Claus Emmeche

The vitalism/reductionism debate in the life sciences shows that the idea of emergence as something principally unexplainable will often be falsified by the development of science. Nevertheless, the concept of emergence keeps reappearing in various sciences, and cannot easily be dispensed with in an evolutionary world-view. We argue that what is needed is an ontological nonreductionist theory of levels of reality which includes a concept of emergence, and which can support an evolutionary account of the origin of levels. Classical explication of emergence as “the creation of new properties” is discussed critically, and specific distinctions between various kinds of emergence are introduced for the purpose of developing an ontology of levels, framed in a materialistic and evolutionary perspective. A concept of the relation between levels as being inclusive is suggested, permitting the “local” existence of different ontologies. We identify, as a working hypothesis, four primary levels and explicate their nonhomomorphic interlevel relations. Explainability of emergence in relation to determinism and predictability is considered. Recent research in self-organizing non-linear dynamical systems represents a revival of the scientific study of emergence, and we argue that these recent developments can be seen as a step toward a final “devitalisation” of emergence.

It is argued that the notion of Umwelt is relevant for contemporary discussions within theoretical biology, biosemiotics, the study of Artificial Life, Autonomous Systems Research and philosophy of biology. Focus is put on the question of whether an artificial creature can have a phenomenal world in the sense of the Umwelt notion of Jakob von Uexküll, one of the founding figures of biosemiotics. Rather than vitalism, Uexküll's position can be interpreted as a version of qualitative organicism. A historical sketch of Autonomous Systems Research (ASR) is presented to show its theoretical roots and fruitful opposition to traditional AI style robotics. It is argued that these artificial systems are only partly 'situated' because they do not in the full sense of the word experience an Umwelt. A deeper understanding of truly situated autonomous systems as being a kind of complex selforganizing semiotic agents with emergent qualitative properties must be gained, not only from the broad field of theoretical biology, but also from the perspective of biosemiotics in the Uexküll tradition. The paper is thus an investigation of a new notion of autonomy that includes a qualitative aspect of the organism. This indicates that the Umwelt concept is not reducible to purely functional notions.

In this essay review of Alin Olteanu: "Multiculturalism as Multimodal Communication: A Semiotic Perspective" ([Series Numanities – Arts and Humanities in Progress 9; Dario Martinelli, series editor], Cham: Springer, 2019) I discuss culturalism, multiculturalism, and polyculturalism, and a problematic style of reasoning seen in some contributions to the humanities, a style here called "associative hermeneutics", with no genuine theory construction. As a contrast to this style, I illustrate some challenges of understanding multiculturalism through an example, the question of how to interpret friendship across cultures as seen from the point of view of cross-cultural friendship research.

The development of form in living organisms continues to challenge biological research. The concept of biological information encoded in the genetic program that controls development forms a major part of the semiotic metaphor in biology. Development is here seen in analogy to an execution of a program, written in a formal language in the computer. Other versions of the semiotic or "nature-as-language" metaphor use other formal or informal aspects of language to comprehend the specific structural relations in nature as explored by molecular and evolutionary biology. This intuitively appealing complex of related ideas, which has a long history in the philosophy of nature and biology, is critically reviewed. The general nature of metaphor in science is considered, and different levels of metaphorical transfer of signification is distinguished. It is argued, that the metaphors may be of considerable value, not only heuristically, but in order to comprehend the irreducible nature of living organisms. In arguing for a semiotic perspective on living nature, it makes a marked difference whether the departure is made from the tradition of F. de Saussure´s structural linguistics or from the tradition of general semiotics of C. S. Peirce. An agenda is made for a Peircean perspective on the semiotics of nature.