Life as a Web of Meanings: An Ontosemiotic Approach to Theoretical Biology

The persistent difficulty of defining life through a unified set of properties suggests that the problem is not merely empirical but fundamentally conceptual: it concerns how the concept of life acquires meaning across heterogeneous scientific contexts. This article argues that the plurality of approaches to living systems—from physical–chemical and systems biology to biosemiotics and astrobiology—should be understood not as theoretical fragmentation but as a constitutive plurality of meanings inherent in the concept of life itself. To analyze this plurality, the article adopts the ontosemiotic approach (OSA)—an epistemological framework, recently extended to any activity system in which knowledge is produced—and applies it through a three-level model: context, problems, and practices; the objects that intervene in those practices; and epistemic dualities with their structural tensions. Ten contexts of scientific practice are characterized as ontosemiotic configurations, each contributing a partial meaning of life, and the physical–chemical configuration is developed in full across the three levels as an illustrative case, showing that even this apparently reductive approach is stabilized through semiotic processes. Two constructs carry the integrating work: the distinction between structural epistemic tensions and the semiotic and ontological conflicts they generate, and the holomeaning—the articulated system of partial meanings whose unity lies in the relations among its configurations rather than in a shared essence. This perspective supports a structured ontological pluralism that avoids both reductionism and unstructured relativism, and it clarifies why attempts to legislate a single definition of life recurrently fail.