotics", and used the term to entitle a volume including the challenge to his thesis as too narrow (Deely 1991). Central to biosemiotics was the biology of Jakob von Uexküll. Over the last decade of his life he tirelessly promoted both.

          Thus, as the 21st century opened, Sebeok's influence permeated all the terms and distinctions of debate in the development of the study of signs as an inherently interdisciplinary intellectual paradigm global in scope. The 'open question' within semiotics at that juncture, marked by a formal conference (Nõth 2001) addressing just this point of how far the action of signs extends, was no longer whether semiology is superordinate to, co-ordinate with, or subaltern to semiotics, but only whether semiotics is broader even than zoösemiotics. On this question two positions had emerged.

          There was the comparatively conservative position (how ironic for time to cast the revolutionary figure of Sebeok in such a pose) which would extend semiotics to the whole of living things, plants as well as animals and microorganisms. The conservative faction in the matter of whether the action of signs, and hence the paradigm of semiotics, can be extended beyond the sphere of cognitive life rallied under Sebeok's coinage, biosemiotics, but construed to name the whole of the sphere of possible semiotics.

          The more radical faction (chief among which must be counted Peirce himself, and most recently Corrington 2000) did not quarrel with the inclusion of phytosemiotics along with zoösemiotics and anthroposemiotics under the umbrella of semiotics, but argued that even this extension leaves out something that must be included, namely, the physical universe at large which surrounds biological life and upon which all life depends. The radical faction in semiotics by the end of Sebeok's life argued that what is distinctive of the action of signs is the shaping of the past on the basis of future events. In this accounting, the action of signs (or {\u8216\'91}semiosis') can be discerned even in formation of rocks and stars as physiosemiosis, to be codified under the rubric of "physiosemiotics", co-ordinate with biosemiotics.

          Whatever proves to be the full extent of sign action, Peirce's proposal (1906: CP 5.448n1) that the universe as a whole, even if it does not consist exclusively of signs, is yet everywhere perfused with signs, is a thesis that better than any other sums up the life and work of Thomas A. Sebeok, "inventor", as Petrilli and Danesi like to say (2001), or father, as I should prefer, of "global semiotics".

          This debate turns out to have carried modernity beyond itself as a distinct philosophical epoch. The man who, more than any other, shaped this development of discourse and the terms of its questions was Thomas Sebeok. That is why the last annual gathering in the 20th century of the SSA took for its theme and proceedings subtitle "Sebeok's Century".

SEBEOK, Thomas A.

1963. "The Notion of Zoosemiotics", as reprinted in John Deely, Brooke Williams, and Felicia Kruse, eds., Frontiers in Semiotics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 74-75. 1964. ed. with A. S. Hayes and M. C. Bateson, Approaches to Semiotics (The Hague: Mouton). 1968. "Goals and Limitations of the Study of Animal Communication", in Animal Communication. Techniques of Study and Results of Research , ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 3-14. 1968a. "Zoosemiotics", American Speech 43.2, 142-144.

1969. ed. with Alexandra Ramsay, Approaches to Animal Communication (=Approaches to Semiotics 1; The Hague: Mouton).

1971. "'Semiotics' and Its Congeners", reprinted in Sebeok, Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs (Indiana University, Bloomington, and The Peter De Ridder Press, Lisse, 1976), 47-58; and in Deely, Williams, and Kruse 255-263.

1975. "The Semiotic Web: A Chronicle of Prejudices", Bulletin of Literary Semiotics 2 (December), 1-65; "Index of Names" added ibid. 3 (May, 1976), 25-28.

1976. Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs (joint publication of Lisse, Netherlands: The Peter de Ridder Press, and Bloomington, IN: Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies of Indiana University). Reprinted (as Sources in Semiotics, Vol. IV; Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985), with a Preface by Brooke Williams, "Challenging Signs at the Crossroads", pp. xv-xlii, written at Sebeok's request to assess and reframe the work in the light of the reviews published by Bouissac, Watt, and Deely.

1977. "Preface" to A Perfusion of Signs, proceedings of the First North American Semiotics Colloquium (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), ix-xi.

1978. Sight, Sound, and Sense, selected papers from the 1975-76 pilot course 'Semiotics in the Humanities' funded at the Bloomington campus of Indiana University by the National Endowment for the Humanities, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press)

1979. The Sign & Its Masters (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press). Corrected 2nd ed. (=Sources in Semiotics, Vol. VIII; Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), with a new Foreword by the author (pp. xv-xxi), a Preface "A Global Enterprise" by John Deely (pp. vii-xiv), a list of Corrections to the Original Publication (p. 339), and an Index to the New Front Matter (p. 340).

1981. The Play of Musement (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).

1984. "The Evolution of Communication and the Origin of Language", published as "Communication, Language, and Speech. Evolutionary Considerations", in Sebeok, I Think I Am A Verb. More Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs (New York: Plenum, 1986), 10-16.

1984a. "Vital Signs", 12 October SSA Presidential Address, The American Journal of Semiotics (1985) 3.3, 1-27.

1986. I Think I Am A Verb. More Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs (New York: Plenum Press (New York: Plenum Press).

1990. "The Sign Science and the Life Science", in "Symbolicity", ed. Jeff Bernard, John Deely, Vilmos Voigt, and Gloria Withalm (bound with Semiotics 1990; Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993), 243-252.

1991. Semiotic Signatures. Semiotic and Inquiry and Method by Thomas A. Sebeok, ed. Iris Smith (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press).

1991a. Semiotics in the United States (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).

1992. "Opening Remarks, July 6, 1992, for the seminar 'Semiotics in the United States' held in Urbino, Italy", Semiotica 147-1/4 (2003), 75-102.

2001. Global Semiotics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).

1977. Thomas A. Sebeok, ed., How Animals Communicate (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).

1978. "Semiotics as a Paradigm for Critical Inquiry: A Report on the First NEH Summer Seminar in Semiotics", Semiotic Scene II.4 (November), 155-159.

1978. Max Fisch, "Peirce's General Theory of Signs", in Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism. Essays by Max H. Fisch, ed. Kenneth L. Ketner and Christian J. W. Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 321-355.

1979. Thomas A. Sebeok, "Prefigurements of Art", Semiotica 27-1/3, 3-73.

1980. Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok, Speaking of Apes: A Critical Anthology of Two-Way Communication with Man (New York: Plenum).

1981. Thomas A. Sebeok and Robert Rosenthal, eds., The Clever Hans Phenomenon: Communication with Horses, Whales, Apes, and People (New York: The New York Academy of Sciences).

1981. Martin Krampen, "Phytosemiotics" Semiotica, 36.3/4, 187-209; reprinted Deely, Williams and Kruse 96-103.

1982. "Jakob von Uexküll's The Theory of Meaning", Special Issue guest-ed. Thure von Uexküll, Smiotica 42-1.

1982. Thure von Uexküll, "Semiotics and the Problem of the Observer", in Semiotics 1982, ed. John Deely and Jonathan Evans (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), 3-25.

1984. Myrdene Anderson, John Deely, Martin Krampen, Joseph Ransdell, Thomas A. Sebeok, and Thure von Uexküll, "A semiotic perspective on the sciences: Steps toward a new paradigm", Semiotica 52-1/2, 7-47.

1987. Petrilli, Susan, interviewer and transcriber, "Da Peirce (via Morris e Jakobson) a Sebeok: I segni di un percorso", interview with Thomas A. Sebeok 21 July 1987 in Urbino, Italy, originally published in Idee 2.5/6, 123-132; later also in English in Sebeok 1991 ed. Smith, 95-105.

1991. John Deely, "Semiotics and Biosemiotics: Are Sign-Science and Life-Science Coextensive?", in Biosemiotics. The Semiotic Web 1991, ed. Thomas Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), 45-75.

1992. "Jakob von Uexküll's A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men Special Issue guest-ed. Thure von Uexküll, Semiotica 89-4.

1993. "Semiotics in the United States and Beyond", Special Issue guest-ed. John Deely and Susan Petrilli, Semiotica 97-3/4.

1994. John Deely, Elements of Anthroposemiosis, or The Human Use of Signs (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield).

1999. "Biosemiotica I" ed. Thomas A. Sebeok with "Biosemiotica II" guest-ed. Jesper Hoffmeyer and Claus Emmeche, Special Issue Semiotica 127-1/4.

2000. Laura Shintani, interviewer and transcriber, "An Interview with Professor Sebeok on Semiotics (October, 1996)", in Sign: aliquid stat pro aliquo (Toronto Student Journal of Semiotic Studies, First Edition, ISSN 1138-160X; University of Toronto: Program in Semiotics and Communication Theory, 2000), 48-57. The transcription rough and incomplete, but a valuable statement.

2001. "Jakob von Uexküll: A paradigm for biology and semiotics", Special Issue guest-ed. Kalevi Kull, Semiotica 134-1/4.

2001. Nõth, Winfried, and Kalevi Kull, eds. German-Italian Colloquium "The Semiotic Threshold from Nature to Culture", published in Sign System Studies 29.1.

2001. Thomas A. Sebeok, The Swiss Pioneer in Nonverbal Communication Studies Heini Hediger (1908-1992) (Ottawa, Canada: Legas).

2001. Thomas A. Sebeok, Susan Petrilli, and Augusto Ponzio, Semiotica dell'io (Rome: Meltemi).

2003. John Deely, "The Word 'Semiotics': Formation and Origins", Semiotica 146-1/4, 1-49.

2003. John Deely and Susan Petrilli, "Editors' afterword: Urbino in Retrospect and American semiotics in Sebeok's perspective", Semiotica 147-1/4, 96-102.

2004. John Deely, "Semiotics and Jakob von Uexküll's Concept of Umwelt", at the opening of the Jakob von Uexküll-Archiv at the University of Hamburg; in Sign System Studies (Estonia).

Umiker-Sebeok, Jean, "Thomas A. Sebeok. A bibliography of his writings", in Semiotica 147-1/4 (2003), 11-73.

Anderson, Myrdene, "Thomas Albert Sebeok (1920-2001)", American Anthropologist 105.1 (March), 228-231.

Bernard, Jeff (2002), "In memoriam Thomas A. Sebeok (9.11.1920-21.12.2001)", Zeitschrift fur Semiotik 24.1, 131-135.

Brier, Søren ed., "Thomas Sebeok and the Biosemiotic Legacy", Special Memorial Issue of Cybernetics and Human Knowing 10.1 (2003).

Corrington, Robert S., A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Csikszentmihalyi, M., Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1996), esp. pp. 373-391.

Danesi, Marcel, ed., The Body in the Sign: Thomas A. Sebeok and Semiotics (Ottawa, Canada: Legas, 1998).

Danesi, Marcel, ed., The Invention of Global Semiotics. A Collection of Essays on the Life and Work of Thomas A. Sebeok (Ottawa, Canada: Legas, 2001), including Frank Neussel, "Thomas A. Sebeok and Semiotics", 51-65; and Susan Petrilli, "Comments on Some Books by Sebeok", 103-113.

Deely, John, Four Ages of Understanding. The first postmodern survey of philosophy from ancient times to the turn of the twenty-first century (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2001).

Hoffmeyer, Jesper, Signs of Meaning in the Universe (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).

Lanigan, Richard, "Sebeok, Thomas Albert", in The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. R. E. Asher (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1994), Vol. 7, 3710-3711.

Petrilli, Susan, and Ponzio, Augusto, Thomas Sebeok and the Signs of Life (Great Britain: Icon Books, 2001).

Petrilli, Susan, and Augusto Ponzio, I segni e la vita. La semiotica globale di Thomas A. Sebeok (Milano, Spirali, 2002).

Tasca, Norma Tasca, ed., Essays in Honor of Thomas A. Sebeok, a Special Issue of Cruzeiro Semiotico Revista Semestral (Porto, Portugal: Fundação Eng. Antonio de Almeida, 1995).