Re: Is FIS in semiotics?

John and Edwina,

very interesting discussion on abduction. Thanks.
I think it is time to talk about the relation of
semiotics and hermeneutics and... to see if this
brings something to information science (related
particularly to biology). There is, first of all, the
triadic relation. It is a classical (particularly since
Heideggers Being and Time � 32) topic of hermeneutics
to make a distinction between:
(pre-)understanding - interpretation - understanding - new
pre-understanding...
The main point in this *circle* (which is supposed to be
a *constructive* not a *vicious* circle) is, that interpretation
does not produces by itself an understanding *out of nothing*
but is always based (and *biased*) on a pre-understanding
that it makes explicit giving thus rise to a new pre-understanding etc.
This is related by Heidegger with regard to the existential
constitution of (human) existence and particularly with
regard to *signs* (Being and Time � 17) in the sense that
the formal relations ("Beziehungen") between signs (as explicited by
Husserl)
are not identical with the existentiall grounded relations ("Verweisungen")
in which we (in the life-world) are *already* immersed.
The point is now, in my view, to see how for in non-human living
nature (a cell, for instance) is *immersed* in a network of
*living relations* in such a way that the *horizons* of
pre-understanding-interpretation-understanding are more or less (!)
(how far?) fixed by *natural laws*. But there is a difference
between the way we (as observers) see these relations and the
way an organism *lives* within them (Koichiro's different between
two different *time* views: exo/endo-view). So the phenomenon
of *abduction* could be seen, within such a hermeutic perspective,
as something that questions a given (implicit) pre-understanding
giving rise to a process of interpretation. Within *natural
philosophy* (or *biophilosophy*) we could speak
of pre-formation - in-formation - (new)formation

kind regards
Rafael

Prof. Dr. Rafael Capurro, FH Stuttgart, Hochschule der Medien (HdM)
University of Applied Sciences, Wolframstr. 32, 70191 Stuttgart, Germany
E-Mail: capurro@hdm-stuttgart.de; rafael@capurro.de
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Received on Thu Jul 18 12:03:06 2002