Dear Loet and colleagues,
One of the advantages of a new discipline is the simplification of
discourse, the creation of a new space where you can easily build new
knowledge without copious management of other unnecessary,
circumstantial ideas. I have already quoted in this list the famous
quotation by Whitehead about the "mental liberation" in arithmetic that
implied the use of zero. Something similar may happen nowadays
concerning the wide reaching domains of information. But I see two
problems about delineating the "information zero".
One, that life is not incorporated yet as the starting point of
communication (I do not mean "biology"--rather it is each one's
biography, historically and evolutionarily augmented/contemplated). At
the end, every living agent "communicates" with other living agents, and
the available tools to do that are signals that mean "portions" of its
own life-cycle. We humans have shared sensorimotor tools that provide
the common ground for our communication, for exporting those missing
portions or needs in our lives. Formalizing the life cycle is quite
problematic, however.
And the second "zero" concerns the need to constitute a new
informational observer, endowed with the general mental characteristics
required for information science. The observer of physics, chemistry,
etc., is well equipped and we assume that his/her mind is properly
"charged" with the corresponding principles, theories, experiences, etc.
But in the case of info science, the topic matter is open-ended. What is
the "charge" of this new observer? Depending on our specializations, we
equip this observer with our preferred approach; so our unending back
and forth. But many other knowledge bodies (or at least the 4-5 basic
disciplines that Xueshan was commenting) may be needed to make sense of
that particular informational/communicational phenomenon in cells,
organisms, people, disciplines, enterprises, countries... If we accept
this "ecumenical" contemplation of information science, how can that
multi-observer be viable at all? Our cognitive limitations are so
obvious... An elementary provisional solution (a pre-zero, a pre-science
tool) for making it possible was suggested in those ten principles weeks
ago.
In any case, I think these two absences or "zeroes" might be
successfully filled in, without having to wait for too long.
Best wishes--Pedro
El 26/10/2017 a las 20:08, Loet Leydesdorff escribió:
Dear Terry and colleagues,
(...) , there cannot be interminable regress of this displacement to
establish these norms. At some point normativity requires ontological
grounding where the grounded normative relation is the preservation
of the systemic physical properties that produce the norm-preserving
dynamic.
I have problems with the words "ontological" and "physical" here,
whereas I agree with the need of grounding the normative. Among human
beings, this grounding of subjective normativity can be found in
intersubjectivity. Whereas the subjective remains/cogitans/ (in
doubt), the intersubjective can be considered as/cogitatum/ (the thing
about which one remains in doubt).
For Descartes this/cogitatum/ is the Other of the/Cogito./
The/Cogito/ knows itself to be incomplete, and to be distinguished
from what transcends it, the Transcendental or, in Descartes'
terminology, God. (This is the ontological proof of God's presence.
Kant showed that this proof does not hold: God cannot be proven to
exist.) Husserl (1929) steps in on this point in the/Cartesian
Meditations/: the/cogitatum/ which transcends us is intersubjectivity.
It is not physical. The physical is/res extensa/, whereas this
remains/res cogitans./ It cannot be retrieved, but one has reflexive
access to it.
Interestingly, this philosophy provides Luhmann's point of departure.
The intersubjective can be operationalized as (interhuman)
communication. The codes in the communication can relatively be
stabilized. One can use the metaphor of eigenvectors of a
communication matrix. They remain our constructs, but they guide the
communication. (Luhmann uses "eigenvalues", but that is a
misunderstanding.) Using Parsons' idea of symbolic generalization of
the codes of communication, one can continue this metaphor and
consider other than the first eigenvector as "functional
differentiations" which enable the communication to process more
complexity. The model is derived from the /Trias Politica/: problems
can be solved in one of the branches or the other. The normativity of
the judiciary is different from the normativity of the legislative
branch, but they both ground the normativity that guides us.
The sciences are then a way of communication; namely, scholarly
communication about rationalized expectations. Scholarly communication
is different from, for example, political communication. An agent
("consciousness" in Luhmann's terminology) recombines reflexively and
has to integrate because of one's contingency. The transcendental
grounding is in the communication; it remains uncertain. Fortunately,
because this implies that it can be reconstructed (by us albeit not as
individuals).
A non-human does not know oneself to be contingent. Lots of things
follow from this; for example, that the non-human does not have access
to our intersubjectivity as systems of expectations.
Best,
Loet
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Loet Leydesdorff
Professor emeritus, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)
l...@leydesdorff.net <mailto:l...@leydesdorff.net>;
http://www.leydesdorff.net/
Associate Faculty, SPRU, <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/>University of
Sussex;
Guest Professor Zhejiang Univ. <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/>,
Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, ISTIC,
<http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html>Beijing;
Visiting Fellow, Birkbeck <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/>, University of London;
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en
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Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta 0
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
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http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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