John C.,
Just curious, by an _/individual species/_ do you mean something like an
individual kind or do you mean (and I suspect that you don't) the
species population as a large, somewhat scattered, collective concrete
individual?
Best, Ben
On 5/26/2015 2:27 PM, John Collier wrote:
We mean something different by “individual”, Edwina. I am using it in
the sense that species are individuals. It was David HulI who put the
ecologists onto me because of my work on individuality. I don’t think
that further discussion with you on this topic is likely to be
fruitful for either of us.
John
From: Edwina Taborsky
Sent: May 26, 2015 8:23 PM
To: John Collier; [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] RE: [biosemiotics:8690] Re: self-R
I don't see an ecosystem as an individual but as a system, in its
case, a CAS. It doesn't have the distinctive boundaries of an
individual - either temporally or spatially. I see a human being as a
system, in that its parts co-operate in a systemic manner; and it is
also an individual - with distinctive temporal and spatial
boundaries. But a human being is not a CAS, for it lacks the wide
range of adaptive flexibility and even transformative capacities of a
CAS.
I have long argued that societies are a CAS; they are socioeconomic
ecological systems, operating as logical adaptations to environmental
realities - which include soil, climate, water, plant and animal
typologies etc. All of these enable a particular size of population
to live in the area and this in turn, leads to a particular method of
both economic and political organization.
Unfortunately, the major trends in the social sciences have been to
almost completely ignore this area - except within the alienated
emotionalism of AGW or Climate Change...Instead, the social sciences
tend to view 'culture' or 'ideology' as the prime causal factors in
societal development and organization. Whereas I view these areas as
emotionalist psychological explanations, as verbal narratives for the
deeper causal factors of ecology, demographics, economic modes.
Edwina
----- Original Message -----
From: John Collier
To: John Collier ; [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Sent: Tuesday, May 26, 2015 1:59 PM
Subject: [PEIRCE-L] RE: [biosemiotics:8690] Re: self-R
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