[Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 32, Issue 13

[Bob Logan]

Dear FISers - I enjoyed Jose’s distinction of meaning and sense making. Employing McLuhan’s notion of figure and ground in which one can only understand a figure in terms of the ground in which it operates, I would therefore say that meaning is figure and sense-making is the ground in which the full significance of the meaning emerges. The same information with identical meanings can have very different significances to two different recipients of that information. Put another way in terms of a McLuhan one-liner "the user is the content".

I hope you got the meaning and the significance of my remark - best wishes - Bob

______________________

Robert K. Logan
Prof. Emeritus - Physics - U. of Toronto 
Fellow University of St. Michael's College
Chief Scientist - sLab at OCAD
http://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertKLogan
www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan
www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Logan5/publications










On Nov 13, 2016, at 10:26 PM, Jose Javier Blanco Rivero <javierweiss at gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Malcolm,

I think that is useful to distinguish between sense-making (Sinn in german, sentido in spanish) and meaning (Bedeutung, significado). Meaning is linguistic, while sense-making mixes linguistic and non linguistic dimensions. For the social sciences, like intellectual history, this distinction helps to clear further the difference between semantics (a field of meaning) and social structure (communicative information processing structures, like condes and communication media -in Luhmanns terms). 
I am aware that maybe in physics this might not be quite convincing...

Best,

El nov 12, 2016 4:43 PM, "Malcolm Dean" <malcolmdean at gmail.com <mailto:malcolmdean at gmail.com>> escribió:
To an animal about to be attacked and eaten, the meaning of an approaching predator is quite clear.

Obviously, meaning is produced by, within, and among Observers, and not by language.

Meaning may be produced *through* language, not *in* language, as a medium of interaction (aka communication).

I wish scientific specialists had more awareness of the effects of their specialization.

Malcolm Dean

 
Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2016 20:29:21 +0100
From: "Loet Leydesdorff" <loet at leydesdorff.net <mailto:loet at leydesdorff.net>>
To: "'Alex Hankey'" <alexhankey at gmail.com <mailto:alexhankey at gmail.com>>, "'FIS Webinar'"
        <Fis at listas.unizar.es <mailto:Fis at listas.unizar.es>>
Subject: Re: [Fis] Is quantum information the basis of spacetime?

Dear Alex and colleagues,

Thank you for the reference; but my argument was about meaning. Meaning can only be considered as constructed in language. Other uses of the word are metaphorical. For example, the citation to Maturana.

Information, in my opinion, can be defined content-free (a la Shannon, etc.) and then be provided with meaning in (scholarly) discourses. I consider physics as one among other scholarly discourses. Specific about physics is perhaps the universalistic character of the knowledge claims. For example: "Frieden's points apply to quantum physics as well as classical physics." So what? This seems to me a debate within physics without much relevance for non-physicists (e.g., economists or linguists).
 
Loet Leydesdorff
Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)

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