Rorot, Wiktor (2025) Scale-Free Communication? An investigation of the use of the concept “communication” in biology and cognitive sciences. [Preprint]
![[img]](https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/style/images/fileicons/text.png) |
Text
rorot-thesis-electronic-20251204-final.pdf - Submitted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial. Download (5MB) |
Abstract
The goal of the thesis is to address the increasing reliance on communication-centred language across life and mind sciences.
A growing number of researchers in different fields of biology and cognitive science employ the term “communication” in their descriptive and explanatory practices. Processes that are subsumed under this notion include—but are not limited to—interactions between single cells, cell ensembles, organisms of varying complexity, both unicellular and multicellular, and at times between animals and artifacts (such as computers).
However, the complex roles the term “communication” plays in the scientific practice of biologists has hitherto received limited attention in philosophy. At the same time, a growing number of researchers view the conceptual framework of communication as fruitful. This leads to proposals (such as the “scale-free biology” approach proposed by Michael Levin and Christopher Fields) that seek to integrate insights from different branches of biology through the terms of “information” and “communication”, expanding beyond the synthesis provided by previous approaches. For this reason, it is increasingly important to scrutinize what “communication” means across the different contexts where it is used, what role it fills in the scientific practices that rely on the term, and what implications its use has for the way we understand biological phenomena.
To answer these questions, I employ the tools of digital philosophy of science to examine a dataset of over 1 million open-access scientific articles from the relevant areas of biology and cognitive science, sourced from the Semantic Scholar Open Research Corpus. The adopted multi-level methodology proceeds in three main steps: first, references to “communication” in the dataset are identified through semantic search. Second, these passages are investigated using topic modelling and collocation analysis. Finally, the results of this computational analysis are analysed in parallel with a close reading of textual data to formulate a defintion of the concept and a detailed account of the role it plays in conceptual practice of science.
Based on the analysis of the data, I submit that there is a continuity in the use of communication notions as applied to phenomena across spatiotemporal scales of life, i.e., at the scale of individual cells, tissues, and whole organisms. I support this proposal with an argument by negation. Using the notion of “patchwork concepts” I show that “communication” is in fact not polysemous and has a core meaning that is shared by the different uses of the concept. I thus propose a novel definition of biological communication. This shared meaning of “communication” allows the concept to play the same role across scales, by describing the causal structure of biological processes, which shares the same key components: sender, receiver, and signal.
To highlight the epistemic benefits of my proposal, I explore how “communication” relates to formal frameworks of information theory, highlighting some of the idealizations these formalisms introduce. Ultimately, I argue for a realist reading of “biological information”, as compatible with the proposed account of “communication”.
Further, I analyze how scientists ascribe meanings to the signals at various scales. Interestingly, despite a shared understanding of “communication”, the practices of identifying semantics of signalling differ across scales. I show the distinctions between the meaning at organism- and cell-level, drawing on existing accounts from philosophy of mind and philosophy of biology. Based on analogies between these models, I extend the concept of “meaning as control” originally proposed within ecological psychology, to capture the connections between the scales.
The dissertation develops a novel account of biological communication covering the whole scope of the use of this notion in biological and cognitive science research. The proposed account of “scale-free communication” can inform investigations into the biological underpinnings of cognitive abilities, including within the emerging field of basal cognition. As communication functions both as a conceptualization of biological phenomena, and a set of focused formal models, the study of this notion offers important insights into how theoretical reasoning intersects with operationalization and formalization in actual scientific practice. Lastly, the methodology used can be extended to other cases, allowing for the study of conceptual frameworks of science at a large scale and across disciplinary boundaries.
| Export/Citation: | EndNote | BibTeX | Dublin Core | ASCII/Text Citation (Chicago) | HTML Citation | OpenURL |
| Social Networking: |
Monthly Views for the past 3 years
Monthly Downloads for the past 3 years
Plum Analytics
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
![[feed]](http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/style/images/feed-icon-32x32.png){kind=icon}