Models grow

Kant, in his Critique of Judgment, distinguished between ‘machines, moved by a mere driving force, bewegende Kraft’ and ‘organisms moved internally by a bildende Kraft, a capacity, a formative force’ (Eco 1997, 93). Bildende could be translated without much distortion as ‘modeling’ or ‘anticipatory’ in Rosen’s sense.

The crucial difference between an organism and a machine, according to Rosen, is that any ‘machine’ has a largest model that can completely describe it, while a living system does not. This is a mathematical expression of the idea that an organism is constantly reinventing itself, and indeed is doing this by modifying its own internal models. Any external model would therefore have to leave room for that creativity by representing its own incompleteness. This could be taken as the point of Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature (see Chapter 10 and 11), and perhaps of Peirce’s remark that an abstract statement could claim to be true only ‘by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness,’ this ‘confession’ being ‘an essential ingredient of truth.’

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