What is reductionism? -- Who is reading the book of life? -- Genetics : from grammar to meaning making -- A point for thought : why are organisms irreducible? -- A point for thought : does the genetic system include a meta-language? -- Immunology : from soldiers to housewives -- A point for thought : immune specificity and Brancusi's kiss -- A point for thought : reflections on the immune self -- Meaning making in language and biology -- A point (...) for thought : meaning : bridging the gap between physics and semantics -- The rest is silence -- The polysemy of the sign : a quantum lesson -- Recursive-hierarchy : a lesson from the tardigrade -- Context and memory : a lesson from funes the memorious -- Transgradience : a lesson from Bakhtin -- The poetry of living. (shrink)

The paradigmatic bases, which sustain traditional western psychological interpretative efforts, need not be just a footnote to Plato. In this paper we introduce the Talmudic interpretative perspective, which we use to point at some weaknesses we identify in contemporary research imaginings. While the empiricist approach may be traced to Plato and the interpretative and the critical approaches may be traced to Heraclitus, we argue that the Talmudic approach is a differentiated and unique perspective that, because of its non-epistemic nature, its (...) dialogical character, and its recognition of two intermingled levels of interpretation, can make an important contribution to new ways of thinking about understanding and meaning in research. (shrink)

The relational structure of RNA, DNA, and protein bears an interesting similarity to the determination problem in category theory. In this paper, we present this deep-structure similarity and use it as a springboard for discussing some abstract properties of coding in various systems. These abstract properties, in turn, may shed light on the evolution of the DNA world from a semiotic perspective. According to the perspective adopted in this paper, living systems are not information processing systems but “meaning-making” systems. Therefore, (...) what flows in the genetic system is not “information” but “value.” We define meaning, meaning-making, and value and then use these terms to explain the abstract dynamics of coding, which can illuminate many forms of sign-mediated activities in biosystems. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 205 Seiten: 1-16.

Living systems are characterized by unique properties that make them resistant to the ``information-processingperspective'' of traditional cognitive science.This paper details those unique properties andoffers a new theoretical framework forunderstanding the behavior of living systems.This framework leans heavily on ideas fromgeneral systems theory (specifically Bateson'sinteractionist perspective), semiotics, andMerleau-Ponty's phenomenology. The benefits ofusing this framework are illustrated withexamples from two different domains: immunologyand verbal interaction.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2014 Heft: 202 Seiten: 555-569.

[Przekład] Ja immunologiczne jest naszym zreifikowanym opisem procesów, dzięki którym układ odpornościowy utrzymuje wyodrębnioną tożsamość organizmu i siebie samego. Jest to proces interpretacyjny, i żeby badać go w sposób naukowo konstruktywny, powinniśmy połączyć długoletnią hermeneutyczną tradycję pytania o naturę interpretacji ze współczesnym rozumieniem układu odpornościowego, pojawiającymi się technologiami badawczymi oraz zaawansowanymi narzędziami obliczeniowymi analizującymi dane sensoryczne.

Mentalization describes the process through which we understand the mental states of oneself and others. In this paper, I present a computational semiotic model of mentalization and illustrate it through a worked-out example. The model draws on classical semiotic ideas, such as abductive inference and hypostatic abstraction, but pours them into new ideas and tools from natural language processing, machine learning, and neural networks, to form a novel model of language-mediated-mentalization.

Journal Name: Semiotica - Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies / Revue de l'Association Internationale de Sémiotique Volume: 2013 Issue: 195 Pages: 119-126.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 218 Seiten: 65-79.

The idea that a sign has meaning only in context invites serious inquiry into the meaning of meaning, context, and meaning-in-context. In this paper, and following Bateson’s ecological approach to the mind, I suggest that meaning is a form of coordination between interacting agents, and that this form of coordination is orchestrated through context markers, the variability of the sign, and symmetric transformation of the agents. This suggestion is examined by using signaling processes across various animal species and by drawing (...) specific attention to current conceptions of context and mind. (shrink)

Multicellular organisms are ensembles of quasi-two-dimensional structures (sheets) of various kinds. Why should the development of all organisms be mediated by a quasi-two-dimensional structure? Why does such development avoid a direct confrontation with the third dimension? In this paper, we accept the challenge of addressing this question from the perspective of computational geometry and suggest that the construction of three-dimensional organisms may be explained by the constraints imposed on a bottom-up construction process.

A review of The Semantic Sphere 1: Computation, Cognition and Information Economy, by Pierre Lévy. ISTE Ltd. and John Wiley and Sons Inc., 2011; 381 pages.

The paper motivates a novel research programme in the philosophy of action parallel to the ‘Knowledge First’ programme in epistemology. It is argued that much of the grounds for abandoning the quest for a reductive analysis of knowledge in favour of the Knowledge First alternative is mirrored in the case of intentional action, inviting the hypothesis that intentional action is also, like knowledge, metaphysically basic. The paper goes on to demonstrate the sort of explanatory contribution that intentional action can make (...) once it is no longer taken to be a target for reductive analysis, in explaining other, non-intentional kinds of action and voluntariness. (shrink)

This paper presents an analysis of the sorites paradox for collective nouns and gradable adjectives within the framework of classical logic. The paradox is explained by distinguishing between qualitative and quantitative representations. This distinction is formally represented by the use of a different mathematical model for each type of representation. Quantitative representations induce Archimedean models, but qualitative representations induce non-Archimedean models. By using a non-standard model of \ called \, which contains infinite and infinitesimal numbers, the two paradoxes are shown (...) to have distinct structures. The sorites paradox for collective nouns arises from the use of infinite numbers, whereas the sorites paradox for gradable adjectives arises from the use of infinitesimal numbers. Each paradox can be traced to a different source of vagueness. The sorites paradox for collective nouns is caused by \, and the sorites paradox for gradable adjectives is caused by \ \. If correct, this analysis implies that infinite and infinitesimal numbers are cognitively real, and that they play a role in the semantic interpretation of natural language. (shrink)

Reality imitation and imagination - critical studies.

This chapter contains sections titled: A Temple of Apollo Quoting the Roman Garden Villa Harmonic Proportions The Sculptural Program Expanding the Theme of Harmony Notes.

El reto de los sistemas educativos ha sido proponer escenarios virtuales con mediación eficiente de tecnología que faciliten la evidencia de desarrollo tecnológico. Nuestra propuesta tiene como objetivo definir una estrategia de aprendizaje que permita el desarrollo tecnológico a través del uso de simuladores basados en IoT y la interacción de servidores en la nube para el almacenamiento de datos. Se pretende convertir al instructor en un guía tecnológico que permita verificar los resultados del aprendizaje. La propuesta facilita el desarrollo (...) de competencias computacionales enfocadas a la creación tecnológica con escenarios dinámicos y configurables para ser accesibles desde la web. (shrink)

The average weight and height of National Basketball League players is decreasing year by year ; Curcic, Dimitrije. 2021. 70 years of height evolution in the NBA [4,504 players analyzed]. RunRepeat. https://runrepeat.com/height-evolution-in-the-nba ). The trend in basketball is to privilege the tallest and strongest. If so, then to what does the body modification of NBA players respond? Will these changes reformulate the corporeity of what is understood as an NBA player? This text seeks, from the postulates of Jacques Fontanille and (...) José Finol, to point out that the process of body modification arose both from the introduction of a new rule and the recognition to new corporealities. From data regarding players’ corporeality, shooting tendency and a body modification scheme, a new corporeality of the NBA player is proposed, one that is no longer determined entirely by height. (shrink)

Mental acts are conspicuously absent from philosophical debates over the nature of action. A typical protagonist of a typical scenario is far more likely to raise her arm or open the window than she is to perform a calculation in her head or talk to herself silently. One possible explanation for this omission is that the standard ‘causalist’ account of action, on which acts are analyzed in terms of mental states causing bodily movements, faces difficulties in accommodating some paradigmatic cases (...) of mental action – or so I argue. After drawing out these objections to causalism, I outline a more promising approach. Building on previous work, I show how the approach I favour, on which the attempt to analyze action is dispensed with, provides a unified account of both mental and physical action. (shrink)

The past two decades have seen a growing interest in evolutionary and scientific approaches to religion. The Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Approaches to Religion is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting and emerging field. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the handbook pulls together scholarship in the following areas: evolutionary psychology and the cognitive science of religion (CSR), cultural evolution and the complementarity of evolutionary psychology, cognitive science and (...) cultural evolution. Within these sections central issues, debates and problems are examined, including: Cliodynamics, cultural group selection, costly signalling, dual inheritance theory, literacy, transmitting narratives, prosociality, supernatural punishment, cognition and ritual, meme theory, fusion theory, sexual selection, agency detection, evoked culture, social brain hypothesis, theory of mind, developmental psychology, emergence theory, social learning, cultural cybernetics, cultural epidemiology, evolutionary and cultural psychology, memetics, by-product and adaptationist theories of religion, systems and information theory, and computer modelling. This is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies and anthropology, the Handbook will also be very useful to those in related fields, such as psychology, sociology of religion, cognitive biology, and evolutionary biology. (shrink)

In the early 1760s, the entry dedicated to the term “social” in Diderot's Encyclopédie claimed that it was “un mot nouvellement introduit dans la langue.” Strictly speaking, this description was inaccurate: “social” had already appeared (though very sporadically) in seventeenth-century French texts. But the essence of the Encyclopédie's argument was correct: “social” had been so marginal in French up until the mid-eighteenth century that its wide deployment in enlightened discourse from the 1740s onward could be treated as a new appearance. (...) The article main argument is that “social's” new appearance in the mid-1740s was of considerable intellectual importance. To support this argument, the article is divided into three parts. The first outlines the general premises of the research into the word “social” and its significance. By placing this research within the ongoing investigation of the semantic field around “société” in enlightened philosophy, the article claims that such an investigation is much more than an etymological exercise. The special epistemological status of “social” in enlightened philosophy makes an understanding of the reasons for its rapid domination of French philosophical discourse a most rewarding project from the perspective of intellectual history. The second part of the article provides empirical evidence for the argument that “social” had been all but completely absent from French intellectual discourse before the mid-eighteenth century. It is of course harder to ascertain the absence of a word before a given point in time than to confirm its presence, but many different indications substantiate the essence of the Encyclopédie's claim. These indications also allow one to follow “social's” discursive rise after about 1745 and to speculate about the identity of the author(s) responsible for it. All evidence lead to two philosophes, the article claims: Diderot and Rousseau. Finally, the third part of the article presents an argument about the reasons for “social's” rapid naturalization in French enlightened thought and discusses what the philosophes tried so intensively to do, achieve, or express with “social.” Possible answers to this question lead to a reevaluation of mid-eighteenth century enlightened thought in general and contemporary philosophes in particular. Most importantly, such answers allow us to reflect on how we write and think about the intellectual achievements of the mid-eighteenth century, and in what way we, too, still inhabit the mental universe the philosophes helped to create. ☆ I would like to thank Keith Michael Baker for his encouragement and helpful criticism of a previous draft of this article. (shrink)

We investigate the relationship between weak square principles and simultaneous reflection of stationary sets.

I describe a new problem for metaethical constructivism. The problem arises when agents make conflicting judgments, so that the constructivist is implausibly committed to denying they have any reason for any of the available options. The problem is illustrated primarily with reference to Sharon Street’s version of constructivism. Several possible solutions to the problem are explained and rejected.

In this paper we prove that from large cardinals it is consistent that there is a singular strong limit cardinal $\nu $ such that the singular cardinal hypothesis fails at $\nu $ and every collection of fewer than $\operatorname {\mathrm {cf}}(\nu )$ stationary subsets of $\nu ^{+}$ reflects simultaneously. For $\operatorname {\mathrm {cf}}(\nu )> \omega $, this situation was not previously known to be consistent. Using different methods, we reduce the upper bound on the consistency strength of this situation for (...) $\operatorname {\mathrm {cf}}(\nu ) = \omega $ to below a single partially supercompact cardinal. The previous upper bound of infinitely many supercompact cardinals was due to Sharon. (shrink)

One of the prominent questions of moral thought throughout history is the question of moral responsibility. In other words, to what measure do human actions result from free will rather than from being subordinate to a common “predetermined” law. In ancient Greece, this question was associated with mythical figures like Moira and Ananke while in recent times it is connected with concepts such as determinism and compatibilism. The argument between these two world views crosses cultures and historical periods, giving the (...) notion that there are two types of ethical point of view that have assumed shapes during history. These points of view are mutually exclusive on the one hand, and on the other, they both stand as axiomatic standpoints of morality throughout history. The dialectical relationship between the two formulates the moral discourse throughout history. (shrink)

There has been a resurgence of interest lately within philosophy of mind and action in the category of mental action. Against this background, the present paper aims to question the very possibility, or at least the theoretical significance, of teasing apart mental and bodily acts. After raising some doubts over the viability of various possible ways of drawing the mental act/bodily act distinction, the paper draws some lessons from debates over embodied cognition, which arguably further undermine the credibility of the (...) distinction. The insignificance of the distinction is demonstrated in part by showing how the focus on ‘inner’ acts hampers fruitful discussion of Galen Strawson’s skepticism of mental agency. Finally, the possibility is discussed that a distinction between covert and overt action should supplant the one between mental and bodily action. (shrink)

Intention Cognitivism – the doctrine that intending to V entails, or even consists in, believing that one will V – is an important position with potentially wide-ranging implications, such as a revisionary understanding of practical reason, and a vindicating explanation of 'Practical Knowledge'. In this paper, I critically examine the standard arguments adduced in support of IC, including arguments from the parity of expression of intention and belief; from the ability to plan around one's intention; and from the explanation provided (...) by the thesis for our knowledge of our intentional acts. I conclude that none of these arguments are compelling, and therefore that no good reason has been given to accept IC. (shrink)

Philosophical orthodoxy has it that intentional action consists in one’s intention appropriately causing a motion of one’s body, placing the latter as (conceptually and/or metaphysically) prior to the former. Here I argue that this standard schema should be reversed: acting intentionally is at least conceptually prior to intending. The argument is modelled on a Williamsonian argument for the priority of knowledge developed by Jenifer Nagel. She argues that children acquire the concept KNOWS before they acquire BELIEVES, building on this alleged (...) developmental priority of knowledge to establish its conceptual priority. I start by taking a closer look at Nagel’s argument, canvassing extant objections to do both with the empirical adequacy of her claims and their philosophical implications. Doing so allows me in the second part of the paper to draw lessons that inform the construction of a revamped parallel argument for the priority of ACTS INTENTIONALLY. (shrink)