Abstract

Biosemiotics and code biology are two promising approaches to understandingbiological phenomena as meaningful. Biosemiotics proposes that a definingcharacteristic of life is code-duality, while code biology asserts that the nature of lifelies in its code. However, they separated due to differences in their understanding ofcellular-level interpretation, as well as related epistemological and methodologicalconcerns. The split between the two was a great loss for biosemiotics. Meanwhile,code biology faces a conceptual dilemma when explaining the source of the normativityof organic codes without biosemiotics. The critiques of biosemiotics madeby code biologists are reasonable and deserve serious concern. Based on TerrenceDeacon’s thought experiment of autogenesis and his explanation of interpretation,the paper proposes the conception of operational interpretation to reconcile biosemioticswith code biology.