Friday 6 September 2013

Reference to semiotic causation/Steps to a semiotics of being in paper by Prakash Mondal

My 2010 article "Steps to a semiotics of being" (Biosemiotics 3.3: 375-392) is cited/mentioned in Prakash Mondal's Biosemiotics article "Does Computation Reveal Machine Cognition?". Reference:
Mondal, Prakash 2013. Does Computation Reveal Machine Cognition? Biosemiotics (published online September 1st 2013; DOI 10.1007/s12304-013-9179-3).
Excerpt (p. 8):
Semiotic causation, which consists in bringing about effects through interpretation (Hoffmeyer 2007), is also a part of human cognitive processes. In fact, Tønnessen (2010) thinks that semiotic causation, in addition to four Aristotelian causes: material, formal, effective and final causes, is necessary for all life processes.
Here's the paragraph in Steps that Mondal refers to (p. 378):
In the article published in English as “The new concept of Umwelt: A link between science and the humanities,” Jakob von Uexküll (2001: 114) addressed the existence of a perceptually oriented pre-modern science: “There have been times when the goal of scientific endeavor was to study the perceptual side of things. [...] Kepler was looking for a design—Newton was looking for a cause for the same phenomenon.” Here, a ‘cause’ is taken to represent only one of Aristotle’s four categories (only the efficient cause, related to motion), which is typical of modern understanding. Perhaps we need to develop a concept of semiotic causation—perhaps such a notion is what we biosemioticians have been, and are still searching for.
 Mondal is based at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi.

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