Ecology and sustainability are current narratives about the behavior of humans toward themselves and the environment. Ecology is defined as a science, and a philosophy of ecology has become a recognized domain of the philosophy of science. For some, sustainability is an accepted, important moral goal. In 2013, a Special Issue of the journal Sustainability dealt with many of the relevant issues. Unfortunately, the economic, ideological, and psychological barriers to ethical behavior and corresponding social action remain great as well as (...) obvious. In this paper, I propose that a new, non-standard and non-propositional logic of real processes, Logic in Reality (LIR) grounded in physics applies to the science and philosophy of these narratives and helps to explicate them. Given the ecological role of organizations and institutions, reference is often made to organizational or institutional logics as guides to ecological practice. This paper suggests that these logics are either too abstract or too informal to have an impact in a conflictual world. Recognition of the suggested new, transdisciplinary logical dimension of ecological processes may provide credibility and support to new initiatives in ecology and its philosophy. (shrink)

In the most general if unconventional terms, science is the study of how man is part of the universe. Philosophy is the study of man’s ideas of the universe and how man differs from the rest of the universe. It has of course been recognized that philosophy and science are not totally disjointed. Science is in any case not a monolithic entity but refers to knowledge as the results of reasoning and both invasive and non-invasive experiment. We argue that the (...) philosophy of science, in studying the foundations, methods and implications of science and the link between philosophy and science, must now take into account the impact of the rapidly developing science and philosophy of information. We suggest that the philosophy of information is in fact a metaphilosophy, since informational processes operate in all the sciences and their philosophies. The simplest definition of (a) metaphilosophy is that of a set of statements about (a) philosophy, and any definition of a metaphilosophy thus requires one of philosophy and of the task of philosophy as well. According to Sellars, “the aim of philosophy is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”. In this paper, we focus on the recursive thought underlying those statements as real processes, occurring both in and between the fundamental and the meta-level. We propose a non-standard logic, Logic in Reality, as the logic of those processes. The metaphilosophy of information is thus a framework for talking about the scientific aspects of philosophy and the philosophical aspects of science. Both Logic in Reality and the metaphilosophy of information provide a basis for understanding the physical and epistemological dynamics of existence, that is, from where the properties of things come that enable both them and the concepts of them to contrast, conflict and ultimately “hang together”. We conclude that the current convergence of science and philosophy under the influence of information science constitutes a revolution in philosophy, that is, in how science and philosophy are done. Many of the issues discussed in the metaphilosophy of information may thus be viewed as part of an emerging informational metaphilosophy of science. (shrink)

Three disciplines address the codified forms and rules of human thought and reasoning: logic, available since antiquity; dialectics as a process of logical reasoning; and semiotics which focuses on the epistemological properties of the extant domain. However, both the paradigmatic-historical model of knowledge and the logical-semiotic model of thought tend to incorrectly emphasize the separation and differences between the respective domains vs. their overlap and interactions. We propose a sublation of linguistic logics of objects and static forms by a dynamic (...) logic of real physical-mental processes designated as the Logic in Reality (LIR). In our generalized logical theory, dialectics and semiotics are recovered from reductionist interpretations and reunited in a new synthetic paradigm centered on meaning and its communication. Our theory constitutes a meta-thesis composed of elements from science, logic and philosophy. We apply the theory to gain new insights into the structure and role of semiosis, information and communication and propose the concept of ‘ontolon’ to define the element of reasoning as a real dynamic process. It is part of a project within natural philosophy, which will address broader aspects of the dynamics of the growth of civilizations and their potential implications for the information society. (shrink)