Book Review
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concrete interactional context of the DNA-bearing organism. Parallel to this, the descent, evolution and precision of signal-mediated coordination and cooperation in single-cell populations such as populations of bacteria or protoctists and in multicellular organisms like fungi, animals and plants, clearly demonstrate that communication functions only if the signaling exchange and interpretation is coherent to species-specific shared rules. Therefore, biological disciplines begin to look to non-biological disciplines like linguistics (Searls, 2002), semantics (Barbieri, 2001), biosemiotics (Kull, 2005), biohermeneutics (Markos, 2002), and action-theoretical communication theory (Witzany, 2000). Not only in the case of biosemiotics this leads to an increasing interest in the foundations of sciences which focus on sign-use, language and communication. The interest in a general theory of signs, i.e. semiotics, goes hand in hand with the lack of a unique theory or methodology that can provide the foundations of semiotics. Realism, idealism, ontology, mathematical language theory, systems and information theory, naturalism, semioticism, pragmaticism, structuralism and constructivism are some of the many argumentative lines of (philosophical) foundations, which compete in several semiotic subdisciplines such as in socio-, cultural- or bio-semiotics. Paul Bains undertakes an ambitious approach to work out an ontological foundation not only of semiotics but of philosophy in general. This means acknowledging sign processes (semioses) as real relations prior to any knowledge. On this view, semioses and the relations constructed by them are at the very foundations of Being and are prior to cognition and philosophy. Recurring to the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, John Deely, John Poinset and Humberto Maturana, Bains looks at relations as being ‘externalÕ to their terms. Bains historically reconstructs this line of thought, starting with the ontology of Aristotle, the essentialism of scholastics and then proceeding further to Duns Scotus, John Poinset, Charles Sanders Peirce, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Humberto Maturana, Martin Heidegger, Jakob von Uexku¨ll, John Deely, Alfred North Whitehead, Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers. Bains suggests that understanding the ontology of relations would allow us to develop a convincing representation of the action of signs. The central assumption is that relations as relations are univocal in their ‘‘ad-esse’’. This univocity is prior to thinking and Being, prior to the division of ens rationis and ens reale. BainsÕs aim is to achieve a solution for the medieval nominalist thesis, that it is possible in the example of the univocity of relations as relations to show their objective Being. Because external relations are the essence of Being, prior to thinking and categorizing, they are also the precondition to our understanding and communication. We primarily recognize Being in the world as relations and, secondarily, we can understand oursel
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