Thoughts on systems, semiotics, dialectics

Systems, semiotics, dialectics is a more methodological hendriatis than ecology, society, democracy, which has a more ontological flavor. Thinking of these three as communities, they each were subject to significant development in the “long” 20th century. The number of academic papers that explicitly focus on each area must be in the millions. The scope of each area is profound: systems tries to cover not only all reality, but the compositional rules that describe the relationships between different sub-components and the nature of these subcomponents. Semiotics may be slightly more restricted, perhaps limited to living systems in biosemiotics, but origin of life requirements may push this back into physical systems as well. Dialectics may be expanded to apply to all reality (Hegel’s absolute idealism), to all previous human societies (dialectical materialism), or to living systems (i.e. Dialectics of Nature).

Brad DeLong defines the long 20th century as the years from 1870-2010. DeLong’s essay seems hopelessly biased towards capitalism, but Giovanni Arrighi wrote a book called The Long 20th Century that takes a world-systems view towards the subject and promises to be both more accurate and more ideologically friendly than DeLong’s work.

As Deely points out, semiotics has a much longer intellectual tradition but it’s revival is begun by Pe