Semiotic Explanation in the Biological Sciences
Many biological explanations are given in terms of transduced signals and of stored and transferred information. In the following, I call such information-theoretical explanations “semiotic explanations.” Semiotic explanation was hardly ever discussed as
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Semiotic Explanation in the Biological Sciences Ulrich Krohs
Abstract Many biological explanations are given in terms of transduced signals and of stored and transferred information. In the following, I call such informationtheoretical explanations “semiotic explanations.” Semiotic explanation was hardly ever discussed as a distinct type of explanation. Instead, philosophers looked at information transfer as a somewhat unusual subject of mechanistic explanation and consequently attempted to frame biological information as being observable within physicochemical mechanisms. However, information-theoretical terms never occur in isolation or as a plug-in in mechanistic models but always in the context of information-theoretical models like the semiotic model of protein biosynthesis. This chapter proposes that “information” enters the game as a theoretical term of semiotic models rather than as an observable and that semiotic models have explanatory value by explaining molecular mechanisms in functional rather than in mechanistic terms. Keywords Biological information • Conserved quantity • Model structure • Nonconservative model • Signal
4.1 Introduction Biology uses several different kinds of explanation. Among those are causal-mechanistic, constitutive, evolutionary, and deductive-nomological explanations, all of which are well studied in philosophy of science. Giving a causal-mechanistic account is the right way to explain glycolysis or fatty acid synthesis. Constitutive accounts are used in explaining the locomotion system of vertebrates as being made up of bones, muscles, and tendons or in explaining U. Krohs () Westfälische Wilhelms Universität Münster, Philosophisches Seminar, Domplatz 6, 48143 Münster, Germany e-mail: [email protected] M.I. Kaiser et al. (eds.), Explanation in the Special Sciences: The Case of Biology and History, Synthese Library 367, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7563-3__4, © Springer ScienceCBusiness Media Dordrecht 2014
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cell respiration as being constituted by the respiratory chain, the NADPH/NADPC system, the TCA cycle, etc. To explain the presence of particular organismic traits in an organism, evolutionary explanations, which refer to an iterated sequence of variation and selection events, seem to be the adequate kind of explanation to give. Deductive-nomological explanations, finally, though they might be less often applied in biology than in physics, are used whenever a phenomenon is found to be governed by a general law. Some other types of biological explanation, however, are less well understood and raise severe philosophical concerns. Those are functional explanation, which is regarded as teleology laden and was discussed continuously for half a century in philosophy of science (and by Kant anyway), and explanation in terms of transduced signals and of stored and transduced information. This chapter concentrates on the latter.1 In the following, I shall call such information-theoretical models “semiotic explanations.” A common account of protein biosynth
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