Cognitive Semiotics, Issue 4 (Spring 2009), pp. 134–169 Göran Sonesson New Considerations on the Proper Study of Man – and, Marginally, Some Other Animals In order to differentiate the semiotic capacities of animals and human beings we need to understand more exactly what these properties are. Instead of identifying all vehicles of meaning with signs, we certainly have to specify the notion of sign, but it will also be necessary to provide an inventory of other kinds of meaning, starting out from perception, and going through a number of intermediate notions such as affor- dances, markers, and surrogates before reaching signs and sign systems. This essay proposes a phenomenological description of a few kinds of meaning, which is not meant to be exhaustive, but still should give an idea of the complexity of the task. It suggests that not only the setting up of semiotic levels and hierarchies of evolution and development, but even, to some extent, the comparison of the capacities of animals and human beings must go hand in hand with advances in phenomenological observations. CORRESPONDENCE: Göran Sonesson. Department of Semiotics & Centre for Cognitive Semiotics, Lund University, Sweden. EMAIL: goran.sonesson@semiotik.lu.se Introduction All human beings are (at least also) animals. In this sense, they are objects of the study called biosemiotics. In some respects (of which many are as yet rather unspecified), however, human beings are different from other animals. I hesitate to say that, in this sense, human beings are studied by anthroposemiot- ics, because I take the latter term to be a straw-man set up by practitioners of biosemiotics as we know it. 1 Elsewhere, I have claimed that the main interest of semiotics as a discipline consists in enabling the comparing and contrasting of different semiotic resources, instead of splitting up the study of linguistic, pictorial, and other artefacts, as is done in the traditional humanities (Sonesson 1989, etc.). In the same way, we have to posit one single and comprehensive 1 Or as I know it: I do not claim extensive knowledge of any other tradition than that inspired by Jesper Hoffmeyer.