RE: Is FIS in semiotics?

Dear John C & John H --and FIS colleagues

At 10.24 11/7/02 +0200, John Collier wrote:
>>If a (possibly non-Shannonist) information theory were to adopt 'meaning'
>>does it head off for a semantic bushwalk (with Frege, Fodor, Dretske et al)?
>>It might be more fruitful for our theory to explore a resonant concept like
>>'abduction'(which has attracted Gregory Bateson, C S Pierce and the radical
>>constructivists who have occasionally hovered over our conversations).
>
>I agree with the last, wholeheartedly. I am not at all convinced it is enough,
>or even on the right track ultimately, but definitely fruitful to explore.

I would love hearing further thoughts from you two, and any interested
party, about these different approaches to (philosophical?) abduction. In
my own excursions onto biological (cellular) abduction I have always
stumbled on the conceptual-cluster problem: the parallel need to articulate
coherently several impossible concepts (function, life cycle, knowledge,
symmetry-breaking, functional void...). I wonder whether, philosophically,
something similar occurs.

One possible referent to consider about abduction, besides the
philosophical conceptualizations, might be the social realm. I mean, what
is the 'info' mission of our means of communication? How do media fabricate
'news'? Actually, the doings and workings of the famous 'media' of our
societies, that we take for granted, were brought to the attention of
scholars by Marshall McLuhan. In spite of the rather unfavorable view that
most social scientists nowadays have on his work, I believe that he was
very fertile. Particularly, in some parts of his analysis the 'abduction'
idea looms. His slogan the 'media is the message' somehow suggests about
the 'voidness' landscape that accompanies the media abduction of
news... multiple 'bubbles' with almost nothing but a referent to an
outside, patchy framework. (But probably this is too biased an
interpretation of mine).

It would be very interesting that we could manage to establish a family
resemblance between the different approaches to abduction --philosophical,
biological, social...

best wishes

Pedro

=========================================
Pedro C. Mariju�n
Fundaci�n CIRCE
CPS, Univ. Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain
TEL. (34) 976 762036-761863, FAX (34) 976 732078
email: marijuan@posta.unizar.es
=========================================
Received on Tue Jul 16 13:32:50 2002