Mihai Nadin, the author of this extraordinary book, is one of the few creative semioticians alive. Far from rehashing, ad nauseam, the common places of the discourse derived from the pioneers of the “doctrine of signs”, Nadin opens new ways of thinking at the interface of information and neuro-cognitive sciences. His inquiry focuses our attention successively on the philosophical foundation of anticipatory behavior, pro-action and re-action, the nature of mind and the centrality of related notions such as expectation, prediction, forecast / plans, design, management / quantum semiotics, link theory, co-relation / necessity, possibility, probability. Echoing Einstein, Nadin characterizes anticipation as a “spooky computation”. For those who think that semiotics is in need of a refoundation in view of the scientific advances made since the early adumbrations of Peirce and Saussure, Nadin’s theses form a promising sprinboard. The book’s design itself is a semiotic jewel, a challenge to the curious reader and an potential object of prospective cogitations. Its multilingual (English, German and French) and multicolor (yellow, orange and black) pages are read sideways, opening like a surprise box, fun to unpack, that includes drawings, photos and an interactive DVD. Also worthy of note is the foreword by Lofti A. Zadeh, director of the Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing (BISC).
As anticipation is currently attracting much attention from researchers in computer science, psychology, philosophy, biology and the evolutionary neurosciences, an informative and stimulating complementary reading is Anticipatory Behavior in Adaptive Learning Systems: Foundations, Theories and Systems, edited by M.V. Butz, O. Sigaud and P. Gérard (Springer 2003), in which Nadin has a chapter.