Jon, List, Yes, that is pretty much what I concluded. In some earlier work I pointed out that you need to take into consideration closure conditions to be certain of what entity the function is for the sake of. It might be survival of the individual, or the lineage, or population, or ? I am now working on function in ecology on a grant from Brazil; I am now on my third three month period in Brazil. Ecology is the hardest so far. I previously did a couple of papers on individuation in ecology with an ecologist, and that was hard enough. In any case, we seem to be on the same wavelength. Initial reaction among the biosemiotics crowd was mixed, and the group eventually split over issues related at least. The other group now calls themselves "code biology". I maintain they are presupposing thirds even though they deny it. Their leader considers Peircean semiotics "unscientific". My topic this year for the Biosemiotics Gathering is "Are genes signs and if so what are they signs of?"
Cheers, John -----Original Message----- From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:jawb...@att.net] Sent: March 5, 2015 2:01 PM To: John Collier; Helmut Raulien; Peirce List Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Relations & Their Relatives Re: John Collier At: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/15782 John, List, That is a very nice paper! It was something of a bio-trope back when I was spending a lot more time in the company of bio-sci folk to say that the phenotype was just a device for reproducing the genotype, and I think that is more or less a turn on the symmetry issue that you mention. Reading that in a Peircean frame of mind, I took it to mean that the real object of the process was neither nucleic acids nor amino acids nor proteins but some pragma of evolution about which they all turned. Regards, Jon On 3/5/2015 9:29 AM, John Collier wrote: > I would agree with Jon on this. I argued that > control theory/ information theory can result > in a symmetry problem for > explaining biological > function, and that a particular notion of autonomy > > provides thirds (in a particular way) for biological > systems. The > paper is at > Explaining Biological Functionality : Is Control Theory > Enough? > http://web.ncf.ca/collier/papers/Final%20SAJP_30%281%29_Collier%5B1%5D.pdf > South African Journal of Philosophy. 2011, 30(4): 53-62. > It can also be found on the South African Journal of Philosophy site. > > John > academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey my word press blog: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/ inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/ isw: http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/JLA oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/JonnyCache
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