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Semiosis as Individuation: Integration of Multiple Orders of Magnitude

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Abstract

This paper proposes Gilbert Simondon’s ontogenetic theory of individuation as an overarching framework for multilevel semiosis. What renders this theory suitable for this role is the fact that it shares a significant part of its heritage with biosemiotics, which provides compatibility between them. Unlike many philosophers who have worked on individuation, Simondon envisages a general process of individuation that starts with a metastable preindividual. This process ultimately constitutes an axiomatisation of ontogenesis and manifests itself in three basic modes: physical, vital and psycho-collective. In any of these modes a transductive operation is at work resolving the disparities of the preindividual whereby new structures emerge. Depending on the mode of individuation, the emerging structures can create new disparities that ask for further individuation. Simondon refers to such conversion of structure to operation and vice versa as allagmatics. He also extends his theory to scientific methodology establishing a healthy balance between reductionism and holism. His theory can be used to amend Peircean metaphysics to improve its compatibility with contemporary scientific discourse.

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Notes

  1. The term “super-cooled water” refers to water cautiously cooled below its freezing point without freezing due to the lack of a nucleus around which the crystallisation process could have been initiated.

  2. All English translators of Simondon’s works have translated his usage of the noun “axiomatique” as “axiomatic”. However, in English it sounds like an adjective and could better be replaced by “axiomatics”. Nevertheless, we prefer to keep the original French word as a specialised term of art because Simondon apparently employs this concept to refer to an evolving system of ontic relations (which includes as a special case also systems of epistemic principles) as opposed to the common usage of axiomatics that typically evokes an epistemic system of first principles.

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Correspondence to Yagmur Denizhan.

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Karatay, V., Denizhan, Y. & Ozansoy, M. Semiosis as Individuation: Integration of Multiple Orders of Magnitude. Biosemiotics 9, 417–433 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-016-9273-4

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