SUO: Re: Sign Relations
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Josiane Caron-Pargue wrote:
>
> At 14:20 15/05/2001 -0400, vous avez écrit:
>
> Jon,
>
> Thanks for your documents upon determination;
> But there were so many mails that I could not
> yet look carefully at them. I will do.
>
> > > Hi Jon,
> > >
> > > In fact I quoted this paragraph for a double reason.
> > > I try to clarify without refering to Peirce terminology
> > > what made me react. In fact I am not sure to understand
> > > eveything you said in the two paragraph 'in the first version ...'
> > > and 'in the second version ...' I think that it is good but that
> > > is also a sort of reductionism.
> >
> > Yes, it can become that if one is not careful and flexible.
> > Here is my attitude. I think that a kind of "heuristically"
> > nominal or reductive position is actually a good way to start,
> > and I imagine that this is probably what Ockham, as a sensible
> > person, was probably driving at. And I have seen nothing yet
> > in his original writings that would contradict this opinion,
> > though I have not read but a small taste of what he wrote.
> > But if one refuses, on principle, to admit of any abstract
> > entities at all, no matter what, then one has contracted
> > for a degenre of "dogmatic" nominalism and reductionism,
> > and this makes it all but impossible to do mathematics
> > or almost anything at all beyond "nominal thinking",
> > to pose the rather pointed pun. One of the features
> > that saves my perspective, analogous to projective
> > or descriptive geometry, from falling into this pit
> > is the appreciation of Cartesian Rationalism, which
> > is one of the aesthetic attitudes that Peirce shared
> > with Descartes -- and so it must be the one true view! --
> > whose consequences in this context are that no completed
> > sample of signs, in any significant equivalence relation
> > among signs alone, is going to exhaust the senses of the
> > object to which all of these signs point. This, indeed,
> > if you recall, was the Big Issue that Chomsky took with
> > Skinner, way back when, with the very first shots that
> > were fired in the Cognitive Revolution. Ah, Madeleine!
>
> Sorry, my aim was not to criticize your cartesianisme.
> In this way I am too a reductionnist.
Oh, I was just rambling on a little.
I initially looked into Peirce for
his graphical and matrical ways of
representing the logic of relations,
and so I spent many years in CP 3&4,
without knowing or caring much about
all of these "philosophical" issues.
But then I switched to a subfield of
mathematical psychology for a while,
where Chomsky and Schutzenberger were
the big heroes. So when I eventually
came to the wider discussion of Peirce
I found myself puzzled at first why
Peirce was so critical of Descartes,
who was naturally a childhood hero
of all dormitive mathematicians,
those who like to sleep in late.
So it was a big epiphany for me
when I realized that there was
a congruence between Descartes
and Peirce on the insights of
rationalism, especially about
the relationship between finite
existences and infinite realities.
Moreover, this was the very feature
that distinguished Peirce, as a formal
thinker, from most of the other pragmatists
of his day, James, Dewey, Mead, and even ours.
> My first studies were in mathematics (specially in algebra, analysis, topology) ...
> I forgot certainly a lot, and I do not know recent works. But it is not necessary
> to remind me the topological definitions that worry you so much.
That is just a habit that I have developed in this group,
because the backgrounds and the interests are so diverse,
of trying to say exactly what senses that I have in mind
for what may appear like established or familiar notions.
> In fact I found that your formalization would gain
> if it will be some more complex; The way in which
> I try to expose this to you was also a big reduction.
> The better is to look at Culioli formalization:
>
> Culioli A. (1995). Cognition and representation in linguistic theory.
> Amsterdam, J.Benjamins.
I will try to find this. In the meantime, please feel free to excerpt
any passages that you view as relevant, should you get some spare time.
> It is the same thing for determination: I believe that it is the same
> thing as you, but I am in the habit of seeing it more formalized, or more
> exactely in a different way (cf Culioli). The way I explained you it was
> very rough itself.
>
> Rather than to discuus determination, to-day I will try
> to give an example of my analysis (sorry in french, but
> if you give an english protocol, I think you have it,
> I can transpose the analysis and discuss about its
> formalization on cognitive level). I'll give it
> on a separate mail because I know we have to be
> consise on the list.
>
> Josiane
I once wrote a program for the adaptive learning of
two-level formal languages ("words" and "sentences"),
just as an experiment sticking to classical principles
from Thorndike ("law of effect" and "law of practice"):
http://ione.psy.uconn.edu/~megan/week7/sld020.htm
I later used this program for some tasks of protocol analysis
in the "exploratory analysis of sequential interactions" among
groups of people involved in various "work" or "play" settings.
I started to discuss an example of such a dataset one time here,
but have yet to get back to it:
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg02607.html
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg02608.html
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg03183.html
Amicalement,
Jon Awbrey
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