In strict opposition to the prevailing positivist conception of nature

as senseless and deprived of meaning Jakob von Uexküll claimed that a

certain planmässigkeit was operative in nature. This idea however might be

taken to mean that organic evolution is not itself a creative process but a

gradual, if majestic, unfolding of Nature's own master plan. Such an idea

would threaten to restore determinism in the center of biological theory, and

this would seriously contradict the vision of biosemiotics shared by most of its

proponents. It lies at the heart of biosemiotics and of Peircean cosmological

philosophy that indeterminacy is primary, that "habit taking" or interpretation

are real processes in the world, and therefore that belief in the law of necessity

is unfounded. It is suggested that Uexküllian planmässigkeit is in fact reconcilable

with a modern non-deterministic understanding. In a certain sense

the Umwelten of animals have indeed developed in accordance to a natural

planmässigkeit, but this is a plan that incessantly traps life in certain strategic

, but this is a plan that incessantly traps life in certain strategic

choices and in the same time diversifies the dimensionality of options for

dealing with these choices, i. e. "the adjacent possible" in the terms of Stuart

Kauffman.