List, The current issue of Science magazine features two articles that provoke me to share a few reflections on the subject line, which I’ve chosen to represent the recurring calls on this list for more postings that apply Peircean ideas to “real-world” issues and investigations (as opposed to postings about the minutiae of Peirce’s philosophy, including logic as semiotic).
The first Science article is “Gaia 2.0”, by Timothy M. Lenton and Bruno Latour, which asks the question, “Could humans add some level of self-awareness to Earth’s self-regulation?” It’s accessible at http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6407/1066. I couldn’t help noticing that my blog post of September 5, http://gnusystems.ca/wp/2018/09/earthtypes/, deals with essentially the same question. I didn’t share that blog post with the peirce list, but Gary Richmond posted a link to it along with some very positive comments about it (thanks Gary R!). It does incorporate a quotation from Peirce introducing a semiotic idea (namely the type-token distinction), and tries to apply that concept to what may be the most significant real-world issue of our time, the challenge of the Anthropocene. The Science article does not mention any specifically Peircean ideas, but “Gaia 2.0” certainly overlaps with them in remarkable ways. As the authors say, it “establishes a new continuity between humans and nonhumans that was not visible before—a relation between free agents. This understanding offers the potential to learn from features of Gaia to create a Gaia 2.0. We focus here on three of these features: autotrophy, networks, and heterarchy.” Those are not Peircean terms, but “continuity” certainly is a central focus of Peirce, and I certainly see his logic/semiotic as a major contribution to making visible the continuity between humans and nonhumans. I also see Peirce as a major contributor to awareness of the continuity among various branches of science, notably by laying the groundwork for what we now call biosemiotics. The authors of “Gaia 2.0” exemplify such continuity: Lenton is a (British) Earth Systems scientist, while Latour is a (French) philosopher. Does it matter that they do not mention Peirce or use Peircean terminology? Well, it does to those interested in the history and philosophy of science who are concerned with giving credit where credit is due. Does it matter in terms of facing the challenge of the Anthropocene? I doubt it … but I’ll come back to this question below. The other current Science article is about “nervous system-like signaling in plant defense.” It’s one small contribution to the literature on plant “signaling” — even plant “intelligence” — which has become voluminous in recent years. Now, you might think this is fertile ground for biosemiotics. But in fact, neither this article nor the two full books about plant semiosis that I’ve recently read ever mentions the term “biosemiotics,” or cites any of the ‘usual suspects’ who publish in that field. Neither does David Attenborough, in his recent television programs which have dealt with various forms of semiosis observed in the vegetable world. Why not? I think the answer is simple: biology does not need semiotics as a separate field to investigate “signaling” in plants. The Science article I mention here is about the recent discovery that glutamate, which acts as a neurotransmitter in animals, also plays an important role in “plant defense,” i.e. in the relatively fast mechanisms by which a plant’s leaves can be informed of damage to other leaves elsewhere on the plant, and respond by activating whatever chemical defenses they may have. The fact that both plants and animals use the same chemical substance for similar semiosic purposes does suggest the continuity between these two aspects of the biosphere, but is (in my opinion) relatively trivial compared to the more general and formal aspects of semiosis which apply across the full spectrum of the life sciences. The value of biosemiotics, in my view, is its elucidation of those formal patterns, not in the discovery of specific details of the detailed mechanisms in which they are embodied in this or that life form. Biology can take care of that and is doing so in laboratories around the world. The importance of biosemiotics is more philosophical, even ethical in the sense of ‘global ethics.’ And I think the same applies to the matter of ‘bringing Peirce into the 21st century.’ Let me explain that by referring to my aforementioned blog post (and its larger context, the “netbook” Turning Signs). One of the central concepts in both is what I call “the meaning cycle,” which I take to be a basic pattern in all forms of semiosis. There’s a diagram of it in that blog post, and in Turning Signs at http://gnusystems.ca/TS/mdl.htm#meancyc. In the course of transcribing Peirce’s Lowell Lecture 7, I came across this passage which seems to me fully congruent with the concept of the “meaning cycle,” although Peirce does not mention either “meanings” or “cycles”: [[ The course of events by which any new subject gets added to our knowledge is most clearly marked in the case of an addition to our scientific knowledge. In the first place we are already in a previous state of knowledge. Logic has quite nothing to say concerning the primum cognitum. In consequence of this we are in a state of expectation concerning a coming phenomenon,— being that expectation active or passive. If the phenomenon, when it comes, fulfills that expectation, it strengthens the habits of thinking on which that expectation is based, but teaches us nothing new. But if it involves any surprise, as it mostly does, our habits of thinking are deranged, whether little or much. We then feel the need of a new idea which shall serve to bind the surprising phenomenon to our preëxisting experience. One usual phrase is that we want the surprising fact explained. With this end in view we are led to frame a hypothesis, and the process of reasoning by which we come to set up a hypothesis is the kind of reasoning that I call Abduction. Now this hypothesis is a purely ideal state of things, and upon the basis of a purely ideal state of things as a premiss, we can only reason deductively. In fact, deduction always relates to a purely ideal state of things, in this sense, that if the premiss of deduction is known for anything more than that, its being more has nothing to do with the course of the deduction. The Deductions which we base upon the hypothesis which has resulted from Abduction produce conditional predictions concerning our future experience. That is to say, we infer by Deduction that if the hypothesis be true, any future phenomena of certain descriptions must present such and such characters. We now institute a course of quasi-experimentation in order to bring these predictions to the test, and thus to form our final estimate of the value of the hypothesis, and this whole proceeding I term Induction. I speak of quasi-experimentation because the term experiment is, according to the usage of scientific men, restricted to the operation of bringing about certain conditions. The noting of the results of experiments or of anything else to which our attention is directed in advance of our noting it, is called Observation. But by quasi-experimentation I mean the entire operation either of producing or of searching out a state of things to which the conditional predictions deduced from the hypothesis shall be applicable and of noting how far the prediction is fulfilled. ] http://gnusystems.ca/Lowell7.htm ] In Turning Signs I’ve brought in many specific references from biology, psychology, neuroscience, ecology, even sacred scriptures and sutras, to show how this basic pattern recurs in all these fields. I’ve also drawn heavily on Peircean semiotics. But I do not attribute the “meaning cycle” concept (or my diagram of it) to Peirce. That’s because I didn’t actually get it from Peirce; I got it from Robert Rosen’s work on “anticipatory systems”, and had incorporated it into the book before I found it in Peirce. When I do quote Peirce in the book (which happens quite a lot), I quote him for the same reason that I quote other writers: because I find their words to be clear statements of principles I consider important to the “ecology of meaning,” as I call it, across the whole spectrum of semiosis from the human down to the microbial, and from the collectively cultural to the individual. To sum up: many of Peirce’s important ideas don’t need to be ‘brought into’ the 21st century because they are already here. They may not be credited to Peirce, but they are further developments of thoughts he pioneered or picked up from his predecessors and carried further. I think our responsibility to Peirce, if we have any, is to carry his ideas further, and express them in new contexts which did not exist in Peirce’s time. Whether we mention Peirce or use his terminology, or cite him as an “authority,” is not all that important, pragmatically speaking. Each of us needs to adapt Peircean ideas and terms to the communicational context in which we find ourselves, in oder to carry them forward. But speaking for myself, the great value of this list is the contributions of those who are actively reading Peirce with the aim of refining (and sometimes reforming) our understanding of what he said. When we find something in Peirce that offers fresh insights into the Thought process of Gaia, or of even more inclusive universes, that’s what motivates us (or me at least) to bring Peirce current dialogues. Gary f. } Everything is always becoming something other than what it was becoming. [Floyd Merrell] { http://gnusystems.ca/wp/ }{ Turning Signs gateway
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