Abstract
With the exception of the incipient discipline of biosemiotics, the influence of Peircean ideas upon science in general—and biology in particular—has been rather oblique and peculiar. In most cases this influence has not arisen from familiarity with his writings, but quite indirectly, through rediscovery of those ideas by the scientists themselves. Moreover, these have often been reluctant rediscoveries, motivated by theoretical impasses that proved insurmountable short of painfully rejecting well-entrenched, even cherished, philosophical stances and presuppositions.
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Notes
- 1.
Here and elsewhere the noun “emergence,” the verb “to emerge,” and derived expressions, refer to the rise of novel forms of order, variety and complexity through the breaking of symmetries (or equivalently, as intimated further on, by the acquisition or breaking of habits). There is at present a vast and complex philosophical bibliography on emergence, often concerned with metaphysical issues (such as the relations between mind and matter) not necessarily pertinent to the ideas discussed here. The acceptation adopted herein is increasingly encountered in the scientific literature and in many cases can be traced to the very influential paper “More is different” (Anderson 1972).
- 2.
During the twentieth century several eminent physicists separately rediscovered Peirce’s conception of the evolutionary rise of the laws of nature from former, less exacting laws. Among them we count Dirac, Feynman, Nambu, Thirring, and others. Lee Smolin has repeatedly given credit to Peirce for this idea, which he has further developed (see e.g. Smolin 2009, 2012a, 2012b).
- 3.
Our brief exposition cannot do justice to the complex network of ideas behind Peirce’s cosmological speculations. As is often the case these ideas have deep roots in his mathematical thought. For an excellent analysis of their connection to the mathematical notion of the Absolute and to time and geometry see Kalil 2011.
- 4.
As Winfried Nöth remarks: “…Peirce’s much broader perspective of the symbol as a sign guided by onto- and phylogenetic habit serves as a synechistic bridge to overcome two dualisms which have prevailed in the history of semiotics, the dualism of culture vs. nature and the dualism of the conventional vs. the innate, i.e., between signs culturally transmitted by teaching and learning and signs genetically inherited and interpreted by instinctive dispositions. Against the dualism culture vs. nature, Peirce proposes that the habit by which symbols are interpreted is conventional or natural. Against the dualism of the conventional vs. the innate, Peirce postulates that the habit which determines the symbol is an “acquired or inborn” disposition (Nöth 2010, p. 84–85).
- 5.
- 6.
The history of the rise and consolidation of scientific cosmology through impassionate debates in the third and fourth decades of the last century is ably and vividly depicted in Gale 2011. An eminent Peircean scholar, Thomas Short, is quite unsympathetic to Peirce’s cosmological speculations (see Short 2011), which he declares a failure, adding that Peirce did not have a cosmology because he was unable to make experimentally testable predictions. This is an idiosyncratic acceptation of the term “cosmology,” contrary to standard uses (e.g. Aristotelian cosmologies), and in most cases if we were to adopt it the term would apply only metaphorically to ideas developed before roughly 1930.
- 7.
Extrapolating backwards in time, Hubble’s discovery indicates that some 14 billion years ago all energy (before the formation of matter) was concentrated in an extremely small and dense region. The release of that energy represents what is known as the “Big Bang.” This fact remarkably agrees with Peirce’s intuition that the universe came into existence in a way that logically “precedes” the origination of time itself, at a finite temporal distance from our present.
- 8.
Critical phenomena are pervasive in nature. Typical examples are phase transitions, as in the example of the change of liquid to solid water, the spontaneous magnetization of an iron bar when the temperature goes trough the critical Curie point, the onset of turbulence in fluids, superconductivity, etc. These transitions are characterized by the emergence of new forms of behavior through the appearance of new structures, and a transition from a disorderly state to a more orderly one. Phillip Anderson’s seminal 1972 paper, “More is different,” initiated an ongoing program to account for the emergence of novelty and complexity through the phenomenon of symmetry breaking. See e.g., Anderson 1972; Fernández 2012a.
- 9.
Alan Guth, the original proponent of “inflation,” explains this difficult idea in very simple terms: “Inflationary theory takes advantage of results from modern particle physics, which predicts that at very high energies there should exist peculiar kinds of substances which actually turn gravity on its head and produce repulsive gravitational forces. The inflationary explanation is the idea that the early universe contains at least a patch of this peculiar substance. It turns out that all you need is a patch; it can actually be more than a billion times smaller than a proton. But once such a patch exists, its own gravitational repulsion causes it to grow, rapidly becoming large enough to encompass the entire observed universe” (Guth 2001).
- 10.
Causation (and therefore explanation) in self-organizing complex systems takes new forms as a consequence of features, such as historicality, contextuality, and hierarchical organization, which are not apparent in simpler, linear systems. The emergence of new and locally manifest laws is in different ways brought about by the presence of changing dynamic constraints. We cannot go into these vast and contentious topics here. For the role of dynamic constraints on the emergence of new kinds of regularities see e.g., Juarrero 2009. For various forms of non-standard causation in complex systems see e.g., papers by Noble 2012; Ellis 2012; Bishop 2012, and several other authors in the special issue on top-down causation of Interface, February 6, 2012.
- 11.
The rise of novelty through symmetry breaking is virtually coextensive with an increase of information. As John Collier has repeatedly noted, “information originates in symmetry breaking” (see e.g. Collier 1996; Fernández 2011). There are several partially incompatible notions of “information” used at present in biosemiotics, but a consensus seems to be arising that the standard (Shannon’s) conception so much valued by communication engineers is insufficient to meet the needs of semiotics. Peirce described the rise of novelty as “… ‘organized heterogeneity,’ or, better, rationalized variety.” (CP 6.101). André de Tienne has brilliantly examined Peirce’s evolving notion of information in connection with Peirce’s late model of semiosis as a medium of communication, discussed later on (de Tienne 2006). Roy Frieden and Vinicius Romanini have given a new explication of semiotic information in terms of Fisher information (Frieden and Romanini 2008).
- 12.
According to the principle of superposition, before a measurement is performed quantum systems are in all their possible states simultaneously, and this leads to the wave-like interference (coherence) famously exemplified in the two-slit experiment. Decoherence refers to the spontaneous suppression of quantum interference through complex interactions (entanglement) of the quantum entities with their environment. See e.g., Bacciagaluppi 2012.
- 13.
The term “scaling” refers to a feature of systems that show self-similar properties around their critical points, and “universality” to the fact that otherwise dissimilar systems display similar behavior near those points. A very elementary explanation of the appearance of universality classes and their relations to the phenomenon of scale invariance can be found in Fernández 2012b. Batterman 2011 offers and in-depth, competent, and rather technical treatment of these issues in connection to current discussions on emergence and reductionism.
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Fernández, E. (2014). Peircean Habits, Broken Symmetries, and Biosemiotics. In: Romanini, V., Fernández, E. (eds) Peirce and Biosemiotics. Biosemiotics, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7732-3_5
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