Re: SUO: RE: Reductions Among Relations
Pat,
What you are mistaking for a sign in the email below is the specialized
sign type called a token, one of Peirce's few sign types to have achieved
widespread use (others: index, icon, symbol, type). And your misgivings
would certainly be well founded if anyone proposed to found an ontology
upon the token. The sign is a formally defined, irreducibly triadic
relation, a 3-in-1. Whence the triadic recursions that Jon Aubrey likes to
draw out.
The sign is thus not to be "distinguished from other representational
structures" but is rather the general form all such structures may be seen
to take.
For purposes of an SUO, it is actually quite important whether and how one
preserves a place for the type (or really modality) of sign that an entry
exhibits. Robert Kent, for example, wishes to stratify SUO signs into
three types and has a further theory to justify this.
My thought-- and my non-legalistic reason for having wished for a more
matter-of-fact approach to funding realities-- has been that the work of
an SUO really does require a working paper that would review the design
choices available to us in the light of what else is out there (a
'best/existing practices' issue).
Lee
Josiah Lee Auspitz
17 Chapel Street
Somerville, MA 02144
617-628-6228
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On Tue, 3 Apr 2001, pat hayes wrote:
>
> >
> >JLA>What the primitive informational unit can be, if it is not a sign, escapes
> >
> > >me.
> >
> >I agree with Lee. The term "sign" is more traditional and
> >shorter than "informational unit". Whether any signs are or
> >can ever be "primitive" is an empirical question.
>
> Maybe I have been misled by the terminology, but I take 'sign' in the
> singular to refer to a simple lexical item, or even a single
> character. In this sense, a sign is rarely a useful unit of
> information, which usually requires a more elaborated structure with
> an internal productive syntax.
>
> Perhaps Lee or John could enlighten us on what they mean by 'sign',
> and what distinguishes signs from other representational structures?
>
> Pat
>
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