Do you know whether Whitehead had a social theory? The lack of social theory in the biosemiotcs schema is as telling as the failure to distinguish between the "semiosis" of unicellular organisms and human beings.
I saw Sebeok back in the '70s. He didn't talk about this, but he did say something suspicious. He said something about overeating as a craving for information. This is a cute metaphor, but it also reveals the idealism of interpreting the material universe as information.
This picture shows up what I'm trying to get it in the distinction between mystical and materialist emergentism. There is a "dialectical" lesson here. Note that the linchpin of all these bad biosemiotic arguments comes from the metaphysical ordering of empirical data and the manipulation of the relationships between philosophical categories. This is where dialectics is important, not in the direct intervention into empirical science.
I think I need to repeat this last paragraph a few hundred times and then explain it. For now, though, just note the categorial relationships between matter, information, meaning, mind, society ... that form the basis of this idealist discipline.
At 12:26 PM 3/12/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:
Ralph, 1. You should be distrustful of this biosemiotics business. In essence, it's just a new twist on the kind of Neo-Kantian Ideas, Western and Russian, that Lenin (1908) warned us about in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.
2. I don't know just how much you want to know about it so I'll just provide a quick sketch of the origins, history and family ties of biosemiotics and a general description and criticism of two of its more important theoretical developments (Western: Hoffmeyer and Emmeche, Russian: Alexei Sharov).
ORIGINS, HISTORY, AND GENEOLOGY OF BIOSEMIOTICS: 3. Biosemiotics shares with Ethology and Biosociology a common ancestor in Jakob v. Uexküll of umweltforschung fame. Umwelt can be understood to mean the world of significant experience of any specified, individual life form.
4. Here's how it's put in the encyclopedia of the free dictionary.com http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Umwelt Umwelt (from the German umwelt, "environment") is the "biological foundations that lie at the very epicentre of the study of both communication and signification in the human [and non-human] animal." The term is usually translated as "subjective universe". Uexküll theorized that organisms can have different Umwelten, even though they share the same environment. Each component of a Umwelt has a meaning which is functional for a particular organism. Thus it can be water, food, shelter, potential threats, or points of reference for navigation. An organism creates its own Umwelt when it interacts with the world, and at the same time the organism reshapes it. This is termed a 'functional circle'. The Umwelt theory states that the mind and the world are inseparable, because it is the mind that interprets the world for the organism.
5. As you can gather from this description, umwelt is a very Kantian concept. That is to say that umwelt describes the world of the life form as the "product" of its subjective consciousness. Uexküll (1864-1944) along with Dilthey and Popper in historical studies and Levy-Bruhl and Franz Boas in anthropology and Mach and Avenarius in the philosophy of science is among the considerable number of European and Russian intellectuals who developed the distinctive Neo-Kantianism that still dominates much of the so-called advanced thinking of modern science, even today.
6. Thomas Sebeok (1920-2001), the Hungarian-American semioticist, combined v. Uexküll's ideas with the theories of language of de Sassure and Jakobsen thereby inventing the discipline of biosemiotics. Sebeok's biosemiotics is based on the following three principles: See http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/biosemiotics for more on this. 1. The signification, communication and habit formation of living processes 2. Semiosis (changing sign relations) in living nature 3. The biological basis of all signs and sign interpretation Biosemiotics is "biology interpreted as sign systems". It certainly is a revolutionary approach when compared with the almost exclusive focus of orthodox biological theorizing on the mechanical properties of life systems. Biosemiology represents a new focus on life process (rather than mechanism) as the conveyance of signs and and their interpretation by other living signs in a variety of ways, including by means of molecules. While biosemiotics takes for granted and respects the complexity of living processes as revealed by the existing fields of biology - from molecular biology to brain science and behavioural studies - its object is to bring together separate findings of the various disciplines of biology (including evolutionary biology) into a new and more unified perspective on the central phenomena of the living world, including the generation of function and signification in living systems, from the ribosome to the ecosystem and from the beginnings of life to its ultimate meanings.
7. For the biosemioticist signification, is understood to be real material activities: They are governed by regularities (habits, if not laws) that can be discovered and explained. They are intrinsic in living nature, but we can access them, not directly, but indirectly through other sign processes (measurements for instance) - even though the human representation and understanding of these processes (in the construction of explanations) builds up as a separate scientific sign system distinct from the organisms' own sign processes.
8. The tremendous expansion of research into the mechanics of inheritance is accompanied by a growing realization that the complexity of life activity cannot be easily unified by mechanical theory (see Hoffmeyer "Biosemiotics: Towards a New Synthesis in Biology" European Journal for Semiotic Studies Vol. 9 No. 2, 1997 pp. 355-376). The difficulties of developing a unified mechanical theory even for evolutionary processes (we've come a long way since Dawkins wrote) has made Uexküll and Sebeok's work much more attractive to bioscience than ever before. Hoffmeyer and Emmeche are the leading figures in this development in Europe and the US while Alexei Sharov has been the most prominent thinker in this area in Russia.
HOFFMEYER, EMMECHE AND SHAROV: 9. Hoffmeyer and Emmeche: Hoffmeyer and Emmeche, share with Kant the objective of determining the universals that govern activity. They go one better than Kant, and search for the universals that govern all life activity, from the DNA molecule in the Zygote to the writing of important articles in the European Journal for Semiotic Studies. Hoffmeyer even goes so far as to suggest that consciousness is not a truly important part of creatively selective activity.
10. The problem of the origin of semiosis for Hoffmeyer and Emmeche is the acquisition by pre-biotic systems of the capacity to impart significance (essence) to the differences in their environment. They posit that the necessary and sufficient conditions for a system to make distinctions in this sense is that it has developed self-reference based on code-duality, i.e. the continued chain of digital-analogue (i.e. DNA cell) re-interpretations guiding the genealogical descent (Hoffmeyer 1997). The basic idea of code duality and self-representation is the existence of a digital codifier (like DNA, RNA, or what have you) and an interpretant (zygote, cell, or organism) that is able to read the digital info as structure and process and reproduce an analogue of the object (the Phenotype) recorded digitally (the Genotype) by the codifier (Hoffmeyer and Emmeche 1991 in M. Anderson and Floyd Merrell eds On Semiotic Modelling pp. 117-166).
11. Evolution, Natural Selection, an external mechanism, explains the development of semiosis over time (after all the theory itself, like all Kantian and Neo-Kantian theory contains no internal dynamic to explain change). Naturally, the focus of the Hoffmeyer - Emmeche model on semiosis leads them to propose that the natural selective process discriminates between semiotic systems rather than on genetic or on anatomic-economic activity. This is a revolutionary proposal in the context of the Standard Model of Natural Selection since what is selected are intra- and interspecies interactional systems rather than species themselves. Hoffmeyer (1997) further postulates that evolution maximizes sophistication of semiotic interactions, i.e. semiotic freedom, as well as enhanced information content. He writes in the same article: "And to the extent evolution favours the establishment of refined semiotic interaction patterns between species, it will also tend to open the way for a multitude of physical interactions between species. In this perspective symbiotic relations are not to considered just funny accidents, rather they constitute a systematically occurring phenomenon in the semiosphere {cf. Salthe 1993 Development and Evolution: chap. 6]".
12. Play, (Hoffmeyer uses Bateson's (1979 Mind and Nature) description of play as experimental interaction as opposed to ritual) to explain the input of new semiotic systems into the Natural Selection meat grinder. Interestingly, he recognizes that as play pushes semiotic freedom upwards it becomes virtually impossible (as games become more complex they tend to produce no-win results) to measure the stakes of individual players (individuals, demes, or species) in the game, and suggests that Natural Selection does not discriminate between individual semiotic systems, but rather between different kinds of play activity.
13. Despite his insinuation that species selection may not be as central to Natural Selection as represented in the Standard Model, Hoffmeyer returns speciation back into the selective process by suggesting that species selection operates in favour of increased sophistication of mate recognition or, better, of recognition all the cues in the environment that influence reproductive activities in the direction of demic isolation. Thus, semiotics might hold the essential clue to the origin of species.
14. Tommi Vehkavaara (1998 Some Conceptual Extensions in Biosemiotics and the Extended Concept of Knowledge) describes the Hoffmeyer - Emmeche model as extension of the concept of subjectivity into what is inherently unconscious activity. They are not the first to have done this, Franklin Pierce, the American pragmatist and semiologist-logician. Pierce theorized that essence can be arrived at without consciousness if the subjective meaning, the interpretant should be defined simply as the appropriate reaction of an interpreter when the sign starts to represent the object for the interpreter.
15. Hoffmeyer and Emmeche's model is clear as regards the identity of the interpreter of the digital information system as analogue, i.e. the cell or zygote or for that matter the human individual. On the other hand, the interpretation and identity of the interpreter of the object as digital information is ambiguous to say the least. The interpretation of the object as digital occurs at a different level from the former process and the interpreter is identified as the population or lineage of an evolving group. This group is generally not reducible to individual cells, so the link between object to digital and digital to analogue must be realized by some sort of (non-conscious) interaction between individuals and groups. Hoffmeyer identifies this link in the Swarm (Hoffmeyer 1997 The Swarming Body); Swarms being self-organized groups of minor subjects capable of coherent collective functioning. This is only a partial solution since both Hoffmeyer and Emmeche are insistent that the object represented by the digital presentation is a whole organism and not just a co-operating collectivity.
16. The Russian biosemiologist, Alexei Sharov, more or less resolves the question by clearer distinguishing between the interpreter and the interpretant, i.e. the interpretant is the product of the interpreter (the descendent is the product of the interpretation of the interpreter, cell, zygote, organism). He also argues (and here we begin to see where Sharov "is coming from") that the object must exist before the digital representation and that representation is further manifested by the formation of the interpretant (Vehkavaara 1998). The problem with Sharov's argument is that his interpretant (the gene frequency in the descendent population) is not a true interpreter of the object. Though Sharov's interpretant, the descendants (the gene frequency of the descendent population) the fact of differential reproduction in the descendent population does indeed effect the relation of interpreter with the environment such that certain objects are selected for digitalisation as contrasted with others that are ignored or discarded.
17. Sharov's general reasoning concerning biosemiotics differs somewhat from that of Hoffmeyer and Emmeche. He also proposes a dual system, but he represents this dual system as consisting of a the macro-features of structure or of material and its representation by the micro-features of information bearing media or ideality. Remind you of anyone you know? Well, here's another hint. The material world is independent because its dynamics can be predicted along all stable trajectories, while the ideal world can interfere in this process only at unstable bifurcation (choice) points. I'll quote the rest of the paragraph (Sharov 1992 Biosemiotics: Functional-Evolutionary Approach to the Analysis of the Sense of Information from Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok (ed.) Biosemiotics, The Semiotic Web): "That's why such [bifurcation points] points are essential for the function of actual information. The more is the number of unstable points the more matter is 'spiritualised'. It becomes clear why physics predicts the movement of a stone perfectly but cannot predict the movement of a man." (And that should confirm without a doubt where Sharov is coming from)!
18. Sharov recognizes that while the interpretation of matter into informational code describes the material world in an "ideal" form, it does not truly indicated essence or significance. To produce essence he introduces the concept of value as the third element of the system (or the second element of the signifying process). In general, value is interpreted as purpose or utility, a conscious activity, which is not a useful concept for describing the non-conscious activities of primitive life. Sharov suggests that since purpose perishes after being combined with the system (if the purpose is attained there is no more purpose), value must be separable from purpose. As he sees it, value is immanent to its bearer. It can be thought of as a purpose as it is combined with a system, as 'entellehia' (his term, not mine) or 'containing purpose'. Thus, Sharov represents value as objectively measurable by the coefficient of reproduction. Value, in this sense, exists as a function of processes of self-maintenance and self-reproduction, or, in other words, as equivalent to the system's ability to support survival and reproduction of the information that embodies the system. In this fashion, Sharov avoids the extended subjectivity suggested by the Hoffmeyer-Emmeche model, but at the cost of producing a pseudo-biosemiotic system (see Vehkavaara critique above)
19. Sharov's material description of essence-value enables him to adopt a view of Natural Selection, less radical than that of Hoffmeyer and Emmeche. Sharov regards the development of self-replicating systems as the development of sense expansion in time and space through discrimination in favour of value by Natural Selection. Sharov concurs with Teilhard de Chardin's idea of non-living nature as pre-life, containing ideality in its rudimental form. The origin of life is in the assignment of value through Natural Selection of this rudimentary ideality, thereby imparting to it essence and transforming it into information. The introduction of essence into the natural world produces matter that can extend itself in time and space by reproducing offspring and actively interact with its environment. By interacting with its surroundings, the self-reproducing matter incorporates elements of the latter into its internal system or, in other words, its internal space.
GENERAL CRITIQUE OF BIOSEMIOTICS: 20. I will limit the criticism of Biosemiotics to 3 main points: 1. Its absolute (or nearly absolute) obliviousness to the role of social life; conscious and unconscious in the development of semiotic systems. 2. It's fundamentally ahistorical conception of development. 3. It's failure to account for the development of learning in virtually all multi-celled organisms and of consciousness in all vertebrates and possibly in some of the invertebrates.
21. In general, the biosemoticists ignore the role of social life in the development of semiotic systems. Hoffmeyer and Emmeche's approach is unabashedly a subjectivist one in which the whole semiotic process is regarded as an immanent feature of organism without almost any need to postulate a learning process much less the formation of normative representations (ideas) to account for knowledge and thought. I write here, "almost", because of Hoffmeyer's only partially successful effort to identify the interpreter of the object with the swarm, which is, indeed, a primitive and non-conscious sort of sociality. The effort is only partially successful since Hoffmeyer, in the final analysis, cannot actually account for the actual physical link between the swarm and the single cell member (the digital interpreter). Sharov's adoption of Dubrovsky's avowedly non-social materialism is implicit in his definition of ideality as a purely subjective, or, in this case, individual property. Though Sharov does present a tolerable theory for conditioned learning, ideality and value, i.e. information does not exist outside the bounds of the individual and he encounters considerable difficulty in determining an objective medium whereby information acquired through conditioning is transferred from individual to individual. The best he can do is propose that similarity of macro- (material) and micro- (ideal) fields of related organisms enables them to communicate through the use of shared signs, which is about as precise a representation as any of Kant's ideas of common understanding (see Ilyenkov, 1974 Dialectical Logic chap. 3 and 5) .
22. The object of Hoffmeyer, Emmeche and Sharov's work is to produce a single theory that encompasses the semiotic activities of all life forms from the retrovirus to man. In truth, all three recognize that human semiotic activity is quite different from that of primitive life (Hoffmeyer identifying the nearly total independence of human consciousness from natural restraints and Sharov in recognizing that human semiotic activity is associated with man's virtually absolute control over the properties of his environment), but none of them can account for these strange developments within the context of their theoretical formulations. It appears to me that the failure of Hoffmeyer's argument that the swarm is the interpreter of the object arises out of his attempt to unite the swarm and cell in a simple synthesis. In fact, the swarm represents a dialectical negation of the cell and that it is out of this dialectical negation that one might generate the fully organized multicellular life form. By regarding the relation between cell, swarm, and multicellular organism as a dialectical process, Hoffmeyer might have been able to postulate a parallel history of semiosis involving distinct processes for each stage of organizational development, each stage of semiosis negating and sublating the prior stages in a truly historical schema for semiotic development.
23. Without a consideration of the impact of social life on the development of semiotic systems and committed to an abstract, ahistorical representation of semiotic activity, the proponents of biosemiotics cannot account for the development of the very consciousness that enables them to reflect on natural phenomenon and to construct ideas about it. It's hard to believe that the same processes whereby the ambient bacterium senses a good meal just a little to his starboard bow is the same as that produced the papers on biosemiotics.
Links on Biosemiotics: The international biosemiotics page Overview of Gatherings in Biosemiotics The S.E.E.D. Journal (Semiotics, Evolution, Energy, and Development) Jakob von Uexküll Centre Zoosemiotics Home Page Biosemiotics Home Page
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