SV: tech. note & comments

Dear Pedro

        You write:
> - I cannot help but reiterating my present skepticism about the
> deepest
> ontological considerations. When Cao and Aitchison (1997, Nature, 388,
> p.
> 340) discuss, in the context of theoretical physics, about STRUCTURAL
> REALISM (I played by heart and partially failed with the term in my
> last
> message--thanks, Soeren), they hold that "the structural relations
> between
> entities (often expressed by mathematical structure) in a succesful
> theory
> should be taken as real, rather than the entities themselves".
>
It is one of the points that I would like to underline in my view -
based on Peirce - that the relations, processes and regularities
(thirdness) are just as real as particles and things.

Again - with Peirce- I think you have two choices about metaphysics:
Either you discuss it consciously or your are controlled by it
unconsciously. It is always there, but has been suppressed in the
sciences and most researchers are now unconscious mechanistic realists.
That is why it is necessary to discuss metaphysics again.

You doubt that we know enough at this stage of research to get anywhere
with metaphysical discussions.

I do not think that we can reach an agreement on a precise metaphysics,
but we might agree on that a few of them are not compatible with the
facts we have now or when somebody attempts to make a grand synthesis
-like Tom - there are some metaphysics that are not compatible with the
theory. That is anyway one of my problems with Tom's theory that it
seems to be raised on an implicit mechanistic foundation but actually
suggest a theory that is not compatible with this foundation, as far as
I understand him. Things like that really bothers me, and it takes the
beauty out of theories. So I would really like Tom - as the father of an
explicit grand theory - to try to clarify that here. Maybe my
understanding is wrong or maybe we could clear up some foundational
problems that would pave the way for further development. This is after
all FIS.

Finally you actually talk about "language" on other levels than human
social. In the pragmatic view language are organized in language games -
like the scientific one we are playing now. But to use the concept
language we usually demand a syntax, the ability to make meaningful
sentences and some generative principles to make new meaningful
sentences appear. With biosemiotics I think that what animals exchange -
and even what cells exchange - should be called signs. I have suggested
that we call the vocabulary of signs and the life forms or context
within which they work, instead of languages, for 'sign games'. This was
again epistemological and ontological aspects that were necessary to
make clear.

In my opinion to work with FIS is to a great extend to try to make some
of these metaphysical assumptions clear enough to be discussed in a
fruitful way.
Received on Wed Dec 17 14:26:03 1997