Soren Brier
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Posters & Accepted Abstracts: Arch Clin Microbiol
My hypothesis is one of the major limits of dominating biomedicine paradigm of Western medicine lies in its inability to include the qualitative psychological and sociological realities in its theoretical foundation for describing the whole person in models of the causes of health and illness. The natural sciences misses the concepts of experience and meaning in their ontological foundation when attempting to model living embodied conscious beings based on law-governed mechanisms. That is the framework behind most experimental and quantitative science. It seems incommensurable to qualitative paradigms like phenomenology and hermeneutics that deals with experience and meaning. The medical practitioner that wants to treat the whole person is in dire need of a transdisciplinary framework that can unite the data from these qualitative different fields or at least combine them in a consciously reflected way as a supplement to the practical way physicians have learned themselves to deal with the complex embodied human cultural reality. Biosemiotics based on Charles Sanders Peirces semiotic fallibilist philosophy of science attempts to unite a meaning based theory of cognition and communication with empirical quantitative methods close to Karl popper’s view of science. Biosemiotics is about 30 years old now and has its own journal Biosemiotics and book series at Springer. Brier has attempted to combine Peircean biosemiotics with Niklas Luhmann’s autopoietic system theory in a framework called Cybersemiotics as an alternative to the info-computational view of the natural, life, mental and social sciences on one hand and constructivism on the other.
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