Donald Favareau

Donald Favareau graduated from UCLA with a PhD in Applied Linguistics with an emphasis on both Interaction Studies and the Neurobiology of Language, and a BA and an MA, both also from UCLA, in Philosophy of Mind. He is the author and editor of Essential Readings in Biosemiotics: Anthology and Commentary (2010), A More Developed Sign: Interpreting the Work of Jesper Hoffmeyer (2016), and Co-operative Engagements in Intertwined Semiosis: Essays in Honour of Charles Goodwin (2018). He also edited and co-translated Jesper Hoffmeyer’s seminal volume entitled Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs (2005), and his own writings have appeared in Semiotica, Biosemiotics, Sign Systems Studies, Philosophy, The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Issues in Applied Linguistics and Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, as well as a number of edited volumes on Biosemiotics.

Seeking to join the insights and concepts of embodied, distributed, and mutually-constructed, moment-to-moment joint cognition with the analyses of pre-linguistic, organismic meaning-making that is the central purview of Biosemiotics, Favareau has been central member of the Biosemiotics community since its first international conference in 2001, and is the subject of the 2017 festschrift Biosemiotics in the Community: Essays in Honour of Donald Favareau.

He is also a dedicated teacher and developer of a number of highly regarded interdisciplinary courses at the National University of Singapore’s University Scholars Programme, including Multidisciplinary Perspectives on ‘Mind’, Biosemiotics: Signs in Nature and The Doors of Perception: Biology, Technology and Culture, and is currently working on the creation of feature-length video documentary that will not only detail the history of the interdisciplinary research agenda of Biosemiotics, but that will, in so doing, also provide newcomers with an understanding of both the history and the concepts that inform that field.

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"As the capture of ongoing agent-object-action relationships, both evolutionarily and ontogenetically, become instantiated as biological signs for the guidance of the organism , not only are successful survival strategies within a given possibility space captured (as in traditional accounts of Natural Selection), but captured as well within those signs are access to the entire complement of previously untaken but still veridical real-world possibility spaces that are inseparably ‘entangled’ with that sign, and just awaiting exploration by the organism. The emergence of ever-more complex semiotic capabilities in organisms has thus expanded the possibility space of immediate-next-action in the world exponentially, and has brought into being not a pre-given, physically deterministic world, but an emergent, many ends-directed bio-world of promiscuous, unforeseeable, and interacting telos. The goal of Biosemiotics is to understand and to explore this world."

(Creation of the Relevant Next: How living systems capture the power of the adjacent possible through sign use. Journal of Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 119 (3): 588-601.)

Essential Readings in Biosemiotics: Anthology and Commentary.

Synthesizing the findings from a wide range of disciplines – from biology and anthropology to philosophy and linguistics – the emerging field of Biosemiotics explores the highly complex phenomenon of sign processing in living systems. Seeking to advance a naturalistic understanding of the evolution and development of sign-dependent life processes, contemporary biosemiotic theory offers important new conceptual tools for the scientific understanding of mind and meaning, for the development of artificial intelligence, and for the ongoing research into the rich diversity of non-verbal human, animal and biological communication processes. Donald Favareau’s Essential Readings in Biosemiotics has been designed as a single-source overview of the major works informing this new interdiscipline, and provides scholarly historical and analytical commentary on each of the texts presented.

The first such anthology of its kind, this book constitutes a valuable resource to both biologists and to semioticians interested in this emerging new discipline, and can function as a primary textbook for students in biosemiotics, as well. Moreover, because of the field’s inherently interdisciplinary nature and its focus on the ‘big questions’ of cognition, meaning and evolutionary biology, this volume should be of interest to anyone working in the fields of cognitive science, theoretical biology, philosophy of mind, evolutionary psychology, communication studies or the history and philosophy of science.
Co-operative Engagements in Intertwined Semiosis: Essays in Honour of Charles Goodwin

Charles Goodwin’s pioneering work has re-shaped the field of human interaction studies and has shed light on a pervasive form of social action that he calls intertwined semiosis. Defined as the act of laminating different kinds of semiotic materials, contributed by different actors, into local arrangements for the building of conjoint action, Intertwined Semiosis, Goodwin maintains, is the distinctive form of human sociality and cognition. Moreover, in the course of making his extremely detailed and astute investigations into what human sign users are doing as they make meaning with one another in real time, Goodwin’s extraordinary eye as a naturalist and mind of an anthropologist have allowed him to unearth for us the essence of the distributed, embodied and multi-modal practices of intertwined semiosis that are central to the human calibration of experience and knowledge in both every-day and institutional settings. His dynamic view on linguistic, embodied, and material resources has been shown to hold not only for co-present interaction - i.e., within the situated hic et nunc of talk as it emerges moment-by-moment - but also for historically linked chains of actions across contexts, generations, historical moments and even species.

Goodwin’s work thus constitutes a fundamental contribution to the study of human ways of knowing, acting and being, and has inspired not only at least two generations of interaction scholars, but also linguists, cognitive scientists, semioticians, anthropologists, and philosophers. Accordingly, one finds in this volume a wide-ranging assortment of reflections and analyses, each of which constitutes a deeply-felt testament and tribute to Charles Goodwin’s extraordinary ideas, career, personality and life, and together forming the most comprehensive single-volume assessment to date of his outstandingly original and profound oeuvre in the analysis of meaning-making.
A More Developed Sign: Interpreting the Work of Jesper Hoffmeyer

“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” (Emmeche, Kull, and Stjernfelt 2002: 41).

In this volume, over 80 world-class scholars from more than 20 countries select a short quotation taken from one of Jesper Hoffmeyer’s texts and provide their scholarly commentary upon that passage - whether in the form of an analytical explication, a critical disagreement or a conceptual extension – in a way that they feel asks the questions that need to be asked, proposes the ideas that need to be proposed, and/or that draws out the implications that need to be so explicitly drawn out, germane to the claims of the selected passage. At once a celebration and a serious academic development of the work of Jesper Hoffmeyer, this landmark volume marked the occasion of his 70th birthday on February 21, 2012, and is available as a free download here: http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=419651

Selected Publication

Creation of the Relevant Next: How living systems capture the power of the adjacent possible through sign use. (2015). Journal of Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 119 (3): 588-601.

Symbols are grounded not in things, but in scaffolded relations and their semiotic constraints. (2015) Biosemiotics 8 (2): 235-255.

Why this now? The conceptual and historical rationale behind the development of biosemiotics. (2015) Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 19.3: 227-242.

Collapsing the wave function of meaning: The epistemological matrix of talk in interaction. In A Legacy of Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as a Precursor to Biosemiotics. (2008). Hoffmeyer, J. (Ed.) Dordrecht: Springer-Verlag, pp. 169-212.

Favareau, D. (2007). How to make Peirce’s ideas clear. In Biosemiotics in Transdisciplinary Contexts. Witzany, G. (Ed.) Helsinki: Umweb Press. pp. 163-173.

The evolutionary history of biosemiotics. In Introduction to Biosemiotics: The New Biological Synthesis. . (2006). Barbieri, M. (Ed.) Dordrecht: Springer. pp 1-67.
Complete list of publications

For complete list of publications, click here.

University Scholars Programme; National University of Singapore

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Books

Essential Readings in Biosemiotics: Anthology and Commentary.

Co-operative Engagements in Intertwined Semiosis: Essays in Honour of Charles Goodwin

A More Developed Sign: Interpreting the Work of Jesper Hoffmeyer

Publications

Selected Publication

Complete list of publications

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