Abstract
First, I offer a short overview on the classical occidental philosophy as propounded by the ancient Greeks and the natural philosophies of the last 2000 years until the dawn of the empiricist logic of science in the twentieth century, which wanted to delimitate classical metaphysics from empirical sciences. In contrast to metaphysical concepts which didn’t reflect on the language with which they tried to explain the whole realm of entities empiricist logic of science initiated the end of metaphysical theories by reflecting on the preconditions for foundation and justification of sentences about objects of investigation, i.e. a coherent definition of language in general, which was not the aim of classical metaphysics. Unexpectedly empiricist logic of science in the linguistic turn failed in the physical and mathematical reductionism of language and its use in communication, as will be discussed below in further detail. Nevertheless, such reflection on language and communication also introduced this vocabulary into biology. Manfred Eigen and bioinformatics, later on biolinguistics, used ‘language’ applied linguistic turn thinking to biology coherent to the logic of science and its formalisable aims. This changed significantly with the birth of biosemiotics and biohermeneutics. At the end of this introduction it will be outlined why and how all these approaches reproduced the deficiencies of the logic of science and why the biocommunicative approach avoids their abstractive fallacies.
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Notes
- 1.
The outline of the three metaphysical world views follows Zeno Bucher (1982). Natur, Materie Kosmos. Eos, St. Ottilien.
- 2.
‘Speech, communication, reading and comprehension on this level mean binding (=recognising) the complementary molecular building blocks (=language symbols) and linking them into a macromolecular ribbon (=text)’ (307).
- 3.
‘Each language primarily reflects the characteristic features of the respective, underlying communication machinery’ (313).
- 4.
‘The relative arrangement of the individual genes, the gene map, as well as the syntax and semantics of this molecular language are (…) largely known today’ (207).
- 5.
‘Although the active center – the actual three-dimensional word correlate of the protein language – comprises no more characters than the number of verbs in spoken language, the protein molecule must unite a total of between one to five hundred chain elements within itself in order to form such an active center, each one of these molecules represents a particular task and one could describe the enzymes as the ,verbs’ of the molecular language’.(305) ‘(…) All the words of the molecular language are combined to a meaningful text, which can be broken down into sentences’ (305).
- 6.
‘…sentence structures, if we disregard the specific peculiarities of the individual languages, exhibit parallels that indicate a universal regularity evidently originating in the organization of the human brain’ (301).
- 7.
‘Nature, through the development of receptors that register environmental signals and through the development of nervous systems that can process and store such signals, has found a more economic way’ (225).
- 8.
‘A specific operational task of the von Neumann automaton is self-reproduction. The first model from the year 1950 was entirely realistic in its conception: the machine runs back and forth in a huge spare-parts warehouse and compiles the components necessary for its own replication. Most importantly, it also reproduces its own construction plan or blueprint. Its progeny should, after all, also be equipped with the self-reproduction capability. Herein lies the possibility to perfect the von Neumann automaton, an idea that has long been taken up by theoreticists: selective alteration of the program enables continuous improvement and an expanded range of application in the sense of Darwinian evolution’ (216).
- 9.
‘In principle, the automaton is capable of carrying out any desired calculation’ (217).
- 10.
‘At any rate one can say that the prerequisite for both great evolutionary processes of nature – the origin of all forms of life and the evolution of the kind – was the existence of a language’ (314).
- 11.
‘Is what we call ‘obeying a rule’ something that it would be possible for only one man to do, and to do only once in his life? (…) It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which someone obeyed a rule. It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which a report was made, an order given or understood, and so on – To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions). To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique’ (Wittgenstein 1975: 80e).
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Witzany, G. (2010). Introduction: Metaphysical and Postmetaphysical Relationships of Humans with Nature and Life. In: Biocommunication and Natural Genome Editing. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3319-2_1
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