No abstract

A description of living systems is still a topic of discussion among a number of disciplines. By an evaluation of the approaches, we get to an axis differentiating those that are indisputable in sense of dealing with verifiable and measurable phenomena. We thus also get to approaches that integrate particular extensions when dealing with the possibilities to describe living systems and processes. It is a task for biosemiotics to find connections of these approaches and thus ways to enrich each other or simply describe phenomena to the widest extent possible. One of the authors whose work is permeated by this idea is Howard Pattee. Inspired by his work, we discuss the options of description when talking about living systems and semiotic apparatuses. We do so by a formulation of two viewpoints that differ in questions of contextual dependency, interpretation and necessity of the existence of an autonomous agent as indispensable elements for the description of life phenomena.

This investigation focuses on the nature of explanation in synergetic linguistics. After recounting the basic principles of Haken s synergetics, a physicalist stance constitutes the basis of a critique of using the stringent synergetic principle of synergetic linguistics. Jaegwon Kim has convincingly demonstrated that the strict synergetic principle impairs quantitative linguistics with downward causation. The central part of this paper demonstrates that the synergetic principle is not an appropriate principle on which to construct a valid functional explanation of quantitative linguistics. The final section analyses the concept of law in quantitative linguistics. We examine a series of laws as models and economization principles and we outline a conception of laws as various categories of conservation principles.

Th is paper provides explication of basic mathematical concepts of "chaos theory". It indicates the key attributes of dynamic models of chaotic behavior of the system with regard to the explanatory and predictive power of these models. From the standpoint of philosophy of science it analyzes especially the representational role of chaotic models. Th e most interesting aspect of these models is a strict limitation of their representational role with regard to the fulfi llment of the hyperbolicity condition necessary for the validity of the shadowing lemma.

The paper investigates possible forms of explanatory monism for the cases of non-causal explanations (primarily Reutlinger 2018; Woodward 2018). In the conceptual analysis, the advantages and weaknesses of the counterfactual view of explanation are examined. Although this conception of explanation provides a common explanatory framework, it cannot sufficiently take into account the specificity of individual nomic generalizations and, in the non-causal case, it is difficult to construct a non-interventionist form of counterfactual. Therefore, the paper offers a return to the unificacionist view of explanation (primarily Kitcher 1981), which is a type of explanatory monism, does not suffer from the mentioned problems, and also offers a solution to the problem of asymmetry of noncausal explanations.