Semiosis and Information: Meeting the Challenge of Information Science to Post-Reductionist Biosemiotics
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Semiosis and Information: Meeting the Challenge of Information Science to Post-Reductionist Biosemiotics Arran Gare 1 Received: 26 January 2020 / Accepted: 9 September 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The concept of information and its relation to biosemiotics is a major area of contention among biosemioticians. Biosemioticians influenced by von Uexküll, Sebeok, Bateson and Peirce are critical of the way the concept as developed in information science has been applied to biology, while others believe that for biosemiotics to gain acceptance it will have to embrace information science and distance biosemiotics from Peirce’s philosophical work. Here I will defend the influence of Peirce on biosemiotics, arguing that information science and biosemiotics as these were originally formulated are radically opposed research traditions. Failure to appreciate this will undermine the challenge of biosemiotics and other anti-reductionist traditions to mainstream science with its reductionist ambition to explain everything through physics. However, for this challenge to be successful, it will be necessary to respond to criticisms of Peircian ideas, jettisoning ideas that are no longer defensible and integrating ideas allied to his antireductionist agenda. Here I will argue that the natural philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, offering a searching critique of the application of the new concept of information and cybernetics to the life and human sciences, provides the means to defend and advance Peirce’s core ideas and thereby defend post-reductionist biosemiotics. Keywords Biosemiotics . Information . C.S. Peirce . Jesper Hoffmeyer . Howard Pattee .
Gilbert Simondon There is a problematic relationship between biosemiotics and the concept of information, along with information science generally. Jesper Hoffmeyer in Signs of Meaning in the Universe (1991), essentially a manifesto for biosemiotics based on Peirce’s philosophy, pointed out that ‘form’ for the Romans was a mangled version of the Greek ‘morf’ (or ‘morph’), and ‘information’ meant being formed mentally. Atomistic * Arran Gare [email protected]
1
Philosophy and Cultural Inquiry, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia
Gare A.
thinking in the Twentieth Century led ‘information’ to be understood as isolated chunks of knowledge and this was taken over by the physicists, who then characterized it as something in the world, independent of anyone, and then tried to impose this inverted, desiccated concept of information on all other disciplines. In his later book Biosemiotics, he wrote that ‘up-to-date biology must acknowledge that the biochemical concept of information is just too impoverished to be of any explanatory use’ (p.61). In the lead article to a special issue of Biosemiotics published in 2013 devoted to information in biosemiotics, ‘Epistemic, Evolutionary, and Physical Conditions for Biological Information’, Howard Pattee took exception to Hoffmeyer’s denigration of the concept of information. As he put it, ‘On the contrary, as a phys
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