Søren Brier

To follow the transdisciplinary ambition in much information science and philosophy leading to cognitive science we need to include a phenomenological and hermeneutical ground in order to encompass a theory of interpretative meaning and signification to achieve a transdisciplinary theory of knowing and communication. This is also true if we start in cybernetics and system theory that also have transdisciplinary aspirations for instance in Batesons ecological concept of information as a difference that makes a difference and in Luhmann’s triple autopoietic communication-based system theory. Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmaticist semiotics integrates logic and information in interpretative semiotics. But although Peirce’s information theory is built on meaningful signs and he connects information to the growth of symbols, his information theory is empirically based in a realistic worldview, which in the development to modern biosemiotics include all living systems.

Abstract Any great new theoretical framework has an epistemological and an ontological aspect to its philosophy as well as an axiological one, and one needs to understand all three aspects in order to grasp the deep aspiration and idea of the theoretical framework. Presently, there is a widespread effort to understand CS Peirce's (1837–1914) pragmaticistic semeiotic, and to develop it by integrating the results of modern science and evolutionary thinking; first, producing a biosemiotics and, second, by integrating it with the progress in ...

Abstract: In the midst of preparing the present issue news of Stafford Beer's death reached us. As he was one of the founding fathers of management cybernetics and a member of our editorial board we decided to delay this issue a little in order to include his obituary. We are also using the ASC-column to include an edited version of a previously unpublished group letter on human development from his hand. It shows how much he cares about human development. Finally, we present two of his poems as a salute to the work and personal ...

Abstract: Thomas A. Sebeok was born on November 9, 1920, in Budapest, Hungary, and died peacefully in his home in Bloomington, Indiana, on December 21, 2001. He was a pioneer in semiotics and the creator of the field of biosemiotics. He belongs to the most renowned exponents of semiotics in the second half of the 20th century. By means of his scientific, institutional, and editorial efforts he exerted steady influence on the development of semiotics as a transdisciplinary field of inquiry; the doctrine of semiotics he called it. He ...

Abstract: In'The Cybersemiotic Roots Of Computation: A Critique of the Computational Model of Cognition,'Jed C. Jones challenges the prevalent metaphor of human cognition, a von Neumann-type (1945) computational process, as flawed because it fails to recognize the crucial role of an embodied observer's capacity for semiosis in any computational process. The paper affirms Brier's (1996) cybersemiotic framework, which states that semiosis is the organism's selection of environmental perturbations in the attempt to satisfy its own needs ...

The view argued in this article is that If we want to define a universal concept of information covering subjective experiential and meaningful cognition - as well as intersubjective meaningful communication in nature, technology, society and life worlds - then the main problem is to decide, which epistemological, ontological and philosophy of science framework the concept of information should be based on and integrated in. All the ontological attempts to create objective concepts of information result in concepts that cannot encompass meaning and experience of embodied living and social systems. There is no conclusive evidence that the core of reality across nature, culture, life and mind is purely either mathematical, logical or of a computational nature. Therefore the core of the information concept should not only be based only on pure logical or mathematical rationality. We need to include interpretation, signification and meaning construction in our transdisciplinary framework for information as a basic aspect of reality alongside the physical, chemical and molecular biological. It is difficult to produce a pure quantitative statement independently of a qualitative analysis based on some sort of relation to the human condition as a semiotic animal.
To follow the transdisciplinary ambition in much information science and philosophy leading to cognitive science we need to include a phenomenological and hermeneutical ground in order to encompass a theory of interpretative meaning and signification to achieve a transdisciplinary theory of knowing and communication. This is also true if we start in cybernetics and system theory that also have transdisciplinary aspirations for instance in Batesons ecological concept of information as a difference that makes a difference and in Luhmann’s triple autopoietic communication based system theory. Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmaticist semiotics integrates logic and information in interpretative semiotics. I therefore suggest alternatively building information theories based on semiotics from the basic relations of embodied living systems meaningful cognition and communication. I agree with Peircean biosemiotics that all information must be part of real relational sign-processes manifesting as tokens.
But although Peirce’s information theory is built on meaningful signs and he connects information to the growth of symbols, his information theory is empirically based in a realistic worldview, which in the development to modern biosemiotics include all living systems.
To follow the transdisciplinary ambition in much information science and philosophy leading to cognitive science we need to include a phenomenological and hermeneutical ground in order to encompass a theory of interpretative meaning and signification to achieve a transdisciplinary theory of knowing and communication. This is also true if we start in cybernetics and system theory that also have transdisciplinary aspirations for instance in Batesons ecological concept of information as a difference that makes a difference and in Luhmann’s triple autopoietic communication based system theory. Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmaticist semiotics integrates logic and information in interpretative semiotics. But although Peirce’s information theory is built on meaningful signs and he connects information to the growth of symbols, his information theory is empirically based in a realistic worldview, which in the development to modern biosemiotics include all living systems.

In spite of a general wish of greater interdisciplinarity most of our tradition disciplines in science and humanities still separated by Snows two cultures. To make interdisciplinary exchange possible between the quantitative and qualitative research areas it is necessary to formulate new non-reductionist transdisciplinary frameworks based on a more comprehensive metaphysics than the ones used for the different areas of research now. The prize is that they will have to relativize the old ones. The question is if it is possible to create a transdisciplnary framework where nature is not outside culture and the mind is not inside a subject or the head?  As human beings are embodied, feeling, knowing, and culturally formed living systems, participating in semiosis and language processes, we are forced to acknowledge that they are living simultaneously in minimum four different worlds:1. The physic-chemical part of the natural world that also constitutes the pure material-energetic aspect of our body.2. A living body as the source of life, which we share with other living species. 3. Our experiential world of feeling, will, drives, affects, and thoughts, manifested as experiential consciousness. 4. The cultural world of language, meaning, power, and technology. Language, pragmatically conceived in its embodied, enacted and extended reality, connects our perception with our thinking, communication, and acting in the social world. To create a common foundation for them I suggest that we need to draw on a combination of Peircean triadic semiotics and Luhmanian system theory. System theory provides Peircean semiotics with the idea of self-organizing developing systems that are organizationally closed. Semiotics provides systems and cybernetics with a phenomenological grounding to be able to ender the realm of meaningful communication. This combination I presently called Cybersemiotics.

Central to the attempt to develop a biosemiotics has been the discussion of what it means to be scientific. In Marcello Barbieri’s latest argument for leaving Peircean biosemiotics and creating an alternative code-biology the definition of what it means to be scientific plays a major role. For Barbieri “scientific knowledge is obtained by building machine-like models of what we observe in nature”. Barbieri interestingly claims that - in combination with the empirical and experimental basis -mechanism is virtually equivalent to the scientific method.  The consequences of this statement seem to be that the optimal type of knowledge science can produce about living system is to model them as machines. But the explicit goal of a Peircean semiotically based biosemiotics is (also) to model living systems as cognitive and communicative systems working on the basis of meaning and signification. These two concepts are not part of the mechanistic models of  science today, not even of cognitive science.  Barbieri tries to solve this problem by introducing a new concept of biological meaning that is separate from the Peircean biosemiotics and then add Peirce’s semiotics on top. This article argues why this view is inconsistent on the grounds that Peirce’s semiotic paradigm only gives meaning in its pragmaticist conception of a fallibilist view of science, which again is intrinsic connected to its non-mechanistic metaphysics of Tychism, Synechism and Agapism. The core of the biosemiotic enterprise is to establish another type of trans- and interdisciplinary wissenschaft than the received view of “science”.

The present article analyses the Lomborg case of environmental conflicts in the Agora of the mass media by viewing science, politics, economics, religion and the big news media as differentiated systems using what Luhmann calls symbolic generalized media. Each has its own simplified code and interest that make it easier and faster to canalize messages. But the problem for the public good then becomes that they cannot communicate directly with each other. Each system is closed around its own code and specialists. There are no rules of engagement for the benefit of the greater system of society. Is that a good thing or could the public knowledge generation processes be improved? This article analyses the Lomborg case viewed as a problem of public knowledge management in democratic societies with free presses. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The present issue is in honor of the late Niklas Luhmann. It focuses on his view of the relationship between cybernetics, systems and semiotics. Especially the constructivistic cybernetic approach inspired by Spencer-Brown. ... Dirk Baecker writes an overview of Luhmann's work summing up important aspects of his life's work. ... We present Luhmann's article 'Sign as Form' from the English book of translated Luhmann papers Problems of Form, which Dirk Baecker has edited. This paper is the most central in Luhmann's attempt to relate semiotics and ...

Contents v In honour of my father, Knud Harald Stig Nielsen, who spent eighteen months in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War for being part of the Danish resistance against Nazism and who suffered for it the rest of his life; and to my mother Dorte Brier and my ...

The paper attempts to develop a non-reductionistic and transdisciplinary view on human knowing in the light of the growing development of transdisciplinary practices and sciences. Medicine is one of the oldest; ecology and information science are some of the newer examples of ...

In the program article―The Architectures of Theories‖(1893), CS Peirce presented his trichotomies within psychology, biology, physics and philosophy, and in terms of these trichotomies, it could easily be predicted, according to Peirce, what kind of metaphysics it would be appropriate to construct, a cosmogonic philosophy. But, other than presenting his very brief sketch of a thoroughgoing evolutionary cosmogony, Peirce, unfortunately, did not give this important topic further treatment in the article.

... This is very clear but then the theory has almost nothing to do with the cognition and ... Something is basically epistemologically wrong also with this frame-work and its concepts ... To distinguish between the marked and the unmarked state as Spencer-Brown state it in "The Laws of ...

The present article will approach biosemiotics from two different interests and contexts. One is an interest in the development of the ethological project of Konrad Lorenz (1970-1971) and Niko Tinbergen (1973) into a truly non-mechanistic bio-psychological foundation of cognitive ...

This article praises the development of second-order cybernetics by von Foerster, Maturana and Varela as an important step in deepening our understanding of the bio-psychological foundation of the dynamics of cognition and communication. Luhmann's development of the theory ...

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The practical goal of formulating foundations of a general theory of information, cognitive and communicative processes in nature and society is that we hope to be able to contribute to the designing of a conscious evolutionary process (Banathy 1996) that integrates technological and human aspects in a process that leads to the emergence of a new form of humanity.

In this book we have tried to draw together a number of important strands in contemporary approaches to the philosophical and scientific questions that emerge when dealing with the issues of computing, information, cognition and their overlap.

En cd-rom er et optisk lagermedie, en CD med tekst og ofte også billeder, film, lyd og evt. edb-programmer, der ikke kan rettes på. ROM står for det engelske read only memory. Da cd-rom brændere nu (1997) kan købes til omkring 3000 kr. og de tomme skiver til ca. 30 kr. er der nye store muligheder for “hjemmebrændere”, ligesom skiver, der kan klare op til 1000 rettelser, er på vej ind på markedet. CD-teknikken kan ikke kun bruges til lyd, men også til at gemme programmer, tekst, video og multimedier på.

Forskningsresultater deltager i to litterære kredsløb: det lille og det store. Det lille er forsker til forsker kommunikationen. Det er først og fremmest fagspecialister indenfor et vidensdomæne som f. eks. kybernetik eller genetik, der beskriver nye forskningsresultater og fremsætter nye teorier indenfor området i primær afhandlingslitteratur. Desuden meddeles resultater til en bredere kreds af forskere via tertiær litteratur, så som forskningsoversigter, faglige monografier, som f. eks.