Reviving the Living

Yair Neuman takes a semiotic view of biological processes and argues that meaning, which is inevitably contextual, emerges in evolution and development (especially of the immune system) by something that is rather like a conversation. He criticizes reductionist approaches to biology on the grounds that the action goes on at more than one level in a hierarchy. He also grapples with such problems as whether an organism in a state of cryptobiosis is dead or alive. The argument might be strengthened and simplified by recognizing that life is largely structured as whole-part hierarchies, in which the participants are (concrete) ontological individuals, rather than sets or (abstract) classes. The entities ranked at such levels engage in different processes. There is need for a better understanding of dispositional properties.