SUO: Re: Membrance Of Things Parsed
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Robert,
I have this picture of you fleeing across the country
pursed by a host e-u-menidean e-mails, only to return
and find another horde of e-u-daimons waiting for you!
Bienvenu aux Etats-Unis!
Just by way of recalling what we were talking about
the other day, I will string together a collection
of relevant passages from the conversation so far.
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Jon Awbrey wrote:
>
> Robert Meersman wrote:
> >
> > [John Sowa wrote:]
> > >
> > > ... I think that the distinction between the terms "continuant"
> > > and "occurrent" can be quite nicely defined in Whitehead's terms:
> > > A continuant is something that we can recognize at multiple encounters.
> > > An occurrent is something that does not have enough distinctive characteristics
> > > that we can be sure whether another encounter is with "the same" or "a similar" entity.
> >
> > ### a most enlightening definition I must say.
> > But in it, and in fact in all of the above,
> > who are these "we" and "I" who do the
> > recognizing and identifying ...
>
> Myself, I usually call such an agent
> by any one of the following names:
> Interpreter (I), Observer (O),
> Interpretant Observer (IO),
> Observant Interpreter (OI),
> at time, neologistically,
> the Interrupreter.
>
> For a pragmatician, I dare say, these are all different titles for the same job,
> due to the indiscernibility between interpreting and observing one's experience.
>
> It is a standard exercise in the Peircean theory of signs
> to try one's hand at coming to grips with the relationship
> between interpreters, putative agents of the interpretative
> process, or as they say, of the ongoing "semiosis", and the
> so-called "interpretant signs" that intervene in this action
> between the object of a sign and the initial sign in question.
>
> A big portion of my dissertation work is directed toward trying
> to make sense of this relationship in a system-theoretic setting.
>
> Here is how I discuss what I regard to be one of the most critically illuminating
> passages in Peirce's entire treatment of this "interpretant-interpreter" question:
>
> [ Acronym Glossary:
> |
> | IM = interpretive moment
> | MOI = model of interpretation
> | SOI = system of interpretation
> ]
>
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>
> 1.3.4.18 C'est Moi
>
> From the emblem unfurled on a tapestry to tease out the
> working of its loom and spindle, a charge to bind these
> frameworks together is drawn by necessity from a single
> request: "To whom is the sign addressed?" The easy,
> all too easy answer comes "To whom it may concern", but
> this works more to put off the question than it acts as
> a genuine response. To say that a sign relation is
> intended for the use of its interpreter, unless one has
> ready an independent account of that agent's conduct,
> only rephrases the initial question about the end of
> interpretation.
>
> The interpreter is an agency depicted over and above the sign relation,
> but in a very real sense it is simply identical with the whole of it.
> And so one is led to examine the relationship between the interpreter
> and the interpretant, the element falling within the sign relation to
> which the sign in actuality tends. The catch is that the whole of the
> intended sign relation is seldom known from the beginning of inquiry,
> and so the aimed for interpretant is often just as unknown as the rest.
>
> These eventualities call for the elaboration of interpretive and objective
> frameworks in which not just the specious but the speculative purpose of
> a sign can be contemplated, permitting extensions of the initial data,
> through error and retrial, to satisfy emergent and recurring questions.
>
> At last, even with the needed frameworks only partly shored up, I can
> finally ravel up and tighten one thread of this rambling investigation.
> All this time, steadily rising to answer the challenge about the identity
> of the interpreter, "Who's there?", and the role of the interpretant,
> "Stand and unfold yourself", has been the ready and the abiding state
> of a certain system of interpretation, developing its character and
> gradually evolving its meaning through a series of imputations and
> extensions. Namely, the MOI (the SOI experienced as object) can
> answer for the interpreter, to whatever extent that the called for
> conduct can be formalized, and the IM (the SOI experienced in act,
> in statu nascendi) can serve as a proxy for the momentary thrust of
> interpretive dynamics, to whatever degree that the called for process
> can be explicated.
>
> To put a finer point on this result I can do no better at this stage
> of discussion than to recount the "metaphorical argument" that Peirce
> persistently uses to illustrate the same conclusion.
>
> | I think we need to reflect upon the circumstance that every word implies
> | some proposition or, what is the same thing, every word, concept, symbol
> | has an equivalent term -- or one which has become identified with it, --
> | in short, has an 'interpretant'.
> |
> | Consider, what a word or symbol is; it is a sort of representation.
> | Now a representation is something which stands for something. ...
> | A thing cannot stand for something without standing 'to' something 'for'
> | that something. Now, what is this that a word stands 'to'? Is it a person?
> |
> | We usually say that the word 'homme' stands to a Frenchman for 'man'.
> | It would be a little more precise to say that it stands to the Frenchman's
> | mind -- to his memory. It is still more accurate to say that it addresses
> | a particular remembrance or image in that memory. And what 'image', what
> | remembrance? Plainly, the one which is the mental equivalent of the word
> | 'homme' -- in short, its interpretant. Whatever a word addresses then or
> | 'stands to', is its interpretant or identified symbol. ...
> |
> | The interpretant of a term, then, and that which it stands to are identical.
> | Hence, since it is of the very essence of a symbol that it should stand 'to'
> | something, every symbol -- every word and every 'conception' -- must have an
> | interpretant -- or what is the same thing, must have information or implication.
> |
> | Charles Sanders Peirce, 'Chronological Edition', CE 1, 466-467.
> | http://www.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/awbrey/inquiry.htm
>
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>
> > I tried to observe before that all of semantics constitutes
> > an agreement among cognitive agents (e.g. two persons who agree
> > they are pointing at the same occurrent; or one agent who agrees
> > with himself that he is looking at an instance of the same continuant
> > after a while, etc etc. Is this too trivial to mention, or am I too
> > obtuse, in hypothesizing that we include these cognitive agents, AND
> > perhaps the procedure by which they arrive at their agreements, AND
> > the contexts that must restrict or qualify these agreements, as
> > first-class citizens in any ontological design process? Or has
> > somebody been there & done that? I'd like a reference so I may
> > catch up in that case.
>
> Myself, I have spoken of this facet of interpretation so often here
> and elsewhere that it would be difficult for me to recount them all,
> but here are some links that leap to mind:
>
> http://www.shss.montclair.edu/inquiry/fall95/awbrey.html
> http://www.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/awbrey/integrat.htm
> http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg00683.html
>
> > ### In John's statement above, the key hidden elements
> > in my opinion again are these implied silent agents who
> > are "given assurance", allegedly "are mistaken" and have
> > or not "reasonable doubt". Without the implied agreement by
> > them in spite of these mistakes, doubts, ... the identification
> > process and its result would be, in a quite formal sense, meaningless.
> >
> > --Robert Meersman
>
> Many Regards,
>
> Jon Awbrey
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Jon Awbrey wrote:
>
> It comes down to an "agon", a conflict, or a tension
> between the aspect of "primality" or "irreducibility"
> and the attribute of "modularity" or "distributivity".
> I have broached this and incident subjects under the
> heading of "factorization issues" -- the initial knot
> on one of these threads that you might follow is here:
>
> http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg02332.html
>
> That is the gist of the exchange of thoughts that I had
> with Christopher Spottiswoode, marking one of the first
> discussions that I had with anybody here on the problems
> of "Ontological Relativity", making a slightly indirect
> allusion, even a "literal purloin", if you please, but
> not an altogether irreverent "lifting" of Quine's title,
> and of "Critical Reflectivity". The nub of it is here:
>
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>
> Christopher Spottiswoode wrote:
> >
> > MACK goes further than that in its reflectivity. But possibly
> > in rather a different way. I know Java is only used as an example
> > there, but as it happens I have often found it necessary to distinguish
> > MACK's reflectivity strongly from that of Java Beans or Java's so-called
> > introspection. Reflectivity has to assume that it is looking at something
> > relevant, but from the MACK point of view, Java'a application decomposition
> > and recomposition approach all too often produces a very poor "equivalent"
> > of reality.
>
> This is beginning to look like where I came in ...
> enough to make me go back and refine the title ...
>
> > More generally, my long-standing criticism of classical OO's "island class"
> > approach (the latter being Grady Booch's words) is that it often very poorly
> > provides for the interconnectedness of reality that semantic webs or conceptual
> > graphs are trying to capture.
>
> Ay, there's the rub ...
>
> And now I can dub it with a name of my own:
> It usually arises in the guise of a trade-off
> between the "modular architectronic tile" (MAT)
> and the "triadically irreducible relation" (TIR),
> between the sorts of chunkiness that we wish all the
> world would fall into, for the sake of making the job
> of programming all that much easier, and the un-sorts
> of tangles that the real world un-cysts to tie us into.
>
> Now here is where I know very little -- except that, whatever it is,
> I run into this problem all of the time while working in a Peircean
> framework, where it seems like most of the generically interesting
> and genuinely useful sign relations are almost all TIR's and no MAT's.
> But it may be just that I have so little experience with the proper
> forms of composition for triadic relations that I cannot see where
> the joints ought to be.
>
> Does anybody else run into a problem like this?
>
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Jon Awbrey wrote:
>
> Here is another piece of the puzzle that comes to mind.
> As I know that you know, the use of the word "module"
> in mathematics is subject to the following analogy:
>
> Module : Vectorspace :: Ring : Field.
>
> I dare not speculate on how or when or where or whether or why,
> if it did, the word may have found itself washed up, epically,
> on the sundry shores of AI, computer science, linguistics, or
> psychology, taken up, as often occurs, in cargo cult fashion,
> or maybe it was more straightforwardly transported from the
> realms of carpentry and kiffen cabinetry. In any case, it
> will be my suggestion here that, consciously or other-wise,
> and as I have recently remarked to Pat Hayes, a true believer
> in the "continuity of semiosis" (COS) would literally be forced
> by the elliptic dynamics of semiosis to retort the distilled gist:
>
> You can take the Word out of the country of conception, ...
>
> At any rate, one of the characteristic features of these sorts of
> modules and vector spaces is the circumstance that they afford us
> the most commodious vicinities and the most convenient home-sites
> for the applications of distributive laws, the moduli operandi of
> homeromorphisms, the preveiling winds of superposition principles.
>
> And Thus We Return, Howbeit Epic Cyclicly,
> To The Tropic Of Linear Topics, After All.
>
> Time And Again,
>
> Jon Awbrey
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Jon Awbrey wrote:
>
> Another part of the puzzle of which you have lately
> reminded me can be approached in the following wise:
>
> If we find ourselves from time to time taking up this business
> of assigning to Subjects various Predicates that appear to fit,
> a concern that may be chartered under the aegis and the auspex
> of the nomen "Applied Logic" (AL), if you please, or disbursed
> and pursued just a bit more concretely under the titlements of
> the "Pragmatic Theory Of Signs" (PTOS), by talking of relating
> Objects to Signs, instead, then we will find ourselves brought
> to the counter of contemplating a patent panoply and a diverse
> panorama of triadic relations, whose generic brands we may try
> to catalogue in one or two fashions, as follows. We enumerate
> the components of the triadic transaction in either one of two
> modes, that I customarily codify as <o, s, i> versus <o, s, j>.
>
> The "components" (the "role players" or the "slot fillers") of
> the two types of triadic relations can be described as follows:
>
> 1. "o" is a variable name for the "object",
> an element of the "object domain" O.
>
> 2. "s" is a variable name for the "sign",
> an element of the "sign domain" S.
>
> 3. "i" is a variable name for the "interpretant sign",
> an element of the "interpretant domain" I.
>
> 4. "j" is a variable name for the "interpretive agent",
> an element of the "agent domain" J.
>
> It is tacitly understood in all of this business that an "agent"
> may in fact be more like a "community of interpretation" (COI),
> a "stand in" for any one of the following sorts of constructs:
> a test participant, a witness, an average, ideal, mean, modal,
> or typical representative of the community or the system that
> matters, at times, none other than our old friend T.C. Mits.
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The preceding brings us up to the present moment.
In writing this I am rather acutely conscious of
the circumstances that limit the duration of its
con-textually embedded and situated truthfulness.
I move on with heedless and insouciant e-durance!
In the meantime, various and sundry well-intentioned spirits have
helped to remind me, even quite literally to map out for me, each
and every, or so it seems, conceivable misreading of my intention
and my wordy utteration. So let me gather the lessons that these,
my own eumenides, have afforded me, and see if I can put them all
toward the aim of augmenting clarity and the end of future wisdom.
Strange though it be on first appearance -- and yet not so strange
if one only reflects on the nature of the situation -- I encounter
the very same trite-headed dogma that Peirce himself met when last
he passed this way, to wit, the spectre of hypostatically abstract
agency, polynymically known as "abstractive hypostasis" (AH), even
more elusively or frequently as "hypostatic abstraction" (HA), the
very personification of our human, all too human quandry of trying
to face ourselves without splitting our heads in severally ghastly
divergent directions. And what did I do? I replicated his effort
to experiment by making the very same mistake that he did, just as
if I had never learned a single whit from the mess that he made of
his own example, to wit, I tossed a SOP of welcome to the agent in
my schemata, a "standard operating procedure", to be sure, but one
that but whets its hunger for distraction. When will I ever learn?
Next time I plan next to make my "da capo", returning to the top of the
file before you and interlacing back through it to explain what remains
to be explained.
Until Then,
Jon Awbrey
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