[Fis] Data - Reflection - Information

[Mark Johnson]

Dear Loet, 

When you say "distinguishing between the information content and the meaning of a message requires a discourse" this is, I think, a position regarding what scientific discourse does. There are, of course, competing descriptions of what scientific discourse does.  Does your "meaning" refers to the meaning of scientific discovery? Do we want to defend a definition of meaning which is tied to scientific practice as we know it? Would that be too narrow? Ours may not be the only way of doing science... 

A non-discursive science might be possible - a science based around shared musical experience, or meditation, for example. Or even Hesse's "Glasperlenspiel"... Higher level coordination need not necessarily occur in language. Our communication technologies may one day give us new post-linguistic ways of coordinating ourselves. 

Codification is important in our science as we know it. But it should also be said that our science is blind to many things. Its reductionism prevents effective interdisciplinary inquiry, it struggles to reconcile practices, bodies, and egos, and its recent obsession with journal publication has produced the conditions of Babel which has fed the pathology in our institutions. There's less meaning in the academy than there was 50 years ago.

The business of sense and reference which Terry refers to (and which provided a foundation for Husserl) is indeed problematic. Some forms of communication have only sense and yet there is coordination, emotion and meaning.  Peirce saw something different in the underlying symmetry of communication. This is in Bateson too (symmetrical/asymmetrical schizmogenesis).

It may be that it is symmetrical principles underpin quantum mechanical phenomena like entanglement; they certainly pervade biology. Medieval logicians may have seen this: Duns Scotus's ideas on "synchronic contingency" for example, mirror what quantum physicists are describing.

The implication is that our distinguishing between information and meaning in science may be an epiphenomenon of something deeper.

Best wishes,

Mark



-----Original Message-----
From: "Loet Leydesdorff" <loet at leydesdorff.net>
Sent: ‎14/‎10/‎2017 16:06
To: "Terrence W. DEACON" <deacon at berkeley.edu>; "Sungchul Ji" <sji at pharmacy.rutgers.edu>
Cc: "foundationofinformationscience" <fis at listas.unizar.es>
Subject: Re: [Fis] Data - Reflection - Information

Dear Terry and colleagues, 


"Language is rather the special case, the most unusual communicative adaptation to ever have evolved, and one that grows out of and depends on informationa/semiotic capacities shared with other species and with biology in general."
Let me try to argue in favor of "meaning", "language", and "discursive knowledge", precisely because they provide the "differentia specifica" of mankind. "Meaning" can be provided by non-humans such as animals or networks, but distinguishing between the information content and the meaning of a message requires a discourse. The discourse enables us to codify the meaning of the information at the supra-individual level. Discursive knowledge is based on further codification of this intersubjective meaning. All categories used, for example, in this discussion are codified in scholarly discourses. The discourse(s) provide(s) the top of the hierarchy that controls given the cybernetic principle that construction is bottom up and control top-down.


Husserl uses "intentionality" and "intersubjective intentionality" instead of "meaning". Perhaps, this has advantages; but I am not so sure that the difference is more than semantic. In Cartesian Meditations (1929) he argues that this intersubjective intentionality provides us with the basis of an empirical philosophy of science. The sciences do not begin with observations, but with the specification of expectations in discourses. A predator also observes his prey, but in scholarly discourses, systematic observations serve the update of codified (that is, theoretical) expectations.


Best,
Loet
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