Exploring Life’s Boundaries: Biosemiotics and the Challenge of Defining Life

Abstract This article addresses the challenges of defining life by combining insights from biological and semi-otic perspectives. It explores the lexicographic complexity of defining life, analysing how definitions vary across scientific and philosophical contexts and how these definitions are shaped by cultural and ideological influences. The study highlights the importance of semiosis as a fundamental characteristic of living organisms, positioning biosemiotics as a fundamental framework for understanding life beyond mechanistic models, but also semiotics as a tool for unravelling scientific narratives. Historical and contemporary intentions to define the minimum threshold of complexity for life, highlighting how these efforts have evolved over time and their implications for modern biology. By examining different perspectives on the phenomenon of life and its intermediate forms, the article offers a critical and interdisciplinary approach to understanding life as a semiotic and interpretive process. The fact that an everyday concept of life is richer than the biologic concept of life (in the sense of a greater semantic flexibility and its encompassing character of embracing normative, emotional, sacred, and other aspects of life) may lead us to pose a contra-factual question: Could other notions of life have become basic for biology had it not been developed in the shadow of a hegemony of a mechanicist ideal of science during the 19 th and 20th centuries; i.e., could life have become conceived of as something different from merely complex organizations of material particles and their energetic relations? (Emmeche 1998: 4)