Søren, Gary R., list,
Søren, you wrote,
I'd say that it's with semiotics and semioses, as with statistics and stochastic processes. There are material statistics, biostatistics, etc., and the study of stochastic processes at those levels; e.g., chemical dynamics is stochastic. Then there is the general statistical study of stochastic processes more or less in the abstract - involving particular examples and applications, but not dedicated to any special class or 'domain' (as people sometimes like to say) of phenomena. I've also seen stochastic processes listed among the things considered in probability theory, which is a pretty high level of generality.
- But logic is semiotics? And semiosis is a process of relations and therefore quite a lot self-organizing through an evolution of meaning?
Peirce placed his discussion of statistical reasoning in the section on induction in critical logic in the 1902 Carnegie application. (In his time, reference to a subject simply as 'statistics' could be taken as a reference to accounts of human matters, like biography and history). As part of cenoscopic http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/terms/cenoscopy.html philosophy, general statistics is a study of positive phenomena in general, not this or that special class of phenomena. Questions OF general statistics are not resolved by special experiments; rather such statistics may point out when special experiments need to be done, how to design them, etc. As part of his philosophical logic, general statistics is part of logic as formal semiotic. He generally pursues the study of semiosis at the cenoscopic level, though he uses examples often from human life, and sometimes from a broader pool of phenomena. He considers evolution of meaning at various levels of abstract generality within philosophy. The closest to an idioscopic sense of 'evolution' is in his metaphysics, wherein evolution has three modes, tychasm, anancasm, and agapasm.
One could argue that, from a Peircean standpoint, decision processes and information processes (communication and control) would have the same variety of levels of study in terms of abstract generality as stochastic processes have. I know little about the study of self-organization, but I don't know why there shouldn't be a cenoscopic study of self-organization, as long as it is a study that rests mathematics and some philosophy, concerns observations within the range of everybody's normal range of experience during most of their waking time, and does not, of itself, treat of the kinds of questions that require special experiences or special experiments to resolve, even if it ought to be applied in treating of such questions.
I feel pretty confident in saying that self-organization (in the sense the produces and maintains cohesive properties and/or systems that have organized complexity) is not observable, but requires a fairly sophisticated set of abductions concerning underlying dynamics and their results. If so, I don't think there could be a cenoscopic study of self-organization.
Signs, as incorporating thirds, are irreducible. The only case of irreducible systems based in dynamics that I know of are self-organizing ones. So I abduce that all signs are grounded in self-organizing processes.
John
Professor John Collier colli...@ukzn.ac.za
Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa
T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031
Http://web.ncf.ca/collier
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
