[Fis] "The Travellers"

Thu Oct 30 15:59:30 CET 2014

Dear Pedro, Dear Sören,

Please let me call the attention of both of you to Sören's article in 
Biosemiotics of 24 May 2012 "What Does it Take to Produce Interpretation? 
Informational, Peircean and Code-Semiotic Views on Biosemiotics". Judging 
from the abstract, this article criticizes at least some points in "Peircean 
pragmaticist semiotic theory based on simulataneous types of evolution".

It is this balance - that one cannot accept the precepts of Peircean 
semiotics automatically as science - that has been missing in the 
discussion. Thus Stjernfelt's book, /Natural Propositions/ while showing the 
movement of Peirce's thought toward greater realism, confirms over and over 
that it is a "narrow window of proposition and argument" involving a 
fundamental reliance on propositional truth in reasoning. I for one cannot 
see that it "enables us to attain idealized and general objectives in ... 
arts, science, politics. technology and other large human endeavors."

Stjernfelt sees propositions throughout nature, not only in language, but he 
then subjects them to the reductionist framework of a Peircean logic still 
based on a binary, linguistic truth-functionality confirmed by mathematics. 
I would like to suggest that what Pedro may be calling for is something like 
an /inverse semiotics/, based on theories of information which reflect the 
dynamics of existence, in which the primary truth is the truth of reality, 
and secondarily that of signs which can be captured in propositions.

Thanks to all,

Joseph

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Pedro C. Marijuan" <pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>
To: <fis at listas.unizar.es>
Cc: "Søren Brier" <sb.ibc at cbs.dk>
Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2014 2:28 PM
Subject: Re: [Fis] "The Travellers"

> Dear FIS colleagues,
>
> I am responding to a mail from Soeren (below) that, curiously, was 
> retained by the list filter. Sorry, but some parts of his message are 
> written in a rather arrogant tone that does not match the unconditionally 
> polite style of our exchanges. This is a pluralistic list and quite 
> different positions may be defended, always within appropriate scholarly 
> bounds.
>
> First, my comment on semiotics was as it was --not with the exaggeration 
> introduced by Soeren. Looking in positive, it is interesting that in the 
> 80's I also started a PhD thesis on the parallel evolution of neuroanatomy 
> and behavior, with a pretty strong ethological content, but stopped it as 
> I could not converge to any relevant outcome. Instead I moved downwards, 
> and started the informational study of the cell and the evolution of 
> biological information processing... Later on the approach pleased Michel 
> Conrad, and the rest is part of fis history.
>
> About my "physicalist" conception of signaling and biological information, 
> I think the two recent papers in BioSystems ("On prokaryotic 
> Intelligence..." and "On eukaryotic Intelligence...") represent an 
> original view that can enrich the current system biology debates on 
> signaling bases of intelligence--or not!, people will tell. To keep the 
> explanation short, the way cellular life has channeled the energy flow 
> (eg, Morowitz, 1968) versus the channeling of the "information flow" 
> contains lessons for the further deployment of biological and social 
> complexity. In particular, the cellular processual distinction between 
> "metabolite" and "signal" looks fascinating, in human terms it is like 
> reading the newspaper vs, eating a sandwich (it can be found in my recent 
> paper of fis-Moscow, journal Information)...  Not far from these views, 
> engineer Adrian Bejan (2012) has recently proposed a "constructal law" 
> based on the circulation needs of the energy flow in nature and 
> society--could we devise a parallel or complementary scheme for the 
> information flow? Actually Bejan's attempt covers it but rather poorly, at 
> least compared with the depth of the energetic part.
>
> In part, I am frustrated that we have been living the most momentous 
> changes in the social history of information and at fis have been able to 
> say very little about. Rather than struggling to achieve the true, 
> monolithic, universal theory of information, shouldn't we aspire to frame 
> a convivial multi-disciplinary space where plenty of both APPLIED and 
> theoretical research on informational entities can be developed and 
> cross-fertilize?
>
> And this is my Second of the week.
> Best regards
>
> ---Pedro
>
> Søren Brier wrote:
>> Dear Pedro
>>
>> This is a wonderful mail revealing all sorts of theoretical views and 
>> philosophy of science prejudices. This one takes the price:  " Semiotics 
>> could be OK for the previous generation--something attuned to our 
>> scientific times is needed now." The conclusion is that semiotics is not 
>> something new and advanced but old-fashioned and outdated !!! The 
>> Peircean biosemioticians are fooling themselves ! They are not 
>> scientific.
>>
>> This is a crucial discussion that many of us have with Marcello Barbieri 
>> on a somewhat different theoretical platform. But he is wonderfully clear 
>> and explicit in his argumentation and always attempting to produce new 
>> alternative models and theories, not just arguing from the status quo of 
>> science.
>> I wonder how deep your own understanding of semiotics actually is - 
>> especially Peircean semiotics. Peirce is very naturalistic.   Your other 
>> price remark arouse this suspicion " of course, later on Tinbergen, 
>> Lorenz, Eibl-Eibelsfeldt, etc. were to develop ad hoc theoretical 
>> schemes". As one having written a master dissertation in Lorenz 
>> theoretical development of the ethological paradigm over a period of 30 
>> years and lecturing at the Konrad Lorenz institute and researched in 
>> comparative psychology for three years after that, I must say that your 
>> knowledge of this area of research is very weak. I have used some of the 
>> results of this  analysis in my book "Cybersemiotics: Why information is 
>> not enough". Which you probably have not bothered to read as you deemed 
>> it outdated in its birth and unscientific.
>>
>> I also wonder what the theoretical framework is for the concept of 
>> "signal". Is it objective information transfer in a Shannon or a Wiener 
>> framework? Does it include any  first person experiential  aspects and 
>> any social meaning aspects? Or is it  - as I  suspect - a pure 
>> physicalistic approach used for explaining processes on the biological, 
>> the psychological and the social level as well, but ignoring the special 
>> qualities of those compared to the physical level?
>>
>>                Best  Søren
>>
>> -----Oprindelig meddelelse-----
>> Fra: Fis [mailto:fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es] På vegne af Pedro C. 
>> Marijuan
>> Sendt: 29. oktober 2014 14:46
>> Til: fis at listas.unizar.es
>> Emne: Re: [Fis] "The Travellers"
>>
>> Dear FIS colleagues,
>>
>> Quite interesting exchanges, really. The discussion reminds me the times 
>> when behaviorism and ethology were at odds on how to focus the study of 
>> human/animal behavior. (Maybe I already talked about that some months
>> ago.) On the one side, a rigorous theory and a strongly reductionist 
>> point of view were advanced --about learning, conditioned & unconditioned 
>> stimuli, responses, observation standards, laboratory exclusive scenario, 
>> etc. On the other side, it was observing behavior in nature, approaching 
>> without preconceptions and tentatively characterizing the situations and 
>> results; it was the naturalistic strategy, apprehending from nature 
>> before forming any theoretical scheme (of course, later on Tinbergen, 
>> Lorenz, Eibl-Eibestfeldt, etc. were to develop ad hoc theoretical 
>> schemes).
>>
>> How can we develop a theory on signals without the previous naturalistic 
>> approach to the involved phenomena? Particularly when the panorama has 
>> dramatically changed after the information-biomolecular revolution. We 
>> have a rich background of cellular signaling systems, both prokaryotic 
>> and eukaryotic, to explore and cohere. We have important neuroscientific 
>> ideas (although not so well developed). We have social physics and social 
>> networks approaches to the social dynamics of information. We should 
>> travel to all of those camps, not to stay there, but to advance a soft 
>> all-encompassing perspective, later on to be confronted with the new 
>> ideas from physics too. The intertwining between self-production and 
>> communication is a promising general aspect to explore, in my opinion... 
>> socially and biologically it makes a lot of sense.
>>
>> Semiotics could be OK for the previous generation--something attuned to 
>> our scientific times is needed now.
>>
>> best ---Pedro
>>
>>
> -- 
> -------------------------------------------------
> Pedro C. Marijuán
> Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
> Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
> Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
> Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X
> 50009 Zaragoza, Spain
> Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
> pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
> http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
> -------------------------------------------------
>
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