Re: ONT Re: Inquiry Driven Systems
Jon --
I'm just responding to your first paragraph, but an ongoing concern I have
with your inquiry-centric inquiry into these matters is that you seem to
totally skip over a question, which in my mind holds primacy over the
single request that you quote below. That deeper, more fundamental, issue
is: "By whom is this sign hoist?"
Doug McDavid
Member, IBM Academy of Technology
mcdavid@us.ibm.com -- 916-549-4600
"Imagine all the people ... living life in peace."
Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>@majordomo.ieee.org on 01/11/2002 09:54:21
AM
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To: Arisbe <arisbe@stderr.org>, Gdsemiocom <gdsemiocom@univ-perp.fr>,
Ontology <ontology@ieee.org>
cc:
Subject: ONT Re: Inquiry Driven Systems
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| Document History
|
| Subject: Inquiry Driven Systems: An Inquiry Into Inquiry
| Contact: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
| Version: Draft 8.70
| Created: 23 Jun 1996
| Revised: 06 Jan 2002
| Advisor: M.A. Zohdy
| Setting: Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA
| Excerpt: Section 1.3.4 (Discussion of Formalization: Concrete Examples)
| Excerpt: Subsection 1.3.4.18 (C'est Moi)
|
| http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/awbrey/inquiry.htm
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 about the role of the interpretant,
"Stand and unfold yourself!", there has been the ready and abiding state of
a certain system of interpretation, developing its character and gradually
evolving its meaning through a series of extensions and imputations.
Namely,
the MOI (the SOI experienced as an object) can answer for the interpreter,
to whatever extent that conduct can be formalized, and the IM (the SOI as
it is experienced in action, in statu nascendi) can serve as a proxy for
the momentary thrust of interpretive dynamics, to whatever degree that
process can be explicated in the meantime medium of this discussion.
To put a finer point on this result I can do no better at this
stage of play than to recount the "metaphorical argument" that
Peirce often used 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.
|
| (Peirce, CE 1, 466-467).
It will take a while to develop the wealth of information that
a suitably perspicacious and persistent IF would reveal to be
implicit in this unassuming homily. The main innovations that
the present project can hope to add to the story are as follows:
1. To prescribe a "context of effective systems theory" (C'EST), one that
can provide for the computational formalization of each intuitively
given
interpreter as a determinate "model of interpretation" (MOI). A
suitable
set of concepts and methods would deal with the generic constitutions
of
interpreters, converting paraphrastic and periphrastic descriptions of
their interpretive practice into moderately complete and relatively
concrete specifications of sign relations.
2. To prepare a fully dynamic basis for actualizing interpretants.
This means that an interpretant addressed by the interpretation
of a sign would not be left in the form of an abstractly-minded
memory image or a detached token to be processed by a hypothetical
but largely nondescript interpretive agent, but realized as a fully
descript type of state configuration in a qualitative dynamic system.
To fathom what might be the symbolic analogue of a "state with
momentum"
has presented this project with numerous difficulties both conceptual
and
terminological. So far in this work, I have tried to approach the
character
of an active sign-theoretic state in terms of an "interpretive moment"
(IM),
"information state" (IS), "attended token" (AT), "situation of use"
(SOU),
or "instance of use" (IOU). A successful candidate for a concept to
this
purpose would capture the transient dispositions that drive
interpreters
to engage in specific forms of inquiry, defining their ongoing state of
uncertainty with regard to objects and questions of immediate concern.
Jon Awbrey
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