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 anti-reductionist 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.
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Pattee appeared to be unaware that Hoffmeyer and Emmeche’s notion of dual coding came from Gregory Bateson, that this was acknowledged by them, and that in defending analog coding Bateson was continuing a debate between cyberneticians from the 1950s over the status of analogue coding (see Dupuy 2009: 114).
It is noteworthy that both Prigogine and Stuart Kauffman (who developed the notion of ‘edge of chaos’), argued that mathematics is limited, consistent with Simondon’s claims. Kauffman, a mathematician, argued that stories are more fundamental than mathematics for comprehending reality.
A similar argument, grappling with much the same problem, has been made by Karatay et al. (2016). Although having a different focus, my interpretation of Simondon has been influenced by this paper.
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Gare, A. Semiosis and Information: Meeting the Challenge of Information Science to Post-Reductionist Biosemiotics. Biosemiotics 13, 327–346 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-020-09393-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-020-09393-w