Cybersemiotics: Why Information Is Not Enough

by Søren Brier

A growing field of inquiry, biosemiotics is a theory of cognition and communication that unites the living and the cultural world. What is missing from this theory, however, is the unification of the information and computational realms of the non-living natural and technical world. Cybersemiotics provides such a framework. By integrating cybernetic information theory into the unique semiotic framework of C.S. Peirce, Søren Brier attempts to find a unified conceptual framework that encompasses the complex area of information, cognition, and communication science. This integration is performed through Niklas Luhmann's autopoietic systems theory of social communication. The link between cybernetics and semiotics is, further, an ethological and evolutionary theory of embodiment combined with Lakoff and Johnson's 'philosophy in the flesh.' This demands the development of a transdisciplinary philosophy of knowledge as much common sense as it is cultured in the humanities and the sciences. Such an epistemological and ontological framework is also developed in this volume. Cybersemiotics not only builds a bridge between science and culture, it provides a framework that encompasses them both. The cybersemiotic framework offers a platform for a new level of global dialogue between knowledge systems, including a view of science that does not compete with religion but offers the possibility for mutual and fruitful exchange.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy

498 pages, Hardcover

First published May 10, 2007

Reviews

[Alexander Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is particularly comprehensive in connections between cybernetics and semiotics. In that sense, this book is basically a functional bibliography and literature review for both fields. That said, I think this book, despite its density, glosses over some nuanced points as if they are structurally reducible to his version of science and semiotics. I think these reductions should have been more detailed. And yet in other cases he is ambiguous in whether he is challenging his own interpretations of things in commonly post-structuralist way, one in which concepts develop or "become" over the reading of the book. For example, Brier has multiple interpretations of Peirce's firstness, secondness, and thirdness. And yet, it is not clear why he has these multiple interpretations, or if they are consistent with each other. There are times I think that this book could have been significantly shorter, and have been more consumable without loss of generality. Instead many of its sections seem to be self-contained topics, but it hints at an all-encompassing system that does not quite come together in my reading. A part of this is perhaps the structural choices of the book more so than what Brier is arguing. He admits early on that one of his struggles is that the book is actually a fairly large collections of papers that had to come together later. In that sense, I see this book to be more like an anthology of ideas in the way that Bateson's Steps is. It's a book that can't be consumed cover to cover, but rather as a network of nonlinear theoretical developments across its chapters.

[Torkild Thellefsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book, that show the depth and breadth of Søren Brier's thinking. I believe Søren apart from Per Aage Brandt is the greatest semiotician in Denmark.

[Christian Moore-Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting and thought provoking book.