Inside / Outside

Abstract

Søren Brier is a thinker who seems to have come to Peircean semiotics because of anxiety about the fact that cognitive science lacks contact with subjectivity. From another point of view, I myself have considered that this semiotic approach might provide a way to expand science more generally away from its mechanistic habits. Brier's book attempts to examine texts related to information science from a Peircean semiotic perspective, with a view towards better understanding, or possibly even subverting, Cartesian dualism. For this purpose he examines the cognitive science-autopoietic and ethological discourses as reflecting one branch of science's nearest approach to mentality; neurology is not given significant attention. But the attempt reaches a stalemate as the book closes upon what I would call the internalism / externalism complementarity. Charles Peirce asserted that feeling is an integral aspect of the world generally, and hinted as well that it could be transformed into mattergy, but science, in its Twentieth Century eagerness to serve technology, has dismissed such ideas as 'pseudoscience'. Brier does not examine possibilities opened up by quantum mechanics on this issue (e.g., Laszlo 1995), although Penrose's thinking is mentioned from time to time. While Brier does not succeed in 'squaring' the Cartesian 'circle', he circles around the project vigorously, returning again and again to the quest (redundancy works!) while taking the reader on a long trek in search of this grail. This is an extremely rich text, and my focus here upon a few of its important points will not do it justice overall.The major problem driving the inquiry in this book is signaled by the subtitle: "Information Is Not Enough" (to understand understanding). To this end Brier proposes to meld together classical science, systems and cybernetic science, and Peircean semiotic in his 'cybersemiotic model', laid out in a final chapter. The incommensurability or incompatibility of the internalist and externalist perspectives (subjective / objective; conscious experience / information processing; res cogitans / res extensa) is in my view the overriding reason for the existence of this book,