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I've just received a notice about a new book from a long time friend
and colleague, Ron Cottam, which speaks, I suggest, to some of the
questions explored on this list. Bridging the Gap between Life and
Physics. Ron Cottam and Willy Ransom. Springer Press.
"This is the only book which deals with the correlatory comparison
between hierarchical living systems and inorganic physical ones. The
culmination of the book is the proposition of research to discover
and understand the natural underlying level of organization which
produces the descriptive commonality of life and physics. Traditional
science eliminates life from its purview by its rejection of
interrelationships as a primary content of systems. The conventional
procedure of science is that of reductionism, whereby complex systems
are dismantled to characterize lower level components, but virtually
no attention is given as to how to rebuild those systems - the
underlying assumption is that analysis and synthesis are symmetrical.
This book fulfills two main coupled functions. Firstly, it details
hierarchy as the major formulation of natural complex systems and
investigates the fundamental character of natural hierarchy as a
widely transferable 'container' of structure and/or function - and
this in the case of the new development of a representational or
model hierarchy. Secondly, it couples the hierarchical description to
that of the electronic properties of semiconductors, as a wellmodeled
canonical example of physical properties. The central thesis is that
these two descriptions are comparable, if care is taken to treat
logical and epistemological aspects....." [My emphasis]
Given the recent focus in this thread on terminology and singular
meanings and actions of each term - I wanted to re-iterate my focus
on the dynamic nature of semiosis, with its insistence that this
semiosic process is instead a process of 'interrelationships as a
primary content'..And that these interrelationships operate within
clear, bounded, hierarchies - i.e., which is the basis of the three
modal categories - for each category operates within a different
time and space.
My view is that a textual, i.e., definitional outline of terms used
by Peirce, although instructive in a limited sense, nevertheless
misses the key nature of semiosis, which is its nature as a complex
system, i.e., with 'interrelationships as the primary content,
operating within hierarchies of authority'.
Edwina
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