[Fis] Meaning. Meaningfulness. Meaning of Meaningfulness.

[Fis] Meaning. Meaningfulness. Meaning of Meaningfulness.

From: Jerry LR Chandler <[email protected]>
Date: Mon 06 Feb 2006 - 17:04:43 CET

Loet:

Yes!

First, I should point out that my reference frame is usually the
individual human being, the individual patient in a physician's
office, the individual mathematician, the individual farmer, the
individual dynamic system within an ecosis. I suspect that your
reference frame is the social system composed from such individuals.

Secondly, I inadvertently made reference to my personal works on the
pathways of emergence of symbolic logics from chemical symbols that
are not discussed on this FIS list serve, so that my remarks were not
fully in context.

A few comments are interwoven in the text.

Loet, I have interwoven some comments
On Feb 6, 2006, at 6:27 AM, Loet Leydesdorff wrote:

>
> If one considers that the conservation rules of chemistry ensure
> the preservation of symbolic meanings in hierarchies, then I fail
> to see the logic basis of your conclusion.
>
> The preservation of chemical identity is intrinsic to the
> construction of chemical hierarchies and to the composition of
> living systems from nutrients. In what sense should meaning extend
> beyond the essence of matter and dynamics?
>
>
> Dear Jerry, John, and colleagues,
>
> In my opinion, Jerry brings here precisely to the point what has
> remained an open question in our discussion. Meaning has to
> preserved in hierarchies at the chemical and biological level.

Yes. Living systems are constructed and function on the basis of such
"Meaning".

> In discourse, meaning can be deconstructed and reconstructed, and
> therefore is at variance. The question then is: how much is it
> constrained by historical contingencies?
>
Loet, I think the sentiment is meaningful but perhaps to broad.
Perhaps the sentence implies an exactness of meaning, the
meaningfulness that permits a logical analysis of the sentence or
sentiment.
Public discourse, public media, the arts, etc, use exploratory
meanings as a way of exploring spaces of meanings.
But not all discourse is public.
Professional discourse is meaningful - for example, mathematics papers.
Personal discourse between two lovers can be meaningful - even in
separate languages.
So, "discourse" sort of implies at least two individual systems and
some sort of back and forth between them. In other words,
communication.

>
> Let us first consider the psychological level. Is the Cogito part
> of the phase space? This has been a subject of intense
> philosophical discussion (mind/body problem, determination/free
> will, etc.). Obviously, the Cogito is constrained and the space for
> variation in providing psychological meaning to events
> (information) is limited. However, the intersubjectivity among
> Cogitantes--that which Husserl calls the Cogitatum--does no longer
> have to be constrained. The depends on its organization.
>
Yes. But, each individual generates their psychological state in
real time. I have no reason to believe that any two individuals have
the same psychological states. Indeed, I would argue from the basis
of genetics that no two individuals can have exactly the same
psychological states.

> The hierarchical organization of society is associated in the
> sociological literature with the high cultures like the Holy Roman
> Empire. The breaking of this order is considered as modernization.
> Luther's call to provide the Bible with new meaning by private
> reading can be considered symbolic for this. The printing press,
> etc., then also allowed for new meaning to be codified, that is,
> temporarily fixed but open for de- and reconstruction. The social
> system seems a system that has to remain on this borderline between
> fixing meanings and reconstructing them. The fixing is needed for
> us (as contingencies) and for us to live in institutions, but not
> intrinsic to the operation.

The mathematical community continues to insist that the text has a
single meaningfulness.
So, we must semantically distinguish between the notion of
communication with an exactness and the notion of communication that
transfers some degree of meaningfulness but less than exact.

(Shannon, of course, insisted on exactness of information transfer
and devised a mathematical method that detected the failure of
exactness and furthermore, another mathematical method to correct the
error such that the original message was restorable to its exact form.)

>
> It seems to me that if meaning can be a source of variance, it can
> no longer be considered as fixed.

I have suggested above that meaningfulness need not be exact, based
on individual (biological) preparation for the communication.
This does not invoke statistical analysis of messages. (I suppose
that you introduce "variance" in a statistical sense.)

This suggests that the issue is the distinction between a single
unique meaning for every text (perhaps the goal of mathematics and
physics, the "for all time and place" syndrome,) and the
contingencies intrinsic to biological communication among individual
biological organisms.

BTW, I think Aristotle avoided the categorical error, in part, by
separating the concepts of individual from species and the concepts
of species from genera.
 From the bio - logic point of view, this Aristotelian distinction is
vital. The reduction FROM the concept of individual - species -
genera TO the set theory basis of merely individual and genera is
genuinely unhealthy for communication.

On a separate topic, the topic of the Robert Rosen's works, it
appears that the critical distinction between

"mechanics" as mathematics (that is, all of mathematics as merely
mechanical positionings of symbols)

"mechanics" as chemical structure and change (for example, catalysis
of chemical bond changes)

is not understood by many.

The curious reader is referred to the last chapter of Rosen's "Life
Itself" for this rather fine semantic and syntactic distinction.

Cheers

Jerry

Jerry LR Chandler
Research Professor
Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study
George Mason University

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Received on Mon Feb 6 17:08:58 2006


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