Biosymbols: Symbols in Life and Mind |
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Authors: | Liz Stillwaggon Swan Louis J Goldberg |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Philosophy, University of Colorado, Denver, Campus Box 179, P. O. Box 173364, Denver, CO 80217-3364, USA;(2) Department of Oral Diagnostic Sciences, School of Dental Medicine, and Ontology Research Group Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics & Life Sciences, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14214, USA |
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Abstract: | The strong continuity thesis postulates that the properties of mind are an enriched version of the properties of life, and thus that life and mind differ
in degree and not kind. A philosophical problem for this view is the ostensive discontinuity between humans and other animals in virtue of our use of symbols—particularly the presumption that the symbolic
nature of human cognition bears no relation to the basic properties of life. In this paper, we make the case that a genuine
account of strong continuity requires the identification of some sort of correlate of symbol-use in basic life properties.
Our strategy is three-fold: 1) we argue that examples of proto-symbolism in simple living systems would be consistent with
an evolutionary trajectory that ultimately produced symbolic cognition in humans; 2) we introduce Gordon Tomkins’ biological
notion of ‘symbol’ as something that represents to the organism a feature of its environment that is significant to its survival;
and 3) we employ this biological understanding of symbol-use to suggest that the symbolic nature of human cognition can be
understood as an enriched version of the basic symbolic properties of life, thus preserving life-mind continuity in this context. |
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