SUO: Re: Sign Relations & Communication
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JA = Jon Awbrey
SR = Seth Russell
SR: Well I would agree, except for your restraint of *solely* ... for
if there is no distinction, then why bother with the extra element
in your form? So that I agree that were we to analyze separately the
contents of either of the domains I or S formally, then we contrive not
to find any distinctions in the texture of that analysis ... yet when we
put them together in one analysis (or picture) we will certainly be putting
different things in each domain the differences illustrating the various roles
of three domains.
JA: No, I mean that quite literally, and it is one of the
most important aspects of pragmatic semiotics that the
interpretant sign really is a sign in relation to its
own interpretant sign, and so on, ad in/finitum, that is,
achieving its own form of closure in ways that are bounded
or unbounded, finite or infinite.
JA: Being an object, a sign, or an interpretant sign is not an essential
attribute. It is an accidental, contingent, incidental, pragmatic,
relational role that a thing happens to be playing at a particular
moment of relation, expressed as an "elementary relation" or
a 3-tuple transaction of the form <o, s, i>.
SR: Ok but my emphasis here is on *role* and how things look relative
to each other. So that if we are to take a snapshot of any given
predicament, that snapshot (that mentograph) will show different
things in the different domains. And when we do this, showing
these domains in relationship to each other to describe some
particular predicament, we must picture the contents as being
different. Sure we can morph (rotate) our viewpoint of that
predicament around so that the same object appears in different
domains ... and that is a useful thing to do ... but in any given
snapshot if we wipe out one of the domains, we are no longer using
Peirce's insight.
JA: At another moment, as embodied in <o', s', i'>, the very same things may
be playing entirely different roles. Don't bother trying to stop me if
you heard this one, but the "Daffy Duck Theory Of The Semiotic Universe"
(D^2 TOTSU) is a perfectly sensible, if somewhat mystical notion to the
Peircean way of thinking, to wit, the idea that the "Whole Universe" (WU)
is quite literally a sign of itself to itself, and thus that the ultimate
cosmic sign relation contains a triple <o, s, i> = <WU, WU, WU>. Really!
SR: Cool! But at any given moment from some particular point of view
that some process can actually take the contents of the elements
<o, s, i> are different.
JA: More generally speaking, this is what relational thinking is all about.
There need be nothing at all that distinguishes the relational domains
as sets. Think of the permutations of a set X = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}.
Such a permutation is a bijective function f : X -> X, in other words,
a special sort of relation F c X x X. There are 6! = 720 distinct such
functions f or relations F, but the functional or relational domains are
exactly the same X. Indeed, there are higher levels of abstraction that
are mounted in group theory where we forget all about X and just preserve
the structure of the group of 6! elements, Aut(X) = {automorphisms of X}
or Sym(6) = {symmetries of a set of 6 elements}.
SR: Yes but we are not talking about a bijective function. There really are
three separated domains when we restrain ourselves to a particular point
of view that some process can actually take at any given moment in time.
I fail to see how taking a God's eye view of this is going to be useful
to us here ... nor can you or I actually that that point of view in any
reality that we can share.
SR: Elements, yes perhaps, but content ... no, I don't think so ...
not at least if they are parts of the *same* picture and are
analyzing *collectively* some particular conundrum ... for
then (as in my comment above) we would not need the extra
column at all. You have swept it away.
JA: Pragmatic Agon: "The winning of our dis/content falls mainly in the O domain."
SR: I refuse to take sides ... I want all three for the purposes of our analysis ...
and while I'm not familure with Mr Agon, I also love the natural world where
these pretentious Os seem to exist. These Os which now are their own things
independant and of themselves alone, and now become signs for other Os, and
now again are refelected in the thoughts darting in my memory.
One is always on the side of one's own content.
Jon Awbrey
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