Abstract
Biosemiotics—a discipline in the process of becoming established as a new research enterprise—faces a double task. On the one hand it must carry out the theoretical and experimental investigation of an enormous range of semiotic phenomena relating organisms to their internal components and to other organisms (e.g., signal transduction, replication, codes, etc.). On the other hand, it must achieve a philosophical re-conceptualization and generalization of theoretical biology in light of the essential role played by semiotic notions in biological explanation and modeling. This paper attempts to contribute to the second task by tracing some aspects of the historical evolution of explanatory models in biology. In so doing, a parallel can be drawn between the present status of biosemiotics and that of physics during the early decades of the last century. By following the career of the concept instrument (organon) in Aristotelian science, we revisit historical stages of the antithetical (but often complementary) roles of mechanical and teleological forms of explanation. The impact of the introduction of the organic codes in biology is seen to be somewhat analogous to that of the introduction of the quantum of action in physics. Faced with intractable empirical facts, physicists combined experimental results and bold philosophical speculation to create quantum physics—a wider, deeper framework that accommodates the new facts through a wholesale reformulation of the classical ideas. Essential to this development was the articulation of the epistemic functions of instruments, which was absent from classical physics. Similarly, the consideration of the role of instruments in biology may lead to a synthesis of Aristotelian and Kantian intuitions within a wider framework capable of joining now separate perspectives, such as Jablonka’s four-fold view of inheritance information, Barbieri’s theory of artifactual copymakers and codemakers, and recently developed models of causation based on the idea of manipulative interventions.
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Notes
Abner Shimony calls this self-referential phenomenon an “epistemic circle” in analogy with the “hermeneutic circle” of phenomenology. See, for instance, Shimony (1993). Michel Bitbol has advanced the discussion of the semiotic import of epistemic circles, extending ideas first proposed by Bohr and Heisenberg to current self-organizational theories of cognition. See Bitbol (1996, 2001).
The relationships between mechanical and teleological explanations in Kant’s thought are complex and subtle. This topic is treated in several papers on Kant and biology that appeared in a single issue of the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (Volume 37, Issue 4, December 2006). See e.g., Steigerwald (2006); Walsh (2006).
Hulswit’s monograph advances a clarification of the relations between semiosis and traditional types of causal determination, but some points remain obscure. See Hulswit (2002). Deely finds support on late scholastic analyses of these relations to show that Peirce at times conflates some forms of teleology with other forms of “ideal” causation, in particular semiotic determination, which would rather fall under the rubric of formal causation. See e.g., Deely (2001, 2007).
Another version of this characterization, from a letter to Lady Welby, is found in Peirce (1998), 477.
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Fernández, E. Signs and Instruments: The Convergence of Aristotelian and Kantian Intuitions in Biosemiotics. Biosemiotics 1, 347–359 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-008-9011-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-008-9011-7