ONT Re: Inquiry Driven Systems
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CP = Charles Peirce
DM = Douglas McDavid
JA = Jon Awbrey
DM: 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?"
well, it's the penultimate cadenza in what amounts to the opening overture
of my dissertational symphony, so i kant be expected to say it all at once --
and y'know that i've tried! -- but if you are asking how a sign comes into
being in the first place -- with a bang up petard or whimpering desperation --
i guess i would have to agree. but i think that i am duly aware, and have
dully expressed something of its "quisitory universal equivalent" (que?),
well, at least once or twice or thrice. i will put aside my obsessive
invention of acronyms, in which you may notice by the way a ceratin
fascination with how new terms are instigmated into being, quasi una
random mutatia, tardily if naturally selected by evolution to persist
in this niche or that, because these are comparative 3-vialities when
put up against the evolution of "life itself" -- as the rosen cavaliers
say by the way -- but still, the question before the question -- as I put
it in my contorted echo of mc^culloch's lifted-out-of-context echo of the
bardic shakespeare: "what's in the brine that ink may character?" --
is not so much how signs come into being as how they survive this
perilous existence between the scylla of objects and the charybdis
of interpretation.
still, "a yarn good question!", said jon theseusly.
jon awbrey
p.s. actually, i have been thinking quite a lot about one of the
more recent examples of a new term being borne into our suo
forum, and that was matthew's use of "posh", but i have not
been able to polish my thought about it enough to utter yet.
j.a.
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JA: 1.3.4.18 C'est Moi
JA: 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.
JA: 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.
JA: 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.
JA: 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.
JA: 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:
JA, quid pro quothing CP:
CP: | 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).
JA: 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:
JA: 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.
JA: 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.
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