Howard H. Pattee, Joanna Raczaszek-Leonardi.
Laws, Language and Life: Howard Pattee's classic papers on the physics of symbols with contemporary commentary.
Springer. 2012
The importance of Pattee’s work lies not only in its clarification of biosemiotics scientific bases. By relating symbols to dynamics it becomes relevant to cognitive science, which today acknowledges the importance of embodied cognition in a physical and social environment. Pattee’s views forge links between dynamical, continuous processes and symbolic thought that create a basis for a viable third way-combining the purely symbolic, computational models of cognition and purely dynamic, non-representationalist models. It is a step toward showing that the unfeasibility of reductionism may have different reasons than proposing non-material entities.
Howard Pattee is an active, publishing, scientist; however his early fundamental, now classic, papers are difficult to access. They are not present in large databases, nor reprinted in other widely accessible journals or books. The book aims at making those papers available for a wider public with contemporary Introduction by the Author and Afterword by Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi, which link the original papers to current discourse in biosemiotics and the cognitive sciences.