Signs, forms, and models: Thomas A. Sebeok’s enduring legacy for semiotics

Abstract

Abstract Thomas A. Sebeok has left semiotics a comprehensive theoretical apparatus for studying semiosis across species and across systems (biological and artificial). Uniting the notions of form, sign, and model into an integrative purview of meaning-making, known as modeling systems theory, Sebeok has provided a conceptual and terminological apparatus for studying all forms of meaning in terms of the fundamental “standing-for principle” that undergirds all semiotic theories. This essay revisits the Sebeokian perspective, delineating its main components in a retrospective way, highlighting its value not only to semiotics but to computer science as well. Above all else, Sebeok has made it possible concretely to establish specific interconnections between semiotics and cognate disciplines in ways that are relatively free of terminological complexities and ambiguities which have beset semiotics in the past.