BIOSEMIOTICS, EVOLUTION, AND PEIRCEAN GENERALIZATION

Current philosophy tends to restrict the term generalization to the intellectual domain of concepts and theories. Peirce, on the contrary, viewed logical generalization as just an analogue of a concrete generalization that takes place in nature. The acquisition and transformation of habits, which are generalizing tendencies, propels the unfolding of cosmic, biological, cultural and technological novelties. I attempt to extend this idea by observing that conceptual generalizations preserve as limit cases the conceptions they generalize (e.g., as the real numbers include the integers). I propose that evolutionary novelties analogously preserve aspects of the structures from which they evolved, and show that there are striking analogies and parallels between conceptual generalization and other forms of evolution. This leads to the hypothesis that all other instances of evolution (biological, cultural, technological, etc.) are special cases of concrete generalization