Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6231] Re: biosemiotics is the basis for

Tue, 29 Jul 2014 00:46:23 -0700

At 11:28 PM 2014-07-28, Clark Goble wrote:
(Sorry for any repeats - I accidentally sent several emails from the wrong account so they didn’t make it to the list)

On Jul 26, 2014, at 7:28 PM, Sungchul Ji <[email protected]> wrote:

Peircean scholars and philosophers in general seem to find it difficult
(or trivial) to distinguish between the two categories of structures,
equilibrium and dissipative, probably because most philosophies have been
done with written, not spoken, words since the invention of writing.

A perhaps pedantic quibble. I think philosophy has been conducted with writing really just since the modern era and even then only on a large scale in more recent centuries. It’s just that the major works of philosophy that we have recorded are written. However I think for a large portion of our history (and perhaps arguably even today or at least until the advent of email) philosophy was dialogical in nature.

Of course I think there’s a continuum between what you call equilibrium and dissipative (I’m a bit unsure what you mean by equilibrium - apologies if you’ve clarified this before. I’m behind in reading the list) Writing is frequently lost after all, we reinterpret its meanings as new contexts are introduced, etc. And of course old recordings degrade over time. Even data stored on hard drive loses data and can become corrupt. At the end all we have are traces of the original dialog. To follow Derrida (although he makes his point in an annoyingly petulant way) all we have are traces rather than some pure presence of communication we call speech.

I made the relevant distinctions in a book chapter in 1990, but I had to introduce some new concepts and definitions to the usual thermodynamic ones. The lack of those has caused multiple confusions and misunderstandings when I have discussed the issues on mailing lists. In particular I argued that dissipative and non-dissipative is a scale dependent distinction. The goal was to ask what the world must be like if we get information from the world, as some philosophers hold. At that time I thought that semiotics was too far from my audience that I didn't mention it, tough I have dome some extensions in later papers.

John
Professor John Collier                                     [email protected]
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
 
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