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SCIENCE AS A COGNITIVE-SEMIOTIC PROCESS IN THE OPTICS OF THE THINKING-TOGETHER-WITH-COMPLEXITY PARADIGM // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2023. Issue 2 (36). P. 81-94

The article is an attempt to constructively comprehend what is meant by (or, what is hidden under) the umbrella term “science” (or scientificity) in the multiperspective optics of thinking-together-with-complexity. This way of thinking is understood as the search for coherence – an inner unity in the flow of the emerging chaotic variety of interactions between man and his natural and technogenic environment in the epoch of the Anthropocene and the emerging artificial intelligence. Not giving a strict definition of complexity, the article refers to a recently published Russian translation of the book by the French thinker Edgar Morin with an afterword by the translator (Yakov Svirsky) and the editor of this book (Vladimir Arshinov). In this connection, the following explanation is provided: thinking-together-with-complexity (the hyphen here is very important as a linking sign) is inter-disciplinary (and transdisciplinary) thinking that focuses exactly on the prefix inter, which has a fundamental meaning. It is recursive-procedural mediating thinking in the middle. The article emphasizes that this way of thinking – together-with-complexity (the complexity paradigm in Moren’s terminology) – is opposed to the simplicity paradigm not as a denial of the necessity (and inevitability) of simplification procedures, but as a thought-activating, linguo- semiotically mediated and conscious strategy of reducing complexity (as interpreted by Niklas Luhmann). It also implies a certain virtue ethics in the sense of Aristotle’s doctrine of middleness and the doctrine of choosing the middle path of Tao. The discussion goes back to Simondon’s understanding of the genesis of technicality as a phase shift in the primordial magical worldview, as applied to the co-evolutionary understanding of science and scientificity as a semiotic entanglement of linguistic-technological-scientificity; as a process of techno-mediated, recursive contact-bonding of man as an organ-like, bodily embodied universe with his reanimated complex environment of biospheric and, ultimately, cosmic habitat, which has generated him and is generated by him; and, of course, as the coevolutionary intertwining of natural-science and humanitarian knowledge and modes of cognition, eco-cognitive semiotic practices.

Keywords: recursion, complexity, entanglement, coevolution, process, semiotic practices, complexity observer