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Recent efforts to go beyond gross domestic product as a measure of economic performance raise important questions about the nature of the economy, including: what is the best measure of a sound, flourishing economy, and what is the purpose of ‘doing well’ in economic terms? One possible measure of the soundness of an economy is the extent to which it results in better lives for humans – a thought that has inspired measures such as the Human Development Index, among others. In the bigger picture, a sound, flourishing economy should also be consistent with good, and perhaps optimal, lives for non-humans, and well-functioning ecosystems. On this measure, economics should not be an altogether anthropocentric enterprise. To go beyond anthropocentric notions of economic performance, a degree of integration between economics, philosophy and biology is required, with Umwelt theory and biosemiotics indicating a way forward. A merely economic outlook can easily lead to the commodification of each and every organism and natural resource, thus neglecting the agency, interests and intrinsic value of animals and other non-humans. To truly ‘serve all’ in an Anthropocene-era world, where the living conditions of practically all organisms on the planet are affected by human economic activities, economists need to acknowledge that there are economic stakeholders beyond humans. This would make economics more compatible with current outlooks in normative ethics with regard to the value of animals, biodiversity, etc., and could be part of a radical reconceptualization of the nature of the economy, in which economic value is situated within value theory in a wider sense.

Anger responding to government-imposed COVID-19 pandemic mandates is examined in relation to 2021 international reports of street protests in cities, with a focus on Perth, Western Australia. Angry protestors displayed a variety of signs and symbols, united under banners demanding freedom. A multi-disciplinary analysis attends to distrust in public health mandates in the global context of an insecure biosphere. Mandates can signify symbolic death, and anger an ‘immune’ response to lifeworld constraints. Anger among nurses and vaccine-hesitant protestors signifies ethical rejection of super-imposed mandates, and fear of alleged vaccine harms. Official pandemic communications are held to be ill-timed, lacking information meaningful to diverse citizens' needs, and offset by poorly contextualised data and unreliable pre-packaged interpretations communicated via digital technologies. A novel hypothesis proposes semiotic misrecognition of the global nature of communications from intersecting ecosocial crises may underlie protestors' anger. Modelling of a management system to validate broad contextual knowledges may restore meaningful balance and public solidarity, to creatively respond to future human crises.

This paper reviews research developments in semiosis (sign activity) as theorized by Peirce, Eco and Sebeok, focusing specifically on the current study of “semiotic threshold zones,” which range from the origins of life through various nonhuman life forms to artificial life forms, including those symbolic thresholds most familiar to library and information science (LIS) researchers. The intent is to illustrate potential opportunities for LIS research beyond its present boundaries.

The paper provides a framework that describes six semiotic threshold zones (presemiotic, protosemiotic, phytosemiotic, zoosemiotic, symbolic and polysemiotic) and notable work being done by researchers in each.

While semiotic researchers are still defining the continuum of semiotic thresholds, this focus on thresholds can provide a unifying framework for significance as human and nonhuman interpretations of a wide variety of signs accompanied by a better understanding of their relationships becomes more urgent in a rapidly changing global environment.

Though a variety of semiotic-related topics have appeared in the LIS literature, semiotic thresholds and their potential relationships to LIS research have not been previously discussed there. LIS has traditionally tasked itself with the recording, dissemination and preservation of knowledge, and in a world that faces unprecedented environmental and global challenges for all species, the importance of these thresholds may well be considered as part of our professional obligations in potentially documenting and archiving the critical differences in semiosis that extend beyond purely human knowledge.

The purpose of this theoretical research paper in philosophy and theory of science is to argue for the necessity of developing transdisciplinary frameworks in order to be able to interact in an interdisciplinary fashion.

Reflects on interdisciplinarity and the prerequisites of doing scientific and scholarly research and develops a non‐reductionistic and transdisciplinary view on human knowing in the light of the growing development of interdisciplinary practices and sciences.

It is argued that there is at present an incompatibility between scientific and phenomenological approaches to cognition and communication. A broader framework is, therefore, needed to encompass both, if one wants to make coherent theories and models in this subject area. The work, therefore, focuses on the relation between information science and semiotics and creates a framework for the analysis of both meaning and truth.

The framework is very abstract here in the description. It has to be developed in detail and its effect demonstrated in practical examples.

They have to be judged both on how well their descriptions fit better than others with what actually goes on in the sciences and humanities and on their usefulness to function as a common map coordinating interdisciplinary work.

A trans‐scientific framework, which is suggested as a basis for the sciences and humanities to understand themselves in relation to other kinds of knowledge such as philosophy, art, religion, political ideology, etc. New also are the visual structural models.

The purpose of this paper is to bring the concept of a “hierarchy of action”, as it is currently being used in other fields, into library and information science (LIS).

Hierarchy theory is adopted to describe three hierarchies of action, which include the human processes of semantic and social innovation, as well as a system of biological interpretence, from which human processes are thought to have evolved as a development of biosemiosis in nature. By way of example, it is argued that a text is a complex achievement, and hierarchy theory shows how to account for this complexity; the everyday definition of “text” is augmented with accounts from different levels of observation.

The concept of a hierarchy of action enables a person to account for a text as a meaning/symbolic product; include in that account the processes whereby texts are produced and used; and say why these processes are important to the health of the biosphere that is called home.

“Hierarchy of action” has been developed as a concept in biology and ecology; it belongs to a way of thinking whereby human reality, like nature, is construed as dynamical processes operating in symbiotic relationship with each other; it has not yet been adopted in LIS with reference to hierarchy theory and its potential is yet to be explored.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a transdisciplinary understanding of the nature of information.

The work draws from previous work done on information in several disciplines and contexts, and proposes a new framework for describing and understanding information. It applies the framework to several different situations involving information, explores the insights revealed by the use of the framework and discusses some of the implications.

Information is usefully described as a situated event that extracts or generates meaning, with the distinction between extracting or generating meaning corresponding to the distinction between semantic and environmental information. A diagrammatic convention based on communications theory and making use of hierarchies of levels is found to provide a powerful means of conveying many of the aspects of the nature of information, and of understanding the role of information in a wide range of applications. An additional specific finding of the work is that information is inherently provisional.

The diagrammatic framework is a new way of presenting, describing and understanding information, and the suggestion that information is inherently provisional is believed to be new.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss Stockhausen's comment that the destruction of the twin towers in New York in September 11, 2001 was “the greatest work of art that ever existed” – a comment that raises crucial questions about the relationship between art and politics, art and ethics, also on the very concept of “artwork”.

Focus on art as a system of communication according to a sociocybernetic approach.

The paper argues that Stockhausen's concept of artwork, which radicalizes the “organic metaphor”, culminates by 1950 in the ideal of a self-produced work of music (very similar avant la lettre to the concept of autopoiesis). Although produced by human labour, the artwork should emerge and act as if it was self-produced. Such reification of art has its counterpart in the Western hegemonic paradigm of artistic communication, which also aims, by means of illusionist devices, to conceal the production process that gives rise to the artwork. Both forms of aestheticism could be described in terms of “phantasmagoria” (similarly to Marx's commodity fetishism).

By discussing critical alternatives to aestheticism, the paper characterizes them as an attempt, from within autonomous art, to operate the re-entry into the system of communication of the distinction art/life-world. Autonomous art becomes in this way self-critical of its own autonomy.