ABSTRACT
The undifferentiated organic sense response at the animal level, or the more broadly biological level, is at the basis of the development of signifying processes, of sense and value characteristic of the symbolic order in the human world. Victoria Welby thematizes the condition of uninterrupted continuity, of interconnectivity across the organic and the symbolic orders, and the need to recognize such interconnectivity for an adequate understanding of human behavior. The whole animal “kingdom” shares the sense-world: the advent of the sense of meaning — the highest kind of sense — marks a new departure: it opens the distinctively human era. Welby works on a general theory of meaning, though her main interest is in verbal language specific to communication in the human world. Moreover, generative and functional similarities between human and nonhuman signifying behavior, between language and signifying phenomena in the organic-biological world at large, among the different spheres of sense are described as homological similarities more than analogical.
