"To the Members of the Editorial Team of Biosemiotics,A long and vivid series of emails and discussion followed, and we decided to make that accessible to a wider audience here, hopefully to inspire and learn more about the diversity of opinions and approaches to biosemiotics.
Dear friends,
Our Journal has just concluded its first year and I wish to have a brief consultation with you.
Please let me have a short comment on the three Issues of Volume 1, and your suggestions for the future. A few lines is all I need, so please let me have your feedback. " (...)
The file with this "COLLAGE of Letters from the EDITORIAL TEAM", kindly compiled by Marcello, can be downloaded in a .doc and a .pdf version (click to download the full correspondance).
(Update of February 2: updated versions from Marcello here: download .doc and .pdf)
Best regards,
Claus
2 comments:
For some reason I have note the code for the blog. So I shall use the tradesman’s entrance. I would like to comment on the feed-back to my “doodle”. Firstly, while the discussion of Peirce and Uexküll might have seemed cartoonish, I do stand by contention that both of them were pretty lousy metaphysicians. I feel that their greatest strengths lay in (and this is ironic) the physicalist and mechanistic writings and research. Their primary models are very practical and that is why they have been applied in many fields, including ethology. I have asserted this before many times. I am therefore not “dissing” these mentors, or Thomas Sebeok, whose early work was characterized by the same mechanistic resolve. He courted the physicalists – just look at the books on animal communication he edited . For whatever reason, Peirce, Uexküll, and Sebeok, seemed to have decided to go metaphysical. So, from my point of view, the triadic theory of the sign, the Umwelt, and Sebeok’s various theories, all suffer, and become in some way “damaged goods” – certainly how else do we explain a tapering off of interest in biosemiotics and zoosemiotics in the late 1980’s? The 1960’s and 1970’s were much more receptive, because theoretical biology and the boundaries between postmodern science and orthodox natural sciences were not enforced as they were later during the so-called Science Wars. Now, it seems that the metaphysical aspects of the three semioticians/ethologists have been exploited and opened to accommodate ideologies that challenge perhaps the very goals they had in mind – which was to use semiotics as a foundation to create and develop a new paradigm/tool for application in the natural sciences. Instead it has been often used to create an obstacle – preventing the possibility of experimentation . It has also contributed to a serious misunderstanding of biosemiotics and its sister field, zoosemiotics. That is why I proposed a bifurcated approach. Recently I have read lots of books and papers on animal communication – I cannot recollect any that referenced any of the applied semiotics. It is a completely different situation in the humanities and business. Semiotics is held in great esteem – and Peirce is often referred to – but baring the philosophical works, it is always a pared down version – i.e. the useful version. That is what I would like to see in our fields. Workable semiotics. For example. In a French book on behavioral ecology there is a huge chunk devoted to fairly qualitative approach to biological information – but where is biosemiotics? If people which to discuss Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and Husserl etc., I am the last one to argue against that – however I fear at times the arguments are not truly philosophical and based on prejudice rather than knowledge of the theories. I would love to argue this in our sandbox! Of course we all love the sandbox! Yet, someday we have to stop playing and get our hands wet with life.
Stephen Pain
For some reason I have not the code for the blog. So I shall use the tradesman’s entrance. I would like to comment on the feed-back to my “doodle”. Firstly, while the discussion of Peirce and Uexküll might have seemed cartoonish, I do stand by my contention that both of them were pretty lousy metaphysicians. I feel that their greatest strengths lay in (and this is ironic) the physicalist and mechanistic writings and research. Their primary models are very practical and that is why they have been applied in many fields, including ethology. I have asserted this before many times. I am therefore not “dissing” these mentors, or Thomas Sebeok, whose early work was characterized by the same mechanistic resolve. He courted the physicalists – just look at the books on animal communication he edited . For whatever reason, Peirce, Uexküll, and Sebeok, seemed to have decided to go metaphysical. So, from my point of view, the triadic theory of the sign, the Umwelt, and Sebeok’s various theories, all suffer, and become in some way “damaged goods” – certainly how else do we explain a tapering off of interest in biosemiotics and zoosemiotics in the late 1980’s? The 1960’s and 1970’s were much more receptive, because of theoretical biology -- and the boundaries between postmodern science and orthodox natural sciences were not enforced as they were later during the so-called Science Wars. Now, it seems that the metaphysical aspects of the three semioticians/ethologists have been exploited and opened to accommodate ideologies that challenge perhaps the very goals they had in mind – which was to use semiotics as a foundation to create and develop a new paradigm/tool for application in the natural sciences. Instead it has been often used to create an obstacle – preventing the possibility of experimentation . It has also contributed to a serious misunderstanding of biosemiotics and its sister field, zoosemiotics. That is why I proposed a bifurcated approach. Recently I have read lots of books and papers on animal communication – I cannot recollect any that referenced any of the applied semiotics. It is a completely different situation in the humanities and business. Semiotics is held in great esteem – and Peirce is often referred to – but barring the philosophical works, it is always a pared down version – i.e. the useful version. That is what I would like to see in our fields. Workable semiotics. For example. In a French book on behavioral ecology there is a huge chunk devoted to fairly qualitative approach to biological information – but where is biosemiotics? If people wish to discuss Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Husserl et al, I am very the last one to argue against that – however I fear at times the arguments are not truly philosophical and based on prejudice rather than knowledge of the theories. I would love to argue this in our sandbox! Of course we all love the sandbox! Yet, someday sadly we have to stop playing and get our hands wet with life.
Stephen Pain
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