Meaning Matters: The Biosemiotic Basis of Bioethics

If the central problem in philosophical ethics is determining and defining the scope of moral value, our normative ethical theories must be able to explain on what basis and to what extent entities have value. The scientific foundation of contemporary biosemiotic theory grounds a theory of moral value capable of addressing this problem. Namely, it suggests that what is morally relevant is semiosis. Within this framework, semiosis is a morally relevant and natural property of all living things thereby offering us an ecological, as opposed to merely environmental, ethic. A consequence of this semiotic theory is that living things are accorded inherent moral value based on their natural relational properties—their ability to signify. This consequence establishes a hierarchy of inherent moral value based on the scope of signification: the larger the Umwelten, the greater the value. This paper argues that a robust semiotic moral theory can take into account a much wider scope of inherent value.. These consequences have positive ramifications for environmental ethics in their recognition of the natural ecological networks in which each organism is bound. This presentation of a biosemiotic model of value offers a justificatory strategy for our contemporary moral intuitions concerning our semiotic/moral relationships with living things while also productively pushing our normative ethical boundaries.     

Critical bioethics: beyond the social science critique of applied ethics

This article attempts to show a way in which social science research can contribute in a meaningful and equitable way to philosophical bioethics. It builds on the social science critique of bioethics present in the work of authors such as Renee Fox, Barry Hoffmaster and Charles Bosk, proposing the characteristics of a critical bioethics that would take social science seriously. The social science critique claims that traditional philosophical bioethics gives a dominant role to idealised, rational thought, and tends to exclude social and cultural factors, relegating them to the status of irrelevancies. Another problem is they way in which bioethics assumes social reality divides down the same lines/categories as philosophical theories. Critical bioethics requires bioethicists to root their enquiries in empirical research, to challenge theories using evidence, to be reflexive and to be sceptical about the claims of other bioethicists, scientists and clinicians. The aim is to produce a rigorous normative analysis of lived moral experience.     

An evolutionary critique of cultural analysis in sociology

A noteworthy development that has transpired in American sociology in the past quarter century has been the increasingly sophisticated interest in the analysis of human cultural systems. Sadly, however, these analyses reveal that social scientists rarely appreciate the profoundly evolutionary aspects of human culture. The chief purpose of this essay is to address this shortcoming and to offer some tentative suggestions toward its rectification. The essay begins by briefly reviewing recent developments in the analysis of cultural systems, primarily by reference to the influential work of Wuthnow. Second, a common flaw in these approaches is addressed—namely, the absence of any recognition of the value of grounding sociocultural theory in an informed evolutionary framework—and the case is made that this shortcoming is avoidable, even within the context of the intellectual traditions of the social sciences. Third, the evolutionary foundations of human cultural behavior are explored in terms of an analysis of relevant theoretical and empirical developments in the evolutionary neurosciences. Fourth, the value of these insights is illustrated by reference to an evolutionary critique of a recent and thought-provoking contribution to the study of modern political culture—Douglas and Wildavsky’s analysis ofRisk and Culture. Finally, the article concludes by emphasizing the value of and the necessity for incorporating evolutionary reasoning into the domain of sociocultural theory.     

THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESSWILLIAM JAMES'S UNRESOLVED PROBLEM

Part I of this article shows that, for different reasons, neither traditional interactionist dualism nor more modern theories of the mind/body relationship — including functional-state identity theory — provide a satisfactory explanation of the evolution of consciousness. Interactionist dualism leaves us with a philosophical impasse; the more modern theories have not yet succeeded in providing adequate answers to the difficulties that were raised by William James in 1879.
Part II of the article disputes Kripke's claim that identity theories are, anyway, untenable because the relevant identities would have to be necessary rather than contingent.     

Spiritual Aroma: Religion and Politics

Anthropological studies of religion have been largely concerned with belief, with ritual, and with the general integrative significance of religious institutions for society. But many issues in the power relations of religious affiliation are still not clear. The political implications of religion involve grave practical as well as theoretical problems. Abstractly, religion and politics are often conceived as opposed; concretely, they interact. While religion can be a powerful political instrument, it can also adapt to political ends and generate its own political structures. In contrast to the broadly affirmative role assigned by anthropologists to religion in society is Karl Marx's thesis of religion as political ideology. Reasons for granting some validity to this position but also for questioning its basic assumptions are given. The whole analysis is illustrated by a wide range of examples, from Polynesian ethnography to the history of Christianity and of Islam, and the situation of religion in modem socialist states .     

On Space As A Capacity

This article is about space and social relationships. More precisely, it is about the space of and in social relationships. It is also about the efficacy of social relationships in segregating their own contexts of meaning and value. The article also addresses the question of how agency comes about. This 'coming about' of agency, its swelling and appearance in a structure of meaning, is what I call 'capacity'. Social relationships have 'capacity'. That is, they have both spaciousness and potency. They accomplish things, and accomplish things 'somewhere'. In this respect, space (or the capacity of social relationships) is something very different from idioms that we have come to think of as forms of space, like landscape or place. This article is also, therefore, a critique of the way in which some anthropologists have recently theorized landscape and place. My argument is based on an ethnographic account of the dimensions through which people construct urban space in the Chilean city of Antofagasta.     

What tourists don’t see: housing,concentration of poverty and ethnic conflict in a Spanish migrant ghetto

This article is a critique of the myth of “concentrated poverty,” that blames urban ills on spatial morphology, presenting the city as a reified entity. Spatial fetishization neglects to consider the political economy that creates poverty and inequalities. Through the evolution of a ghetto in the Spanish Mediterranean coast, the article addresses spatial segregation, social isolation and territorial stigmatization of the urban poor. Three different contingents of residents—Spaniard, gypsies and Moroccan—are analyzed in their mutual relationships and in their dealings with local and regional governments that produce their neighborhood as a wasteland. Although these groups are strongly segregated among them, the space they inhabit carries a stigma that they share and sets them apart from the larger society. However, they are not isolated from but, on the contrary, fully embedded in the basic elements that constitute capitalism.     

Thinking about mind and matter from biology

In biology, man is an object of research; therefore the question might be asked whether inspirations can go from biological data to the reflections on the mind-matter relation in man. The social aspect of man, as treated by sociobiology, is left out of consideration. The knowledge that man is mind, or has a mind, is no result of biological research. It is a datum from philosophy. The biologist, however, is living in a culture which knows about the mental character of man, and this is incorporated in his investigations. He knows that mental activities are connected with processes in the central nervous system and that, especially in the brain, localizations of mental activities are found. As a result of the split-brain experiments with patients and animals, some have arrived at the conclusion that there is a double consciousness. An approach from biology can lead to statements of a philosophical character, as, for example, statements about the unity, or even identity, of mind and matter. The theories of identity meet with great interest in scientific circles, and the truth value of identity statements is investigated. The system theory is taken into consideration. On a philosophical level a revaluation of the concept of matter can lead to a different sort of identity theory.     

Morphological Comparison of Diophrys scutum (Dujardin, 1841) and Diophrys peloetes n. sp. (Hypotrichida, Ciliophora)

SYNOPSIS. Diophrys scutum , collected from four locations on the New Hampshire coast, ranged from 89–195 7mu; in length, 50–105 μ in width, and 68–88 μ in buccal cavity length. The end of the adoral zone of membranelles (AZM) extends 37–59 μ (average = 45.6 μ) posteriorly in a groove on the right side of the body. Dorsally are five rows of stiff cilia. The silverline system (Chatton-Llvoff technique) appears as a fine meshwork, entirely different from that found in Euplotes or Uronychia . There are two elongate macronuclei (Feulgen reaction) and several micronuclei. Diophrys peloetes n. sp., collected from one location in Alligator Harbor. Florida, ranged from 95–134 μ in length, 62–84 μ in width. and 60–80 μ in buccal cavity length. The terminal portion of the AZM extends posteriorly in a groove 30–44 7mu; (average = 36.8 μ) on the right side of the body. Dorsally are eight rows of stiff cilia. The details of the silverline system are similar to those of D. scutum .
There is insufficient difference in ranges of body length, width. and buccal cavity length to use these characters in separating the two species. However, a statistical analysis shows that the length of the portion of the AZM on the right side of the body in D. scutum is significantly different (longer) from that of D. peloetes. Furthermore, these two species differ not only in number of dorsal ciliary rows, but also in the number of cilia per row. The degree of difference in these two species is similar to that between closely related species in other hypotrich genera, and also to that between some varieties of Paramecium aurelia.     

PROPERTY AS LEGAL KNOWLEDGE: MEANS AND ENDS

This article takes anthropologists' renewed interest in property theory as an opportunity to consider legal theory-making as an ethnographic subject in its own right. My focus is on one particular construct – the instrument, or relation of means to ends, that animates both legal and anthropological theories about property. An analysis of the workings of this construct leads to the conclusion that rather than critique the ends of legal knowledge, the anthropology of property should devote itself to articulating its own means.     

The Role of the Principle of Object-relatedness in the Theory of Activity

The present state of the theory of activity (by which we mean the concept developed by Leont'ev and his school) undoubtedly deserves serious discussion. Such a discussion must not be reduced, as often happens, to a critique of this theory by representatives of other schools and currents in psychology that are based on different theoretical positions (i.e., to a criticism from without), on the one hand, or to an unconditional acceptance of all of its postulates by proponents of this theory, on the other. In my view, the kind of critique of this theory that is most relevant and acutely necessary in terms of both its prospects of development and the extent to which its perceptions accord with other psychological currents is of another sort, namely, a critique from within, by which I mean analysis of its own laws, of the internal logic of development of the theory, and of its internal contradictions, which define its present status and the dynamics of its development. Such an analysis should enable us to stimulate more effectively the internal mechanism of development and self-development of the theory of activity and ensure a transition from a period of stagnation that has produced nothing of note to a progressive evolution of its content and its explanatory power.     

THE SUBSTANCE VIEW: A CRITIQUE

According to the theory of intrinsic value and moral standing called the ‘substance view,’ what makes it prima facie seriously wrong to kill adult human beings, human infants, and even human fetuses is the possession of the essential property of the basic capacity for rational moral agency – a capacity for rational moral agency in root form and thereby not remotely exercisable. In this critique, I cover three distinct reductio charges directed at the substance view's conclusion that human fetuses have the same intrinsic value and moral standing as adult human beings. After giving consideration to defenders of the substance view's replies to these charges, I then critique each of them, ultimately concluding that none is successful. Of course, in order to understand all of these things – the reductio charges, defenders of the substance view's replies to them, and my criticisms of their replies – one must have a better understanding of the substance view (in particular, its understanding of rational moral agency) as well as its defense. Accordingly, I address the substance view's understanding of rational moral agency as well as present its defense.     

Biosemiotics and Hominidae history: technicity,animals, and the limitations of human exceptionalism

This article is focused on problematic distinctions of difference among animals in the lineage of great apes. It combines several theoretical perspectives on evolutionary relationships, technological innovation, the development of body parts as tools, and a semiotic interpretation of what André Leroi-Gourhan called technicity. Foundational questions in social theory are developed using biosemiotics, particularly as concerns a materialist understanding of religion and the magical aspects of cultural representation. This, it is argued, provides a framework for theorizing social history in terms of real ecological relations, embodied meaning, and the transference of meaning onto objects. Understood semiotically, the material history of Hominidae, encompassing animals with different kinds of motility, dexterity, and techno-semiotic orientations towards the world, is inclusive and relational rather than exclusively anthropocentric, as is the case for social theory based on the artifice of language and articulations of belief, creativity, and cultural distinction that are thought to be distinctive of the genus Homo.     

Anthropological and Sociological Critiques of Bioethics

Anthropologists and sociologists offer numerous critiques of bioethics. Social scientists criticize bioethicists for their arm-chair philosophizing and socially ungrounded pontificating, offering philosophical abstractions in response to particular instances of suffering, making all-encompassing universalistic claims that fail to acknowledge cultural differences, fostering individualism and neglecting the importance of families and communities, and insinuating themselves within the “belly” of biomedicine. Although numerous aspects of bioethics warrant critique and reform, all too frequently social scientists offer ungrounded, exaggerated criticisms of bioethics. Anthropological and sociological critiques of bioethics are hampered by the tendency to equate bioethics with clinical ethics and moral theory in bioethics with principlist bioethics. Also, social scientists neglect the role of bioethicists in addressing organizational ethics and other “macro-social” concerns. If anthropologists and sociologists want to provide informed critiques of bioethics they need to draw upon research methods from their own fields and develop richer, more informed analyses of what bioethicists say and do in particular social settings.     

Recognising and Translating Knowledge: Navigating the Political,Epistemological, Legal and Ontological

What does it mean to call something ‘knowledge’ today? What does this recognition or translation require? And what does it entrain? This introduction makes a novel synthesis of contributions to the Special Issue and advances observations regarding the ‘mythic’ qualities of intellectual property law, the precipitation of ‘nature’, and the importance of attending to what is lost when things and practices are also called ‘knowledge’. The papers cohere around a timely set of observations and critiques: critiques of the way the knowledge economy makes demands and defines expectations about value; of how intellectual property law lies behind and shapes exclusions, inclusions, and inequalities; of the ‘mythic’ status of assumptions informing laws about ownership; and the implicit hierarchy contained within types of knowledge as understood through the categories of western epistemology. By taking up effect rather than veracity and certainty, contributors leave the definition of knowledge to ethnographic subjects. That is, they attend to where and how things come to be called knowledge, and for what reasons, noticing how equivalences across practices, made for the purpose of creating the possibility of exchange value (and thus of encouraging circulation) does its work at the expense of multiple aspects, values, and relations that are also discernable in social processes that produce ‘knowledge’.     

How to capture the ‘wow’: R.R. Marett's notion of awe and the study of religion⋆

Current scholarship in the social sciences and humanities, including the study of religion, shows a marked appraisal of bodily sensations, emotions, and experiences as eminently social and politico‐aesthetic phenomena (rather than reducing them to a matter of mere individual psychology). How to grasp the genesis of shared perceptions and feelings, and even some kind of ‘wow’ effect, in relation to a posited ‘beyond’ has become a central issue for scholars of religion today. Placed against the horizon of the material turn in the study of religion, R.R. Marett's approach to religion as an ‘organic complex of thought, emotion, and behaviour’ and his concept of awe gain renewed topicality. Engaging with Marett's ideas in the context of broader debates about religious experience, in this article (which is based on my 2014 Marett lecture) I call attention to the surplus generated in the interplay of religious things and bodily sensations and explore its role in politics and aesthetics of religious world‐making. My central point is that Marett's work offers valuable resources for an approach to religion that neither takes for granted the existence of a god or transcendental force (as in ontological approaches), nor invests in unmasking it as an illusion (as in critiques of religion as irrational), but instead undertakes a close study of the standardized methods that yield the fabrication of some kind of excess that points to a ‘beyond’ and yet is grounded in the here and now.     

Hylomorphism and the Metabolic Closure Conception of Life

This paper examines three exemplary theories of living organization with respect to their common feature of defining life in terms of metabolic closure: autopoiesis, (M, R) systems, and chemoton theory. Metabolic closure is broadly understood to denote the property of organized chemical systems that each component necessary for the maintenance of the system is produced from within the system itself, except for an input of energy. It is argued that two of the theories considered—autopoiesis and (M, R) systems—participate in a hylomorphist pattern of thinking which separates the “form” of the living system from its “matter.” The analysis and critique of hylomorphism found in the work of the philosopher Gilbert Simondon is then applied to these two theories, and on the basis of this critique it is argued that the chemoton model offers a superior theory of minimal life which overcomes many of the problems associated with the other two. Throughout, the relationship between hylomorphism and the understanding of living things as machines is explored. The paper concludes by considering how hylomorphism as a background ontology for theories of life fundamentally influences the way life is defined.     

Evaluation of sleep architecture in practitioners of Sudarshan Kriya yoga and Vipassana meditation

Yoga is an ancient Indian science and way of life that has been described in the traditional texts as a systematic method of achieving the highest possible functional harmony between body and mind. Yogic practices are claimed to enhance the quality of sleep. Electrophysiological correlates associated with the higher states of consciousness have been reported in long-term practitioners of transcendental meditation during deep sleep states. The present study was carried out to assess sleep architecture in Sudarshan Kriya Yoga (SKY) and Vipassana meditators. This was to ascertain the differences, if any, in sleep architecture following yogic practices. Whole night polysomnographic recordings were carried out in 78 healthy male subjects belonging to control and yoga groups. The groups studied were aged between 20 and 30-years-old (younger) and 31 to 55-years-old (middle-aged). The sleep architecture was comparable among the younger control and yoga groups. While slow wave sleep (non-REM (rapid eye movement) S₃ and S₄) had reduced to 3.7 percent in the middle-aged control group, participants of the middle-aged yoga groups (both SKY and Vipassana) showed no such decline in slow wave sleep states, which was experienced by 11.76 and 12.76 percent, respectively, of the SKY and Vipassana groups. However, Vipassana practitioners showed a significant enhancement (P < 0.001) in their REM sleep state from that of the age-matched control subjects and also from their SKY counterparts. Yoga practices help to retain slow wave sleep and enhance the REM sleep state in the middle age; they appear to retain a younger biological age as far as sleep is concerned. Overall, the study demonstrates the possible beneficial role of yoga in sleep-wakefulness behavior.