Re: SUO: *Date 10 Mar 2002 -- Extension x Comprehension = Information
Jon --
I think another way to say what you are saying here is the way Korzybski
talks about it. He makes a distinction between "events", "objects", and
"labels". By events, he is referring to the submicroscopic, wave/particle
phenomena, which we now have general agreement about in the scientific
community. By objects he means the observable phenomena, which our senses
have abstracted for us from the submicroscopic events. By labels he is
talking about the names, descriptions, and inferences that we use to
communicate about objects. In the realm of labels there is a theoretically
unlimited number of levels of abstraction (such that we can treat labels as
phenomena to be further labeled, with not fundamental stopping rule).
The point I would lke to make here is that the manifestation of sensing
objects can be called semeiosis (by some agreed-upon spelling), but it is
also true that there is a fundamental difference between sensing and
abstracting characteristics of objects, and sensing and understanding the
meaning of labels (in Korzybski's terms). To say that these are the same
is to make an already difficult task considerably more difficult, for no
useful purpose. It is to consciously go out of our way to confuse the map
with the territory, which I don't think we want to do here. It seems that
this is close to what you are saying in your table below, where the column
under the label "Objective Framework" is blank. That there is an
abstraction of the senses that needs to be taken into account, but that it
is a different kind of abstraction than what happens in the "Interpretive
Framework".
Is that about it?
Doug McDavid
Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>@majordomo.ieee.org on 03/09/2002 09:56:38
PM
Please respond to Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
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Subject: SUO: *Date 10 Mar 2002 -- Extension x Comprehension =
Information
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JA = Jon Awbrey
JD = Jean-Luc Delatre
It is prohibitively difficult for me to try and clear up
whole hosts of misunderstandings at once, so I am trying
to scan through JD's comments and to pick off the easier
pickings as I come to them. Here is one misapprehension
that I think I can clarify a little.
I have repeatedly tried to explain the following point.
I am still hopeful that one day I will find a way that
actually gets through. The basic insight is really as
old as Aristotle, and its development marks one of the
initial instances of a "linguistic turn" in philosophy.
The suggestion is this: If you find that you and your
colleagues having been arguing for an excessively long
time and without success about the nature of "what is",
then maybe it is time to back off from the fixation on
being, just a step or two, and start to look, with new
deliberation and due reflection, at the many different
categories of things that people say about "what is".
That is what I was trying to say when I said these words:
JA: Yes, but it is the level of discourse in which we swim,
the one of which we have some immediate grasp, the one
that is "closer to us", as Aristotle said, and the one
in which we cannot help but to begin. So let us begin.
That is what I was trying to say when I said these words:
JA: If you consider semiotics to be straying, then that is your entitled
opinion,
but I have reasons to think, reasons with which even Plato and
Aristotle were
thoroughly familiar, that our sorts of beings cannot get at ontos+logos
except
through the door of logos first. So that will be my approach to the
subject.
That is what I was trying to say when I drew this picture:
o-----------------------------o-----------------------------o
| Objective Framework | Interpretive Framework |
o-----------------------------o-----------------------------o
| | |
| | "man" |
| | "horse" |
| | "kangaroo" |
| | "whale" |
| | "mammal" |
| | |
| | "spherical" |
| | "bright" |
| | "fragrant" |
| | "juicy" |
| | "tropical" |
| | "fruit" |
| | "orange" |
| | |
o-----------------------------o-----------------------------o
That is what I was trying to say when I said these words:
JA: That is to say, in the beginning there is nothing but words,
and the objective side of the universe is all form and void.
JA: Still nothing happening on the objective side of the world.
Our first inkling of a connection to the "world of matter"
comes with the notions of denotation and Peirce's "sphere".
To which you replied, respectively:
JD: Ha, ha, pure bollocks (sorry, cannot resist that one ...)
No one could build any kind of concepts if it were not for
some examples of objects out of which he will painstakingly
try to make some sense by ordering them along concepts.
JD: Same remark, you will meet with "actual" men, horses, kangaroos,
and whales before you figure out how they relate to each other.
In response to this I might just point out that the "semiotic turn" is
wider than both the linguistic and the logical turns, because among the
so-called "signs" that semiotics studies are all the data of the senses,
which is all that greets us when we first meet with "examples of objects"
and all of the "actual men, horses, kangaroos, and whales" that there are.
The illusion that one begins with some unmediated intuition of objects
is one of the most insidious of all the systematic errors in ontology,
tantamount to the "ontological worker's occupational disease" (OWOD).
Watch out for that ...
Jon Awbrey
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