BTW, what do you think of this biosemiotics business. The one theoretical biologist I know who is into this is full of crackpot ideas. I"m very distrustful:
Claus Emmeche Taking the semiotic turn, or how significant philosophy of biology should be done
http://mitdenker.at/life/life09.htm
Also at this url: http://www.nbi.dk/~emmeche/cePubl/2002b.Wit.Sats.html
Note this key passage:
>More and more biologists are beginning to understand that the essence of >life is to mean something, to mediate significance, to interpret signs. >This already seems to be implicitly present even in orthodox Neo-Darwinism >and its recurrent use of terms like "code", "messenger", "genetic >information", and so on. These concepts substitute the final causes >Darwinists believed to have discarded 150 years ago, they have become >firmly established in molecular biology with specific scientific meanings; >and yet they the semiotic content or connotations are rarely taken serious >by the scientists to the extant that there is a tendency to devaluate >their status as being "merely metaphors" when confronted with the question >about their implied intentionality or semioticity (cf. Emmeche 1999). This >secret language, where "code" seems to be a code for final cause, points >to the fact that it might be more honest and productive to attack the >problem head-on and to formulate an explicit biological theory taking >these recurrent semiotics metaphors serious and discuss them as pointing >to real scientific problems. This means that a principal task of biology >will be to study signs and sign processes in living systems. This is >biosemiotics -- the scientific study of biosemiosis. Semiotics, the >general science of signs, thus becomes a reservoir of concepts and >principles when it is recognized that biology, being about living systems, >at the same time is about sign systems. Moreover, semiotics will probably >not remain the same after this encounter with biology: both sciences will >be transformed fundamentally while gradually being melded into one more >comprehensive field.
While many of the ideas adumbrated in this review seem to be quite fruitful, this paragraph is the tipoff that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
At 05:28 PM 3/4/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:
Have been following your discussion with considerable interest. Sorry to lurk so long, but I was occupied in finishing up a paper.
I was particularly interested in your earlier discussion on emergence. I agree strongly with Jay Gould that dialectics; Hegelian and Marxist alike, describe what I suppose would now be called "emergent functions". I have many reservations about Engel's representation of the dialectic and his three so-called "laws" appear to me to be a snobbish attempt to present "Dialectics for the Working Class". Certainly Llyod Spencer and Andrzej Krauze's Hegel for Beginners and Andy Blunden's Getting to Know Hegel are much more successful representations of dialectical theory. A search for emergentism in Marxism would be better served by reinvestigating the methods of Hegel (his Logics) and of Marx (Practice, or, better, labour practice) for the mechanics and process whereby they derive emergent complex moments from simpler prior conditions. I suspect that the concretisation of abstraction through successive negation, unity of labour practice and extant condition in the productive process, and sublation of prior syntheses in extant dialectical moments will have more significance for understanding emergence in human history than the hierarchy theories of Salthe, Swenson, and O'Neil, the emergent semiotics of Hoffmeyer and so on. That is not to say that systems, even cybernetic systems, are not relevant to the investigation, but, we must remember that despite Engel's (sometimes brilliant and sometimes embarrassing) adventures in the dialectics of Nature, that Hegel and Marx theoretical interests were exclusively focussed on human activity and human history and were only interested in Nature as a derived function of human inteaction with material conditions. Even Hegel's dialectics on Nature concerned the Natural Sciences and not Nature as such (as the subject of human contemplation).
Which bring us to the problem of Natural science and Marxism.
Certainly the Natural sciences are a component of modern history. They more or less emerge in late Mediaeval Europe together with the development of powerful urban commercial and industrial institutions. From the point of view of Marxist theory, the interesting thing about the Natural sciences is the relation between the moment of their emergence and the concurrent developments of European society in all its aspects. For example, the optical and astronomical discoveries of the earliest Natural scientists were most useful for the long-range navigation needs of Europe's commercial and colonial enterprises while the mathematical developments in geometry, trigonometry and the calculus were important for the development of improved techniques for the prompt and accurate estimations of volume, mass, and weight of goods as well as managing cannon fire. Even the origin of the Social Sciences can be traced to this period; Machiavelli and de Seyselle's practical analyses of government as well as the contemporary development of double entry accounting and . But, note, that the Marxist interest in these developments is in their practical relations to the needs growing out of the urbanization and commercialization of human life and not as representations of contemplated Nature.
Mathematics and the Natural sciences can contribute to the development of Marxist theory, but only in a form that contributes to the objectives of the dialectical explication of historical conditions and events. After all, in Capital, Marx exploits and develops the practices of contemporary accounting to provide mechanical mathematical objectifications of the relations between productive and commercial processes that are critical to the aims of his theory. Marx also demonstrates considerable interest in the physics of machine engineering, but not as an objective description of Nature, but specifically as it relates to the historical development of human productive and social practice. Marx and Engels also adapt contemporary thinking on organism and on pre- and proto-human, behaviour to describe the fundamental material conditions for the development of human practice.
In short, the objectives of the practice of the Natural Sciences are distinct from those of Marxist theory, and their products satisfy needs different from those that engender social historical theory. Even the methods are different insofar as the natural scientist enjoys a bit more distance from the subject of his research (except for quantum indeterminism)than the social-historian. Natural Science can be the subject of investigation by social historical scientists and some of its products can, with suitable modifications, be adopted to the objects of social history, but social history has no more qualifications for determining the practices (theory and activity) of Natural science than do the natural scientists for the determination of the practices of social historical science (e.g. the silly foray of Pinker and Dawkins into Memics).
Wirh regards, Victor
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