RE: SUO: Irreducible Triadicity
Dear Lee,
> Matthew,
>
> The catch in my email was the phrase "without any loss of logical
> content".
>
> There is, after all, a big difference between saying, for
> example, 'all
> landscapes can be represented by still black-and-white
> photographs' and
> claiming that such representations *necessarily* capture the visual
> experience of all landscapes without loss of content (e.g. color,
> 3-dimensionality, passage of time).
>
> I do not believe that Pat's critique of Burch's attempt to reconstruct
> Peirce made so strong a claim for reduction to dyadic relations.
MW: Well I will make one then. I will claim that in the way that I
"reduce" triadic relations to dyadic ones, I am actually capturing more
information than the triadic form (see my recent response to John on
plumbing).
>
> Nor in the measurement example you gave, do I see how we can
> address this
> without loss unless we add to the dyadic relation between object and
> measuring instrument the *tertium quid* of the interpreting
> observer.
MW: I forget the detail of teh Measurement example, so this is a recreation
from being to lazy to look it up, please forgive minor inconsistencies,
but that aside, my rendering of a measurement into dyadic form would be,
for a measurement m1, something like:
Measured <m1, Object1>
Performer <m1, Measuring-instrument-1>
Measured-property <m1, (say) temperature>
Result <m1, Characteristic1> (characteristic1 is the degree of hotness
observed)
Celsius <Characteristic1, 20.1>
(mapping of the degree of hotness onto the number space -273.1 to
+infinity).
timed-at <m1, 2001-03-19: 13:00>
> This is not to deny that *some* representation in concatenated dyadic
> relations is possible (and of course computationally convenient if our
> medium of representation is a relational database). But I
> would question
> whether such a representation can exhaust the content of the
> measurement
> problem such that it would be adequate for e.g. quantum physics.
MW: OK you tell me what's missing.
On the other hand in this form, if for example you do not know the identity
of the particular instrument used to make the measurement, you are not
prevented from saying anything at all.
>
> Of course, for the limited problem before us, constructing a
> well-specified upper level artifact, it may be sufficient to
> declare the
> presuppositions that limit it and let those with problems
> that cannot be
> accommodated shop elsewhere.
MW: It is more useful to understand that the forms that I am proposing
always provide a direct route to the forms that some here seem to prefer.
<snip>
Regards
Matthew
===============================================================
Matthew West http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/
Principal Consultant Shell Visiting Professor
Operations & Asset Management The Keyworth Institute
Shell Services International The University of Leeds
http://www.shellservices.com/ http://www.keyworth.leeds.ac.uk/
H3229, Shell Centre, London, SE1 7NA, UK.
Tel: +44 207 934 4490 Fax: 7929 Mobile: +44 7796 336538
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