Jon, If you mean “start” as in time, that is irrelevant to the emergence issue here. If you mean dynamically or logically emergent (or both if you follow my analysis of emergence in dynamical terms) then I fail to see the point you are trying to make. My analysis is in A dynamical account of emergence<http://web.ncf.ca/collier/papers/A%20Dynamical%20Account%20of%20Emergence.pdf> (Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 15, no 3-4 2008: 75-100), among other places.
John Collier Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Assoicate, UKZN http://web.ncf.ca/collier From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:jawb...@att.net] Sent: Wednesday, 30 December 2015 3:12 PM To: John Collier Cc: Søren Brier; Stephen C. Rose; Peirce List Subject: Re: Triadic Philosophy • Sign Relations John, Søren, Stephen, all, I have always found “emergent talk” to constitute a kind of backhanded reductionism. Being irreducible means never having to say it wasn't. That is, triadic relational irreducibility must have been there from the start. Jon http://inquiryintoinquiry.com On Dec 30, 2015, at 5:01 AM, John Collier <colli...@ukzn.ac.za<mailto:colli...@ukzn.ac.za>> wrote: Søren, I have argued for some time that if Peircean thirds are irreducible they must be emergent. I see no reason to doubt that. I think that Deacon’s views are reductionist in some respects, though he is changing that slowly (he quotes me on information in his second book, for example, but I don’t think he absorbed the significance of the quote). I believe that information is fundamental, and that it is physical, but that is not a materialist view. I don’t see Stjernfelt the same way as you do. He doesn’t talk about self-organization or emergence directly, but he does think that thirds are irreducible. His arguments about the centrality of dicisigns don’t make a lot of sense otherwise. But perhaps he is a more cryptic version of Marcello Barbieri. I doubt that, though. Marcello is indeed very much upfront that he doesn’t see Piece as scientific. I have argued that his views imply anti-reductionism, however, in spite of himself. He denies that. Howard Pattee disappointed Marcello when he said he took a basically antireductionist view on meaning. My views are similar to Howard’s but I don’t like his epistemic and other cuts. I see the problem they are supposed to address; I don’t think they are a solution. Even if you take a non-materialist view (idealist or neutral) there is still a problem of how local consciousness emerges. But I think that from our previous discussions we might disagree about that last point. John Collier Professor Emeritus, UKZN http://web.ncf.ca/collier From: Søren Brier [mailto:sb....@cbs.dk] Sent: Tuesday, 29 December 2015 6:50 PM To: John Collier; Stephen C. Rose; Peirce List Subject: SV: [PEIRCE-L] Triadic Philosophy -- Sign Dear John and Stephen I think there is an ontological difference between your views as Deacon and to a certain degree Stjernfelt’ s views are based on ,to me unclear “scientific worldviews”, which in the end means physicalism. None of them has taken a clear opposition to physicalism. They are not mechanical materialist but believe in thermodynamic self-organization through Prigogine’s non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Deacon is close to general system theory but does not accept it openly probably because Bertalanffy was an organicist and therefore not compatible with the physicalist scientific worldview. Never the less he endorse a developmental theory combined with evolution theory from matter, over objective information to icons. Stuart Kaufmann seems also to attempt to make signs emerge from a physicalist worldview. Stjernfelt seem to run a standard scientific ontology parallel with a Peircean semiotic as far as I can read, never going into self-organization and theories of emergence. But in my view a Peircean icon does not work without his whole pragmaticist philosophy with its foundation in his hylozoist, thycistic ontology, combined with his aesthetics, ethics and semiotic logic as the base of his phaneroscopic epistemology. There are a lot of attempts to use Peirce’s semiotics and pragmaticism on other philosophical foundations than the one he painstakingly developed over his life. One of the more obvious is Barbieri’s codebiology, but he is so honest and explicit in his argumentation that it is possible to discuss it, as I have done in the attached article from Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. Am I wrong? Best Søren Fra: John Collier [mailto:colli...@ukzn.ac.za] Sendt: 29. december 2015 04:13 Til: Stephen C. Rose; Peirce List Emne: RE: [PEIRCE-L] Triadic Philosophy -- Sign Stephen, List, That is similar to Terry Deacon’s view in The Symbolic Species (1997), and also later in Incomplete Nature (2012). He argues that the evolution of symbols starts with icons, icons combine to form indexes, and we end up with, in humans, full symbols. Frederick Stjernflelt takes issue with this (Diagrammatology, chapter 11, 2007; Natural Propositions, chapter 6, 2014), arguing that dicisigns can be found, and are needed, right back to the beginning of signs in biology, so that (proto)symbolic symbols and arguments as well are original, both factually and as a requirement for understanding how signs evolved. I am currently inclined to agree with Stjernfelt (Collier, 2014, Signs without minds. V. Romanini, E. Fernández (eds.), Peirce and Biosemiotics, Biosemiotics 11), though I didn’t know about his work at the time. John Collier Professor Emeritus, UKZN http://web.ncf.ca/collier From: Stephen C. Rose [mailto:stever...@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, 29 December 2015 3:47 AM To: Peirce List Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Triadic Philosophy -- Sign I see a sign as something that emerges in the vague penumbra called First or by me Reality. It is named and acquires identity rising from its primal being. It naturally encounters a blunt index of truths which I call Ethics (Second) and is composed of Values (not virtues) and from there it passes through a the doorway to the Third which I call Aesthetics and understand to be the point at which the consideration, which this is, evolves into expression and action. In terms of Peirce's maxim this Third is the the substance of the matter. When I see folk discussing signs and firsts and seconds and thirds in highly complex ways I do not think I am thereby missing the possibilities of Triadic thought. I feel its possibilities lie in a little leap from the point at which Peirce implies that logic might lead to good results to a point at which Triadic thinking actually does lead to such results. I am coming to feel that Peirce's thought is a mite confused at the point of getting grounded and that categories became for him a sort of detour from a a more frontal effort to state the implications of his thought. Fortunately he left a good deal to go on. Books http://buff.ly/15GfdqU
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