The Immune Self, the Sign,
and the Testes
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ABSTRACT
The immune self is one of the main organizing concepts in immunology. However, it is not quite clear what the immune self is and heated debates are taken place among immunologists concerning the usefulness and the meaning of this concept. In this paper, I argue that the problem of the immune self is analogous to the problem of finding the meanings of the sign in semiotics. Following this suggestion, I would like to present the idea that the immune system is a meaning-making system (Neuman 2004) and in this context to provide a novel conceptualization of the immune self that integrates several ideas from immunology and semiotics.