Semiotic Explanation in the Biological Sciences

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.