Abstract
Many biological explanations are given in terms of transduced signals and of stored and transferred information. In the following, I call such information-theoretical explanations “semiotic explanations.” Semiotic explanation was hardly ever discussed as a distinct type of explanation. Instead, philosophers looked at information transfer as a somewhat unusual subject of mechanistic explanation and consequently attempted to frame biological information as being observable within physicochemical mechanisms. However, information-theoretical terms never occur in isolation or as a plug-in in mechanistic models but always in the context of information-theoretical models like the semiotic model of protein biosynthesis. This chapter proposes that “information” enters the game as a theoretical term of semiotic models rather than as an observable and that semiotic models have explanatory value by explaining molecular mechanisms in functional rather than in mechanistic terms.
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Notes
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For a detailed outline of the debate, see Godfrey-Smith (2007).
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We must abstain here from phenomena such as symmetry breaking at the level of elementary particles that are not yet understood satisfactorily.
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Dowe (1992) and Salmon (1994) correctly identified conservation laws as being at the core of modern physics. The link that these authors draw between conservativity and causality, however, can hardly be justified. In contrast to their proposal, conservativity may neither count as a necessary, nor as a sufficient condition for causality: neither is each conservative process causal (e.g., radioactive decay, tunneling, quantum transitions), nor are all causal processes conservative (e.g., semiotic processes; see Sect. 4.3).
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Herbert Simon calls any technical information processing system a physical symbol system (Simon 1996, p. 21, pp. 187–188).
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Here the concept of function is taken in the sense of a causal role function (Cummins 1975), which nevertheless allows for judgment about malfunction. To allow for this normativity of the concept, a modification needs to be introduced into Cummins’s account, e.g., by reference to fixed types of function bearers (Krohs 2009a, 2011).
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A further question is whether nonconservativity of functional models holds in general. This seems to be the case (Krohs 2004). The function of a screw (or of any other mechanical device) of being a stop for a lever can simply be lost under certain circumstances, e.g., if the lever is bent. There is no necessity of the function being transformed into anything else according to any conservation law.
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Only theory reduction is at stake here. Ontological reducibility may be presupposed, be the semiotic model reducible to the physicalistic one or not.
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Darden and Craver (2002, p. 5) ascribe work on information flow to molecular biologists and work on the flow of matter and energy to biochemists. While this might be considered a somewhat artificial attribution of different research topics to disciplines, it clearly emphasizes that physicochemical and semiotic analyses are categorically different and thus should indeed give rise to models of different kind.
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In so far, the realist interpretation of semiotic terms in molecular biology by some biosemioticians is misguided.
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Krohs, U. (2014). Semiotic Explanation in the Biological Sciences. In: Kaiser, M.I., Scholz, O.R., Plenge, D., Hüttemann, A. (eds) Explanation in the Special Sciences. Synthese Library, vol 367. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7563-3_4
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