Human sense and plant blindness

Abstract

Victoria Welby introduces the concept of “Significs” as a methodology that could bridge the various sciences, theoretical trends, and practices in human experience. “Sense”, “meaning”, and “significance” are the three terms in her most important meaning triad. The first level of meaning, ‘sense’ refers to the generation of meaning processes in terms of organic life and perception. Welby hypothesizes that the organic dimension of sense and its human dimension are closely intertwined. She theorized the need for “plastic language” in a biological sense, which she equated with pragmatic, ethic and aesthetic sense: the relation between word and context could be similar to the one between the organism and its environment. The plastic dimension of verbal language and signs in general is necessary for adaptation, development, and expressivity. A century later Elisabeth Schussler and James Wandersee introduce the concept of “plant blindness” which is a human tendency to ignore, in all “senses”, plant species. Plants are different in all aspects from animals: they are not even considered “individuals”. In the etymological sense “individual” means “not divisible”. Plants are “morphologically” divisible. In this presentation I intend to compare these two concepts and analyse their consequences.

Keywords

• ideology
• nomination
• plastic knowledge
• social reproduction
• translation