ONT Re: Sign Relations
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Let me try to keep this radically impoverished couple of exemplary
sign relations, L(A) and L(B), before our attentions for a while.
I want to use them only for the sake of illustrating the basic
features that all sign relations have in common, a focus that
will demand of us that we not become too distracted by the
peculiar properties that they bear as individual cases.
| Imagine that we have selected a sample of a fragment of a dialogue
| between two people, A and B, in which their language is restricted to
| their own proper names, "A" and "B", plus the first and second person
| pronouns, "I" and "you", which will here be schematized as "i" and "u",
| respectively.
|
| To specify a sign relation one has to give three domains,
| the Object, Sign, Interpretant domains, schematized here
| as O, S, I, respectively.
|
| For this example, let us take the two sign relations, L(A) and L(B),
| corresponding to the usages of the two "interpreters", A and B,
| respectively.
|
| L(A) and L(B) are subsets of OxSxI,
| written here as L(A), L(B) c OxSxI,
| where O, S, I are given as follows:
|
| O = {A, B},
|
| S = {"A", "B", "i", "u"},
|
| I = {"A", "B", "i", "u"}.
|
| L(A) has the following eight triples
| of the form <o, s, i> in OxSxI:
|
| <A, "A", "A">
| <A, "A", "i">
| <A, "i", "A">
| <A, "i", "i">
| <B, "B", "B">
| <B, "B", "u">
| <B, "u", "B">
| <B, "u", "u">
|
| L(B) has the following eight triples
| of the form <o, s, i> in OxSxI:
|
| <A, "A", "A">
| <A, "A", "u">
| <A, "u", "A">
| <A, "u", "u">
| <B, "B", "B">
| <B, "B", "i">
| <B, "i", "B">
| <B, "i", "i">
FAQ's that come to mind are these:
1. What happened to the interpretive agent?
2. What happened to ideas, signs in a mind?
3. It's all so static, where's the process?
Answers that come to mind are these:
1. The interpreters are just the two people, A and B.
As it happens, they are also the objects, but that
is an independent considertaion, due merely to the
narrowness of this particular discursive universe.
The best thing that we can say about the location of
the interpreters A and B under these circumstances is
that they are represented by the whole sign relations,
L(A) and L(B), that we have taken as very partial models
of the agents' overall interpretive activity and conduct.
2. On our own time, we usually prefer to contemplate the types of sign relations
in which we imagine the "interpretant sign" slot to be filled in by affective
impressions and mental ideas, but when we wish to communicate the form of
what we have been thinking about to others, then we are forced to employ
slightly shifted types of sign relations, ones that have the same form,
but where the interpretant slot is now filled by patently effable and
publicly observable signs. The nice thing, the practically essential
thing, about the "formal" approach is that it allows us to do this on
a routine basis, all while preserving the eidos, form, pattern, shape,
structure, and so on, of what we are trying to get across to others.
3. The process of semiosis would normally be regarded as transpiring in the SI plane,
as it were, with a triple <o, s, i> in the sign relation codifying the fact that
the sign s can transition to the interpretant sign i in regard to the object o.
Our static presentation of the sign relation thus constrains or "informs" the
conduct of the associated sign process, but there is no requirement in the
sign definition that its "determinations", in Peirce's sense, should make
the whole process "deterministic", in the ordinary causal sense.
That should be enough to get the ball rolling,
in a thoroughly non-classical way, off course.
Jon Awbrey
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