Roundtable: The future of culture in more-than-human worlds of being

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The paper discusses the more-than-human aspects of Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic philosophy, contextualizes it within the history of ideas (Aristotle, the Medievals, Montaigne, Descartes) and examines its syntony with and differences from 21st century trends of cultural and philosophical studies (posthumanism, nonhuman studies, Object-Oriented-Ontology, and the more-than-human paradigm).
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Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo

Peirce’s more-than-human philosophy, its precursors, and its heirs

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Natural sciences paradigms guide this essay’s perspectives. Given the complex-adaptive dynamics of the Earth System, cultures are drivers and prompts of human and natural (sub)systems, respectively. The essay combines geo-philosophical thought and Semiotic Cultural Psychological Theory to depict an ideal-typic narrative of people’s sensemaking culture as an intrinsic part of the Earth System. Generic characteristics of marine operations (e.g., mining at the seabed) illustrate the description. The essay claims that human culture is an attribute of the Earth System, i.e., the nexus that ties human socio-cultural domains and planetary technosphere, biosphere and geosphere, and that more-than-humanness is one of the nexus’ attributes.
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Geo-societal More-than-Humanness

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This essay explores some of the arboreal imaginings that inform analogies between mycorrhizal and technical, or arboreal and human, infrastructural networks. Rather than embrace or dismiss the idea of a wood wide web, I interrogate this intriguing comparison with the help of a variety of natural and human scientists. In so doing I explore how technical, human, arboreal, and mycorrhizal infrastructures are linked by their participation in processes of radical tree mediation.
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(T)RE(E)MEDIATION

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The ambition of this paper is to say that if “cultural science” accepts the need to rethink culture along scientific rather than just critical lines, then at the same time physics must rethink its own commitment to “culture-free” methodology. That has only yielded what we might call “meaningless universe theory,” without addressing ways that physics as a discourse is strongly marked by culture, with the usual signs of gender, race, and hegemony present in its methods. It needs to take responsibility for applications of its discoveries that enter the cultural sphere only to threaten its total annihilation. An alternative to meaninglessness might be to take more seriously the marginalized and derided cultures of everyday thinking, as is attempted by Bogna Konior, and for physics-as-a-discipline to join the effort to reform science. If self-criticism is good for the cultural goose, then it’s good for the scientific gander; and a “cultural science” should say so. Since physics is the most scientific and least cultural of the sciences, this paper uses it as a limit case of knowledge realism. I argue that a science of culture requires reform of the ideology and applications of science as well as new models of culture.
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The physics of meaning: More than inhuman?

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The semiotic realism of the American philosopher and scientist Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) originally emerged out of a systematic critique of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. As such, it does not only offer numerous notions that can be and have been, fruitfully applied to a large variety of cultural phenomena, but it also requires rethinking and reconceiving the concept of culture itself, especially as regards its relation to the concept of nature and its anthropocentric premises and biases. Accordingly, this essay aims to explore how to reconceive culture in a Peircean transcendental framework. I first describe that framework itself, sketching how Peirce’s semiotic realism can be understood as the result of the attempt to realize Kant’s project of a transcendental philosophy more consistently than Kant himself had done. On this basis, I then explore how the relation between culture and nature, and between culture and humanity can be conceived within Peirce’s semiotic paradigm. It is suggested that the relation between culture and nature cannot be sufficiently accounted for in terms of the distinction between symbolic and non-symbolic semiosis, and that various forms of non-human culture, including non-animal and cross-species cultures, are conceivable.
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A Peircean transcendental framework for conceiving human and non-human culture

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Environmental humanities study how human worldviews and culture affect the rest of the nature and our interactions with it. Zoosemiotics provides a unique perspective on human-alloanimal communication and analyzes communication dynamics to address the complexities and competing goals in shared environments, recognizing that human interpretations of alloanimal behavior are often anthropocentric. Understanding alloanimal agency and subjective experiences helps create more respectful and harmonious shared environments. By offering case-studies from zoological gardens and species conservation we hope to guide conservation endeavors, environmental conflict resolution, and more sustainable relationships in the Anthropocene. In examining these shared environments, we also indicate how cultural perceptions and practices influence interspecies interactions, thus emphasizing the interconnectedness of culture and ecology.
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The Role of Zoosemiotic Inquiry in Shared Environments: Interlinking Nature and Culture

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The survival of permissionless blockchains is typically cast as a cryptoeconomic security problem for mechanism designers to resolve. This essay argues that, long-term, these networks may require something that looks more like a UNESCO protection convention for machine culture than an equation. Ethereum’s machine culture is observable through the formation of a “’we’-group” (Hartley &amp; Potts, 2014, p. 76), which is necessary for the establishment of common knowledge. While entry to the group is permissionless, maintaining membership boundaries demands active contributions from validator nodes. The paper discusses concerns that Ethereum’s consensus may be used for purposes beyond itself, making Ethereum vulnerable to external, non-machine political forces. As this begins to manifest, the need to safeguard Ethereum’s intrinsic machine culture becomes apparent—not merely for the sake of the blockchain but to maintain a stable foundation for emerging digital economies and governance structures.
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Machine politics: The cultural science of permissionless systems

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Although the cultures of Indigenous peoples vary greatly, most emphasize two features in their world views. They believe relationships are fundamental and that relationships exist when all conscious entities interact. To establish good relationships, the participants treat each other well and try to understand each other. Because consciousness extends to nonhumans, good relationships require including them. The essay describes six rules that are followed by those who wish to create and maintain good strong relationships, with examples of applying the rules both among humans and among humans and nonhumans. It concludes by briefly describing qualities of good relationships and why these qualities, such as trust and equity, matter. Good relationships support biodiversity and ecosystem productivity.
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How nonhumans are included in relationships

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This article examines the integration of artificial intelligence in music, exploring its potential to redefine traditional creative boundaries and establish a more-than-human co-creativity. It discusses theoretical frameworks by Margret Boden, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour, presenting AI not just as a tool, but as an active creative participant. The paper addresses ethical concerns about AI's role in music, including authorship and copyright, advocating for a reevaluation of musicological frameworks to accommodate the evolving collaborative landscape of human and machine creativity.
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AI Composers and Cyborg Performers: More-than-human Creativity in Music

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Cultural Science

A hallmark of human civilization has been to see ‘culture’ as a defining feature of humanity, epitomized in approaching the ‘humanities’ as the study of culture. Cultural Science: A multidisciplinary journal for the study of more-than-human culture radically breaks with this tradition and extends the domain of the study of culture beyond the human, both in the dimensions of multi-species and machine culture, and by considering all forms of cultural hybridization in a more-than human world. ‘Cultural Science’ investigates structures, interactions, and processes of cultural systems at all levels of analysis and scales of application. It approaches culture as a semiotic medium integrating creative processes in the biosphere, anthroposphere and technosphere as constitutive layers in the life of planet Earth.  ‘Cultural Science’ promotes inter- and transdisciplinary methodological pluralism, reaching from the classical sciences such as biology or ecology to established approaches in the social sciences and the humanities and beyond, venturing into posthumanist alternatives that investigate more-than-human forms of cultural creativity, diffusion, and tradition. ‘Cultural science’ endorses theoretical innovations that stand in line with coevolutionary theories bridging the natural and the human sciences and with novel views on agency and materiality that pursue ontological unification of human and non-human domains of meaning. It encourages active dialogue with science and technology studies, evolutionary and institutional economics, cultural evolution studies, biosemiotics, complexity science, or network analysis, specifying the ‘uses of culture’ from personal meanings to planetary platforms and systems of meaning. In doing so, we assign a crucial role to culture as medium of more-than-human action meeting the existential challenges of the Anthropocene.  ‘Cultural Science’ looks forward to publishing new work that may be critical, analytical and/or empirical, but is most often dialogical; interested in the production and translation of new ideas and knowledge, especially across perceived and disputed borders between systems, groups, and identities as well as academic disciplines.  Contributions to the journal transcend specialist topical foci while remaining on the firm ground of the respective disciplinary methodologies. Exemplary topical fields include:    The study of non-human cultures in the biosphere and the role of naturecultures in the interactions between humans and non-humans;  The role of digital media in the emergence of naturecultures; Explorations of human cultural creativity mediating biosphere and technosphere. Investigations into the emerging forms of cultural creativity of Artificial Intelligence.  Research on interspecies media of cultural expression, such as interspecies art and play.  New theoretical approaches to coevolution and cocreation of cultural media in the more-than-human world.    Journal history  Cultural Science Journal was launched in 2008 as part of the research program of the ARC (Australian Research Council) Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, and John Hartley’s ARC Federation Fellowship. It published 14 issues between 2008 and 2016, before transferring to Ubiquity Press where it continued until 2021. In 2021, the journal moved on to a new home at the Cultural Data Analytics Open Lab (CUDAN) Tallinn University, Estonia. The editors-in-chief were Indrek Ibrus and Maximilian Schich. The journal is now published on the Sciendo platform, a subsidiary of De Gruyter. In 2023, the journal moved on to its third transformation, while remaining on the Sciendo platform, with new editor-in-chief Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, and a second editorial office at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at Erfurt University, Germany, working in tandem with the Tallinn offfice.  Building on the work of Raymond Williams, ‘Cultural Science 2.0’, as it was framed by founding editor John Hartley, sought advances not only in the micro-contexts of culture, but also in systematic and general processes and the mutually conditioning relationships of micro, meso and macro contexts. Hartley and colleagues (Jason Potts, Lucy Montgomery, Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, Paul Ormerod and others) launched an effort aimed at conceptualising and studying such relationships systematically. The journal worked towards transdisciplinary frameworks linking the study of culture with evolutionary and institutional economics, complexity science and other evolutionary approaches to creative change.  This work has been pathbreaking, feeding into new approaches and further studies into evolutionary processes in media markets and cultural industries internationally (emergent fields of media innovation studies, cross-innovation systems, open publishing and so on). At the same time, parallel approaches have emerged linking the study of culture with other disciplines especially evolutionary biosciences, but also mathematics, physics, data science and network science, etc., resulting in novel and epoch making approaches such as cultural analytics, cultural evolution studies, computational humanities and social science, etc. ‘Cultural Science’, it can be argued, is evolving into an intensely dialogic, multidisciplinary and an ‘explosively’ (to use a Juri Lotman’s term) evolving domain.With the third transformation, Cultural Science 3.0, the journal further expands its reach, redefining and co-creating cultural science in the Anthropocene, embracing cutting edge developments in the posthumanist movement, while keeping its roots in emphasising the coevolutionary systems-based approach to culture explored since 2008.In this dynamically developing context, Cultural Science: A multidisciplinary journal for the study of more-than human culture wants to provide an arena where the relevant dialogues are held, where centuries of humanities-based knowledge on culture’s forms, languages and systems of meaning can meet the most contemporary scientific methods, where new questions are asked, where novel conceptualisations can meet or emerge from rigorous empirical or analytical work.　  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 