ONT Re: New List & Classification of Signs

[Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>]

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Martin's question, the re-reading of Murphey, and the subsequent
discussions have reminded me of a whole passel of problems that
were among the first that I ever lost a lot sleep over in logic,
so I will try to stick with this topic so long as the nostalgia
does not become too painful, in a bad sort of way.  Just by way
of trying to keep one foot in the present, I'll restart and run
a parallel thread on a related issue that I had been working on
late last year, newly titled "Critique Of Functional Reason".

As I presently see the Big Picture from here, it all has to do with
the "objective reference of logic as semiosis", and how the iconic,
the indicial, and the symbolic features of logical languages figure
into the functions of language and discourse in describing reality.

What I would like to do first is to explain the "functional interpretation"
of logical languages.  This involves interpreting logical expressions of
various types and orders as so many types and orders of mathematical
functions, typically involving an object domain X and the boolean
domain B = {0, 1} = {false, true}.  The functional interpretation
of syntax involves two complementary "directions":  There is
the "evaluative" direction and the "indicative" direction,
corresponding to the two operations of (1) asking whether
a given description is true or false of a given object,
and (2) asking what objects a given description is
true of, or not.

Jon Awbrey

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