Umwelt (from the German umwelt, "environment") according to Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas A. Sebeok is the "biological foundations that lie at the very epicenter of the study of both communication and signification in the human [and non-human] animal." The term is usually translated as "subjective universe". Uexküll theorized that organisms can have different Umwelts, even though they share the same environment.
Each component of a Umwelt has a meaning which is fuctional for a particular organism. Thus it can be water, food, shelter, potential threats, or points of reference for navigation. An organism creates its own Umwelt when it interacts with the world, and at the same time the organism reshapes it. This is termed a 'functional circle'. The Umwelt theory states that the mind and the world are inseparable, because it is the mind that inteprets the world for the organism.
External link
Umwelt (http://www.ut.ee/SOSE/deely.htm) by John Deely.
Pragmatism and Umwelt-theory (http://www.ento.vt.edu/~sharov/biosem/txt/umwelt.html) by Alexei Sharov.
According to Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas A. Sebeok, Umwelt (the German word Umwelt means "environment" or "surrounding world") is the "biological foundations that lie at the very epicenter of the study of both communication and signification in the human [and non-human] animal." The term is usually translated as "subjective universe".
The Umwelt theory states that the mind and the world are inseparable, because it is the mind that inteprets the world for the organism.
This is termed the 'collective Umwelt' which models the organism as a centralised system from the cellular level upward.
Umwelt is not an ecological niche because niches are assumed to be objective units of an ecosystem which can be quantified using external measuring devices.
Umwelt can be viewed as a language which is used mostly for internal communication within an organism or lineage.
Subjective universe (Umwelt) of an animal consists of things that are useful in their life, e.g., food to consume, shelters to hide, and enemies to fear.
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