Dear Stan, Koichiro, list You confuse two elementary issues, as far as I can see: 1) signs participating in our construction of sciences; 2) signs as the object of scientific study. The example you refer to pertain to issue 1): we take temperature to be a representamen of thermodynamic conditions because we know temperature is a function of those conditions. The signs which all and every science is built from represent causal, formal and other connections in reality - but those connections , apart from science, are not in themselves semiotic of nature. What I refer to is issue 2): physics does not study signification processes which can be seen from the fact that such processes do not form part of the object of physics. The opposite is the case in biology where semiotic processes form part of the object of that science, from the lowest (genetic code) to the highest (animal communication) levels.
Of course, you may chose to redefine purely physical processes as "semiotic", thereby using the word in another sense. I think that by doing so, you generalize the notion of semiotics into insignificance, and, what is worse, make the project of semiotics seem overblown and irrelevant to a scientific worldview. Best F Den 11/09/2014 kl. 03.09 skrev Koichiro Matsuno <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>: At 11:24 PM 09/10/2014, Stan wrote: So, then it would be appropriate to say that temperature is a representamen of thermodynamic conditions (heat energy) as well as a sign of the state of statistical mechanical conditions (particle dispersion). Yes, temperature in thermodynamics is general enough as leaving its numerical value unspecified because of the scheme’s under-completeness while it is concrete enough in determining the macrostate in statistical mechanics. Temperature is thus a mediator between something general and something particular. Semiosis may have its own birth in the chasm between thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, among others. Koichiro
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