Re: Is FIS in semiotics?

From: Pedro C. Mariju�n <[email protected]>
Date: Fri 19 Jul 2002 - 14:07:38 CEST

Dear discussants and FISers all,

About John C's initial warning on entering the 'abduction garden' we have
an idiom in Spanish ('meterse en un jard�n') that means candidly placing
oneself into a labyrinth. So, the caveat in Spanish sounded both prudent
and humorous. Well, the notion of a labyrinth may capture our info problem
rather than the passage in between Scila and Caribdis --and we can insert a
few more interesting referents than just Shannon and McLuhan only, for
instance those three classics, Adam Smith with the 'invissible hand' as a
metaphor for info distributed causation, Cajal with his intriguing
'principle of brain economy', and of course Darwin's towering 'fitness
optimization', etc.

I briefly return to the biological origins of the present abduction
exchanges. We have a system, the cell, with a peculiar macro-meso-micro
organizational texture. Let us liberally assume that we can characterize
those three levels by the recent discussions here in our list: macro with
James' purpose, meso with Cristophe constraints, micro with my fuzzy mol.
recognition, and the ongoing communication dynamics with Jerry�s category
model. Abduction (in my opinion) enters the picture to characterize how
these organization levels interact so that the entity relates to its
environment in an autonomously changing way, selectively, teleonomically.
Well, that phenomenon or that capacity to select (depending on its 'needs'
or goals) the boundary conditions with wich the system is going to
informationally (and energetically) interact, is what could be called
abduction. The biological agent abduces its environmental coupling...
Anyhow, apart from writing the above while taking the customary pinch of
salt, I invite Juan to retake his line on the interest to distinguish, from
the physical perspective, the especial relationship of the living with its
boundary conditions.

About Edwina's comments on McLuhan, in natural science we rarely place
dismissive 'labels' on authors --semioticians included. We care whether
they are interesting or not. And McLuhan (obviously without following in
all the extremes) was a pioneer in quite many regards: multidisciplinary
approach to info, evolutionary nature of social info, criticisms of
specialism and of engineering views (Shannon), etc. Particularly, his
'understanding media' is splendid. In the coming sessions --not perhaps
right now, let us keep within this mostly bio discussions-- I will much
welcome a reasoned discussion on the pros and cons of this author --not
just whether he belonged to the Secondary, Triasic or Quaternary.
Seriously, IMO, both the theoretical abscences and presences in his scheme
are very important for our analysis of social info, which is another
garden-labyrinth to visit in some of the next conference sessions.

Finally, I would like to refer to the 'timing' dimension that is so
apparent in the cellular and social usages of info. Related to that, in
both domains, what I call the 'industry of novelty' tends to occupy more
and more of the systemic activities... But am afraid that following that
path would make this message too long.

Best wishes

Pedro

          
Received on Fri Jul 19 14:08:35 2002

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