Dear Mark:
Do we want to defend a definition of meaning which is tied to
scientific practice as we know it? Would that be too narrow? Ours may
not be the only way of doing science...
I meant my remarks analytically. You provide them with a normative turn
as defensive against alternative ways of doing science.
A non-discursive science might be possible - a science based around
shared musical experience, or meditation, for example. Or even Hesse's
"Glasperlenspiel"... Higher level coordination need not necessarily
occur in language. Our communication technologies may one day give us
new post-linguistic ways of coordinating ourselves.
Why should one wish to consider this as science? One can make music
together without doing science. Musicology, however, is discursive
reasoning about these practices.
Codification is important in our science as we know it. But it should
also be said that our science is blind to many things. Its reductionism
prevents effective interdisciplinary inquiry, it struggles to reconcile
practices, bodies, and egos, and its recent obsession with journal
publication has produced the conditions of Babel which has fed the
pathology in our institutions. There's less meaning in the academy than
there was 50 years ago.
This is a question with a Monty Python flavor: what is the meaning of
science? what is the meaning of life?
The implication is that our distinguishing between information and
meaning in science may be an epiphenomenon of something deeper.
One can always ask for "something deeper". The answers, however, tend to
become religious. I am interested in operationalization and design.
Best,
Loet
Best wishes,
Mark
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Loet Leydesdorff <mailto:l...@leydesdorff.net>
Sent: 14/10/2017 16:06
To: Terrence W. DEACON <mailto:dea...@berkeley.edu>; Sungchul Ji
<mailto:s...@pharmacy.rutgers.edu>
Cc: foundationofinformationscience <mailto:fis@listas.unizar.es>
Subject: Re: [Fis] Data - Reflection - Information
Dear Terry and colleagues,
"Language is rather the special case, the most unusual communicative
adaptation to ever have evolved, and one that grows out of and depends
on informationa/semiotic capacities shared with other species and with
biology in general."
Let me try to argue in favor of "meaning", "language", and "discursive
knowledge", precisely because they provide the "differentia specifica"
of mankind. "Meaning" can be provided by non-humans such as animals or
networks, but distinguishing between the information content and the
meaning of a message requires a discourse. The discourse enables us to
codify the meaning of the information at the supra-individual level.
Discursive knowledge is based on further codification of this
intersubjective meaning. All categories used, for example, in this
discussion are codified in scholarly discourses. The discourse(s)
provide(s) the top of the hierarchy that controls given the cybernetic
principle that construction is bottom up and control top-down.
Husserl uses "intentionality" and "intersubjective intentionality"
instead of "meaning". Perhaps, this has advantages; but I am not so
sure that the difference is more than semantic. In Cartesian
Meditations (1929) he argues that this intersubjective intentionality
provides us with the basis of an empirical philosophy of science. The
sciences do not begin with observations, but with the specification of
expectations in discourses. A predator also observes his prey, but in
scholarly discourses, systematic observations serve the update of
codified (that is, theoretical) expectations.
Best,
Loet
_______________________________________________
Fis mailing list
Fis@listas.unizar.es
http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
