Biosemiotic Cosmogony of the Riddle of Life!

摘要

The book, edited and with a very instructive introduction by Vinicius and Fernandez, contains chapters by: Nathan Hauser; Ivo Ibri; Robert Lane; Elisio Fernandez; Menno Hulswit and Vinicius Roraanini; Vincent Colapietro; Lauro Fredrico Barbosa da Silveira and Maria Eunice Quilici Gonzales; Winfred Noth; John Collier; Joao Queiros, Frederik Stjernfelt, and Charbel Nino El-Hani; and, Vinicius Romanini-all contributing to the development of a more consistent and true Peircean foundation for biosemiotics. In my view this is one of the most philosophically remarkable publications in the Springer biosemiotics series. The subject choices and the quality of its contributions make it a delight to read, though it does not make for light reading. The book attacks the problem of how to make the best possible use of Peirce's new philosophical transdisciplinary framework in order to produce a paradigmatic background for biosemiotics, which does not really exist yet. The difficulty is biosemiotics's position between-or overlapping-the quantitative and the qualitative sciences as well as the natural, social, and human sciences. One of the big and very relevant problems in the many foundational years of biosemiotics-discussed with Marcello Barbieri who edited the first volume of the series-which still has not been solved is the problem of what it means to be scientific. For Barbieri-and many other well-established researchers in the natural sciences-to be scientific is to be able to give mechanistic model explanations and eventually extend them with dualist theories of codes and coding. In Brier (2015), I have recapitulated an aspect of this discussion and argued that this foundation is not enough. It does not even embrace a systems and cybernetic foundation. To be able to produce models of self-organization, as well as cognitive and communicative meaning processes, as explanations, we need triadic models. In this book the consequences for the foundations of a true triadic view of what the dynamism of the cosmos, living nature, culture, and mind means for biosemiotics is investigated from this quote from Peirce himself: