Re: abduction

Hi Edwina, John, Pedro and all

thanks to Edwina and John for further co-thinking.
Yes, I agree with Pedro that abduction has become
a major point of our discussions.
We could define abduction as a process that starts
with effects and looks for causes (like in a detective
story). Is life abduction? Or, less dramatically, what
do we obtain (what for?) if we look at life
AS abduction? Does abduction grasps phenomenologically
what life is about? If a cell is *attacked* by a virus
can the process of *re-cognition* be described as
abduction? is re-pro-duction ab-duction?
Life and understanding (biology and hermeneutics) seem
to me to be like too poles: we start from one and come
to the other, and vice versa. Life is *symptomatic* in the
sense that it proceeds on an *in-formational* basis: i.e.
it trans-forms given forms following *rules*.
The process of (human) understanding can be described
as a process of perception of differences (following Gregory
Bateson's definition of information as a difference that makes
a difference). Is life a way of making a difference through
abduction? A cell *constitutes* its *world* by
giving raise to a forming process that *allows* something
to become *real* following a *form*. According to Luhman
there is a *difference* between *media* and *form* in
the sense that *media* are *elements* of forms (but
there is not such a thing as a *final element* so that
the difference is recurrent: we may say that a cell,
for instance, uses different *media* (=elements)
to *construct* its world but... the world is not identical
with what a cell constructs *as* (its) world.
Although reality construction is media-dependent,
reality is not just the result of media construction.
But *reality* for a cell is not the same as *reality*
for us in the sense that we are much less dependent
on a fixed pre-understanding (which concerns not
only things, but, more basically, what we conceive
as being *real* or not, i.e. the concept of being
itself...).
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
Tel. : +49 - 711 - 25 706 - 182
Universit�t Stuttgart, Institut f�r Philosophie, Dillmannstr. 15, 70049
Stuttgart, Germany
Private: Redtenbacherstr. 9, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany. Tel.: +49 - 721 -
98 22 9 -22 (fax: -21)
Homepage in German/English/Spanish/French: www.capurro.de
ICIE (International Center for Information Ethics): http://icie.zkm.de
Received on Sat Jul 27 16:51:49 2002