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The Relevance of Peirce's Semiotic for Cognitive Science
Abstract
The aim of the text is to present Peirce's relevance for cognitive science,especially in terms of his views in semiotic (i.e, for him : logic), logical machines, and the psychology of iconic reasoning.
... Peirce ' s pragmatic model of meaning as the " action of signs " (semiosis) has had a deep impact (besides all branches of semiotics) on philosophy, psychology, theoretical biology, and cognitive sciences (see Freeman 1983 ;Fetzer 1997 ;Colapietro 1989 ;Tiercelin 1995 ;Hoffmeyer 1996 ;Deacon 1997 ;Freadman 2004 ;Hookway 2002 ). First and foremost, Peirce ' s semiotics is grounded in a list of categories -namely, Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness -which corresponds to an exhaustive system of hierarchically organized classes of relations ( Houser 1997 ). ...
The informational nature of biological organization, at levels from the genetic and epigenetic to the cognitive and linguistic.
Information shapes biological organization in fundamental ways and at every organizational level. Because organisms use information—including DNA codes, gene expression, and chemical signaling—to construct, maintain, repair, and replicate themselves, it would seem only natural to use information-related ideas in our attempts to understand the general nature of living systems, the causality by which they operate, the difference between living and inanimate matter, and the emergence, in some biological species, of cognition, emotion, and language. And yet philosophers and scientists have been slow to do so. This volume fills that gap. Information and Living Systems offers a collection of original chapters in which scientists and philosophers discuss the informational nature of biological organization at levels ranging from the genetic to the cognitive and linguistic.
The chapters examine not only familiar information-related ideas intrinsic to the biological sciences but also broader information-theoretic perspectives used to interpret their significance. The contributors represent a range of disciplines, including anthropology, biology, chemistry, cognitive science, information theory, philosophy, psychology, and systems theory, thus demonstrating the deeply interdisciplinary nature of the volume's bioinformational theme.
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... Indeed, the birth of action-oriented paradigms in cognitive science gave birth to interesting research focused on the theoretical value of the pragmatist tradition for cognitive sciences. Among others, see Aydin 2015;Burke 2008;Engel, Maye, Kurthen, Köning 2013;Fusaroli, Granelli, Paolucci 2011;Gallagher 2009;Jung, Madzia 2016;Menary 2007;Johnson 2006;Johnson, Rohrer 2007;Johnson 2010;Paolucci 2011;Roy 2013;Shook, Solymosi 2014a;2014b;Skagested 2004;Steiner 2008;Tiercelin 1995. precluded the chance to make some ideas clear in cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind: this the case of interpretability and the passive status of representations. ...
... El modelo pragmático del significado como 'acción de los signos' (semiosis) propuesto por Peirce, ha tenido un profundo impacto en la filosofía, la psicología, la biología teórica, y las ciencias cognitivas (ver Freeman 1983, Fetzer 1997, Colapietro 1989, Tiercelin 1995, Hoffmeyer 1996, Deacon 1997, Freadman 2004, Hookway 2002. Sobre todo, cabe destacar que la semiótica de Peirce se basa en una lista de categorías -Primeridad, Segundidad, Terceridad-que corresponde a un exhaustivo sistema de tipos de relaciones organizadas jerárquicamente (Houser 1997). ...
En este artículo presentamos algunas consideraciones sobre una interpretación semiótica de los sistemas de información genética, como una base para la elucidación del concepto de información, que carece en biología de una teoría que posibilite la comprensión de sus aspectos semánticos y pragmáticos. La teoría de los signos de Peirce incluye conceptos que ayudan a entender como genes en el DNA pueden tener una significación biológica para la célula. Con base en estos conceptos, hacemos un análisis semiótico de los sistemas de información genética.
... Peirce' s concept of semiotics as the 'formal science of signs' , and the pragmatic notion of meaning as the ' action of signs' (semiosis) have had a deep impact in philosophy, psychology, theoretical biology, computational semiotics, and cognitive science (Thom 975;Freeman 983;Prigogine and Stengers 983;Fetzer 988;Colapietro 989;Tiercelin 995;Hoffmeyer 996;Brunning and Porter 997;Deacon 997;Houser et al. 997;Freadman 2004;Hookway 2002Hookway , 2004Queiroz and Merrell 2005). And since it deeply informs our own analysis, we need, thus, to present a brief overview of Peirce' s semiotic here. ...
The Peircean semiotic approach to information that we developed in previous papers raises several new questions, and shows both similarities and differences with regard to other accounts of information. We do not intend to present here any exhaustive discussion about the relationships between our account and other approaches to information. Rather, our interest is mainly to address its relationship to ideas about information put forward by Gregory Bateson and Eva Jablonka. We conclude that all these authors offer quite broad concepts of information, but we argue that they are just as broad as they should be, since information is in itself a sweeping concept. Furthermore, all of them suggest a processual approach to information, which departs from the treatment of information as something that is contained in some structure (e.g., in sequences of nucleotides) and moves towards an understanding of information as a process - in terms of our account, a semiotic process, i.e., semiosis.
... Peirce's pragmatic model of meaning as the "action of signs" (semiosis), has had a deep impact (besides all branches of semiotics) on philosophy, psychology, theoretical biology, and cognitive sciences (see Freeman 1983;Fetzer 1997;Colapietro 1989;Emmeche & Hoffmeyer 1991;Tiercelin 1995;Hoffmeyer 1996;Debrock 1996;Deacon 1997;Houser 1997;Hookway 1985Hookway , 2002Freadman 2004;Queiroz & Merrell 2005;Pietarinen 2006;Short 2007). First and foremost, Peirce's semiotics is grounded on a list of categories -Firstness, Secondness, Thirdnesswhich corresponds to an exhaustive system of hierarchically organized classes of relations (Houser 1997). ...
General abstract: Here we introduce biosemiotics as a field of research that develops models of life processes focusing on their informational aspects. Peirce's general concept of semiosis can be used to analyze such processes, and provide a powerful basis for understanding the emergence of meaning in living systems, by contributing to the construction of a theory of biological information. Peirce's theory of sign action is introduced, and the relation between 'information processing' and sign processes is discussed, in fact, a semiotic definition of information is introduced. Three biosemiotic models of informational processes, at the behavioral and molecular levels, are developed, first, a model of genetic information processing in protein synthesis; second, a model of signal transduction in Bcell activation in the immune system; and, finally, a model of symbolic non-human primate communication. We also address some perspectives for the development of applied semiotic research in fields such as Artificial life, cognitive ethology, cognitive robotics, theoretical biology, and education. In this lecture, we introduce theoretical notions one must consider to face the main problems on modeling biological information processes. 1. Peircean semiotics: a very brief introduction Peirce is often considered the founder of modern semiotics.1 Semiotics was defined by Peirce (CP 5.484) as "the doctrine of the essential and fundamental nature of all varieties of possible semioses". In other words, semiotics describes and analyses the structure of semiotic processes independently of their material bases, or of the conditions under which they can be observed - inside cells (cytosemiosis), among tissues and cell populations, in animal communication (zoosemiosis), or in typically human activities (production of notations, meta-representations, etc.). In other words, Peirce's concept of semiotics concerns a theory of the sign in its most general sense. Peirce conceived general semiotics much like a formal science as mathematics is (CP 2.227). However, semiotics finds the objects of its investigation in the signs' concrete, natural environment - and in 'normal human experience', or, else, in 'ordinary experience' (Potter 1967: 8; CP 1.241).
This paper presents some points of proximity between Peirce’s insights on the technical/artificial nature of cognition, and contemporary theories of extended cognition. By doing so, it sheds some new light on the possible relevance of Peirce’s philosophical approach for artificial intelligence, notably regarding the differences between the reasoning abilities of machines and those of humans.
How to model meaning processes (semiosis) in artificial semiotic systems? Once all computer simulation becomes tantamount
to theoretical simulation, involving epistemological metaphors of world versions, the selection and choice of models will
dramatically compromise the nature of all work involving simulation. According to the pragmatic Peircean based approach, semiosis
is an interpreter-dependent process that cannot be dissociated from the notion of a situated (and actively distributed) communicational
agent. Our approach centers on the consideration of relevant properties and aspects of Peirce’s pragmatic concept of semiotics.
Upon developing this approach, we have no pretensions of our being able to present an exhaustive analysis of the differences
between Peirce and other theoretical positions. Nevertheless, our contribution will serve to demonstrate how theorists contribute
toward revealing certain fundamental ‘semiotic constraints’ that will be of interest and importance.
The use of an appropriate set of empirical and theoretical constraints to guide the construction of synthetic experiments leads to a better understanding of the natural phenomena under study, and allows for a greater understanding of the experimental results. We begin this chapter with a description of a general approach for conducting experiments with artificial creatures within a synthetic ethological context. Next, we describe how this approach was used to build a computational experiment regarding the emergence of self-organized symbols. Our experiment simulated a community of artificial creatures undergoing complex intra and inter-specific interactions in which meaning evolved over time, from a tabula rasa repertoire of random alarm-calls to a specific set of optimal referential alarm-calls. To design different kinds of creatures as well as innanimate elements of the environment, we applied theoretical constraints from the Peircean philosophy of sign and empirical constraints from neuroethology. Our results suggest that the constraints chosen were both necessary and sufficient to produce symbolic communication.
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