A Peircean approach to ‘information’ and its relationship with Bateson’s and Jablonka’s ideas

TY - JOUR

T1 - A Peircean approach to ‘information’ and its relationship with Bateson’s and Jablonka’s ideas

AU - Queiroz, João

AU - Emmeche, Claus

AU - El-Hani, Charbel Niño

PY - 2008

Y1 - 2008

N2 - The Peircean semiotic approach to information that we developed in previous papers raises several new questions, and shows both similarities and differences with regard to other accounts of information. We do not intend to present here any exhaustive discussion about the relationships between our account and other approaches to information. Rather, our interest is mainly to address its relationship to ideas about information put forward by Gregory Bateson and Eva Jablonka. We conclude that all these authors offer quite broad concepts of information, but we argue that they are just as broad as they should be, since information is in itself a sweeping concept. Furthermore, all of them suggest a processual approach to information, which departs from the treatment of information as something that is contained in some structure (e.g., in sequences of nucleotides) and moves us towards an understanding of information as a process — in the terms of our account, a semiotic process, i.e., semiosis.

AB - The Peircean semiotic approach to information that we developed in previous papers raises several new questions, and shows both similarities and differences with regard to other accounts of information. We do not intend to present here any exhaustive discussion about the relationships between our account and other approaches to information. Rather, our interest is mainly to address its relationship to ideas about information put forward by Gregory Bateson and Eva Jablonka. We conclude that all these authors offer quite broad concepts of information, but we argue that they are just as broad as they should be, since information is in itself a sweeping concept. Furthermore, all of them suggest a processual approach to information, which departs from the treatment of information as something that is contained in some structure (e.g., in sequences of nucleotides) and moves us towards an understanding of information as a process — in the terms of our account, a semiotic process, i.e., semiosis.

M3 - Journal article

SN - 0277-7126

VL - 24

SP - 75

EP - 94

JO - American Journal of Semiotics

JF - American Journal of Semiotics

IS - 1-3

ER -