NDLI: The Poetics of Purpose

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Exemplifying Umweltlehre Through One’s Own Life A Biography of Jakob von Uexküll by Florian Mildenberger : Review of Umwelt als Vision: Leben und Werk Jakob von Uexkülls (1864–1944). by Florian Mildenberger Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007, 320 pages

Biosemiotics : Volume 1

The Poetics of Purpose

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Alexander, Victoria N.
Copyright Year	2008
Abstract	Hackles have been raised in biosemiotic circles by T. L. Short’s assertion that semiosis, as defined by Peirce, entails “acting for purposes” and therefore is not found below the level of the organism (2007a:174–177). This paper examines Short’s teleology and theory of purposeful behavior and offers a remedy to the disagreement. Remediation becomes possible when the issue is reframed in the terms of the complexity sciences, which allows intentionality to be understood as the interplay between local and global aspects of a system within a system. What is called “acting for purposes” is not itself a type of behavior so much as a relationship between a dynamic system that “exists for a purpose” and its microprocesses that “serve purposes.” The “intentional object” of philosophy is recast here as the holistic self-organized dynamics of a system, which exists for the purpose of self-maintenance, and that constrains the parts’ behaviors, which serve the purpose of forming the system. (A “system” can be any emergent, e.g. an abiotic form, an adapted species, a self, a conditioned response, thought, or a set of ideas.) The self-organized whole, which is represented to the parts in their own constrained behaviors, assumes the guiding function so long attributed to the mysterious “intentional object.” If emergent self-causation is not disallowed, creative originality, as well as directionality, becomes part of the definition of purposeful behavior. Thus, key tools used here, required for understanding emergence, come from poetics rather than semoitics. In the microprocesses of self-organization, I find what I call “accidental” indices and icons — which are poetic in the sense that they involve mere metonymic contiguity and metaphoric similarity — and which are preferentially selected under constrained conditions allowing radically new connections to habituate into an “intentional” self-organized system that, not coincidentally, has some of the emergent characteristics of a conventional symbolic system.
Starting Page	77
Ending Page	100
Page Count	24
File Format	PDF
ISSN	18751342
Journal	Biosemiotics
Volume Number	2
Issue Number	1
e-ISSN	18751350
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Netherlands
Publisher Date	2009-01-07
Publisher Place	Dordrecht
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Biosemiotics Complexity sciences Poetics T. L. Short Teleology J. P. Crutchfield Emergence Computing Methodologies Psychology Philosophy of Science Linguistics (general) Evolutionary Biology
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Communication Linguistics and Language

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The Scylla and Charybdis of Biosemiotics

Do Biosemiotics, But Don’t Forget Semiosis

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Von Neumann’s Legacy for a Scientific Biosemiotics

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