The point of departure in this lecture forms the statement that umwelt is the subjective presence of an organism in reality. Signs cannot be outside of an umwelt. This implies that semiotic research should not be limited to the study of signs; the larger whole, which constitutes the umwelt, must always be included. This is what researchers would call umwelt-based semiotics. Consequently, the relationship between sign, semiosis, and umwelt has to be elaborated more thoroughly. This lecture will argue that in addition to Peircean semiotics, which is based on the concept of sign, and Saussurean semiology, which is based on structure and codes, semiotics can fundamentally be built on Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of umwelt. Moreover, the umwelt-based semiotic studies enable the integration of these rather separate and incompatible semiotic theories but also provide a way for linking them to physiological processes. In the physical world, something is not what the something is not – this follows from the principle of noncontradiction, which is the fundamental assumption used in natural sciences. In the semiotic world, something to be a sign is also something else, i.e., something is what it is not. The latter – 'something is A' and at the same time this 'something is not A' – is a logical contradiction. Therefore, a sign as such is by definition logically paradoxical. So, physics is studying noncontradiction, and semiotics is studying contradiction. The latter is rather Greimasian, however, pointing out that the contradictoriness, or incompatibility, is more fundamental than commonly understood in semiotics (therefore, the term 'natural contradictions', following Frederik Stjernfelt's term 'natural propositions' is postulated for use). Such paradoxicality thus provides the capacity for free (delimited) choice as a basic feature of semiosis.

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