Dear Loet,
I mean to be analytical too. The Pythonesque nature of my questioning leads
naturally to recursion: What is the meaning of meaning? There's a logic in the
recursion - Peirce, Spencer-Brown, Leibnitz, Lou Kauffman... and you have
probed this.
Were you or I to be part of a recursive symmetry, how would we know? Where
would the scientia be? How would we express our knowledge? In a journal? Why
not in a symphony? (the musicologists miss the point about music: Schoenberg
commented once on the musical graphs of Heinrich Schenker: "where are my
favourite tunes? Ah! There.. In those tiny notes!")
I agree that operationalisation is important. But it can (and does) happen in
ways other than those expressed in the content of discourse. If this topic of
"information" is of any value, it is because it should open our senses to that.
Best wishes,
Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: "Loet Leydesdorff" <l...@leydesdorff.net>
Sent: 15/10/2017 07:17
To: "Mark Johnson" <johnsonm...@gmail.com>; "Terrence W. DEACON"
<dea...@berkeley.edu>; "Sungchul Ji" <s...@pharmacy.rutgers.edu>
Cc: "foundationofinformationscience" <fis@listas.unizar.es>
Subject: Re[2]: [Fis] Data - Reflection - Information
Dear Mark:
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...
I meant my remarks analytically. You provide them with a normative turn as
defensive against alternative ways 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.
Why should one wish to consider this as science? One can make music together
without doing science. Musicology, however, is discursive reasoning about these
practices.
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.
This is a question with a Monty Python flavor: what is the meaning of science?
what is the meaning of life?
The implication is that our distinguishing between information and meaning in
science may be an epiphenomenon of something deeper.
One can always ask for "something deeper". The answers, however, tend to become
religious. I am interested in operationalization and design.
Best,
Loet
Best wishes,
Mark
From: Loet Leydesdorff
Sent: 14/10/2017 16:06
To: Terrence W. DEACON; Sungchul Ji
Cc: foundationofinformationscience
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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