1,721,115 research outputs found
From Thing to Relation: Gregory Bateson's Bioanthropology
No full textThe rapid increase in our technological mastering of more and more intimate and everyday aspects of life has created an acute sensitivity towards the huge lacunas left over by rational knowledge and technology. The present ‘turn towards the spiritual’ has probably very much to do with such feelings of disturbance. From a Batesonean view the roots of these lacunae are to be found in fundamental epistemological errors in the preferred schemes of conceptualizations in western culture – a never decently surmounted dualism one might perhaps say. One central point here is the persistent reification of relation. Relations come in many kinds, but science invariably treats relations as dependent variables, dependent that is on things. Giving primacy to process and relation over things Bateson implicitly cleared the way for a semiotic kind of final causation, which however he would perhaps not himself have accepted, because his understanding of final causation implied an inversed – and totally contra factual - temporal ordering. The very systemic characteristics he found in aesthetics in natural systems seems however to point the way to other possibilities for understanding final causation. Possibilities which can be made fruitful in a biosemiotic reframing of technological challenges as well as in our feelings of belonging in a big ‘pattern that connects’.<br/
Introduction: Bateson the Precursor
No full textMost scientists tacitly assume that the questions of origins, the origin of life and the origin of language or consciousness, are solvable on the basis of materialistic science, but only few among them seem to recognize the true enormity of the challenge posed by this belief. Bateson was one of those few. And while his thinking has influenced scholars from a wide range of fields dealing in one way or another with aspects of communication and epistemology, mainstream biology unfortunately has shown little interest in such matters, clinging instead to a simplified description of the natural world -- a description that has never fully broken free of the Cartesian body-mind distinction and sees the natural world as purely material rather than shaped by processes and organization. Bateson understood that the epistemological errors behind this scientific attitude was also responsible for the inability of science to help us cope with the complex, unruly and messy problems confronting modern societies at many levels. He urged science to search for patterns that will emerge only in a broad-spectrum analysis of communication in all its forms This is the challenge to modern science and philosophy taken up by the authors of this book. The introduction briefly presents each of these approches.<br/
Gregory Bateson's relevance to current molecular biology
No full textAmong other things, Gregory Bateson is considered a pioneer in the study of communication in living systems and evolution. His contribution to cybernetics was very special because for him communication was a characteristic property of the living world. But his formulation of information as differences sensed by living systems did not hinder him from using the rest of the conceptual tool-box from cybernetics like, e.g., the notions of feedback, digital and analogical codes, and even information as improbability or restraints, which in his view emphasised the importance of the context in a developmental pathway. Being a central figure in the development of cybernetic theory he collaborated with a range of researchers from the life sciences who were innovating their own disciplines by introducing cybernetic concepts in their particular fields and disciplines. In the light of this, it should not come as a surprise today to realize how the general ideas that he was postulating for the study of communication systems in biology fit so well with the astonishing findings of current molecular biology, for example in the field of cellular signal transduction networks. I guess this is the case due to the fruitfulness of his abductive approach, being as he was concerned with advancing the search for fundamental principles in communication processes in living systems at different hierarchical levels. In this paper I point out some passages to illustrate Bateson’s coherent approach to context-dependent information, hierarchical contexts and analog/digital communication, which I think molecular biologists could find of great inspiration. In particular I highlight ten “Batesonean ideas” that may prove to be of great relevance to the field of cellular signal transduction
A Legacy for Living Systems:Gregory Bateson as Precursor to Biosemiotics
No full textGregory Bateson’s contribution to 20th century thinking has appealed to scholars from a wide range of fields dealing in one way or another with aspects of communication and epistemology. A number of his insights were taken up and developed further in anthropology, psychology, evolutionary biology and communication theory. But the large, trans-disciplinary synthesis that, in his own mind, was his major contribution to science received little attention from the mainstream scientific communities.This book represents a major attempt to revise this deficiency. Scholars from ecology, biochemistry, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, anthropology and philosophy discuss how Bateson's thinking might lead to a fruitful reframing of central problems in modern science. Most important perhaps, Bateson's bioanthropology is shown to play a key role in developing the set of ideas explored in the new field of biosemiotics. The idea that organismic life is indeed basically semiotic or communicative lies at the heart of the biosemiotic approach to the study of life.The only book of its kind, this volume provides a key resource for the quickly-growing substratum of scholars in the biosciences, philosophy and medicine who are seeking an elegant new approach to exploring highly complex systems. "What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all the four of them to me? And me to you?"- Gregory Bateson from Mind and NatureWritten for:Individuals (researchers) and libraries, anthropologists, psychologists, cyberneticians, theoretical biologists, communication scientists, biochemists, those interested in bioinformatics and ethologists, particularly in Europe but also in AmericaKeywords:BiosemioticsEvolutionGregory BatesonMeaningMind<br/
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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