Alfred Lang | | |
Site Page Special | ||
Field Descriptions | ||
Last revised 98.10.24 | ||
Sketches of and Comments on the Fields of Research and Writing which together form the Overview Matrix | © 1998 by Alfred Lang | |
Scientific and educational use permitted | ||
Home || | ||
Alfred Lang | | |
Site Page Special | ||
Field Descriptions | ||
Last revised 98.10.24 | ||
Sketches of and Comments on the Fields of Research and Writing which together form the Overview Matrix | © 1998 by Alfred Lang | |
Scientific and educational use permitted | ||
Home || | ||
On this site you can read texts of scientific and related character that span a large range of activities. In my view there is both an evolution of my thinking over the years of writing and a coherence or inner relatedness of what I have done in various fields. Naturally this relatedness cannot be explicated in most of the papers; they have to stick more or less to their particular topic. In attempting to make that relatedness visible and reconstructible for the reader I have, as I said elswhere, taken to the metaphor of a mind- or sciencescape and approached the nearer and farther relations by means of a matrix of fields and subfields. In spite of there being no hard borders between the fields and subfields and also in spite of the multiple relatedness of many of the papers, the matrix has to present them in a near linear fashion. The reader should attempt to remedy that in his/her reception. The present sketches of the fields and their subfiels are to support such attempts at understanding in a comprehensive way what I have written in a dispersed parts and pieces. Naturally, this should not prevent anybody from concentrating on this or that speciality. However, since I have semiotic ecology available (from around 1990 on) my readers have become increasingly aware of relations that exist in some cases with myself only have become aware after writing.
Semiotic Ecology is certainly the heart of everything in my activities, retrospectively also of much of my early work written from a different vantage point. Although I got to the essence of this perspective relatively late in my personal evolution its has all been prepared from the early phases of my scientific interest in humans and their condition. From the late 1980s on, semiotic ecology has become pivotal in my thinking.
In the late 1950, still a student, I have understood in studying Kurt Lewin and Jakob von Uexkuell that understanding living beings including humans requires inclusion of their environment, i.e. needs to be ecological. Soon after, I also understood that one cannot think ecologically without conceiving things to change in time however apparently static they may appear. In other words, the ecological and the evolutive are two faces of the same. In addition it was evident to me in the early 1960s on the basis of Lewin's philosophy of science insights that some sciences could be reduced to others. In particular, attempts at reduction of psychology to biology would inevitably fail because they were to dismiss the evolutive phases in the human condition that have lead to the differentiation between cultures. And so were attempts to reduce the bioitic to the physical because
However, for almost 30 years I could not see how to deal reasoably with Meaning. Obviously most animals "know" quite a bit of their world, their Umwelt, in their proper ways, depending on the senses and the active means they have to make changes not only in their immediate relation to their Umwelt, but also in their Umwelt itself, smalle changes in the world that may become important not only to themselves, but also to other beings; e.g. they "know what is good or bad for them to eat, they "know their family, their friends, their foes and much more. Even plants are prepared for their Umwelt; it may be less valid to say they "know"it; but in fact their are prepared e.g. for the seasons of the year, for day and night, for helpers to transport their seeds and pollen, etc.
The reader is invited to return to this section after having learnt about the set of fields. Most of my "retirement" activity is devoted to bring semiotic ecology --which is now described in more than a dozen separate papers emphasizing this or that aspect and neglecting others--into a decent synthesizing form. Most of what I have thought and written, whatever terminology I have been using, gets a good place within that SemEco framework.