ONT Re: Brief Lives Examined
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BLE. Discussion Note 1
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BM = Bernard Morand
JA = Jon Awbrey
^ ^ ^ Properties, Qualities
\|/
@ Entity, Object
/|\
v v v Instances, Examples
JA: Here is a generic picture of what I have in mind
as falling under the term "existential correlate".
JA: NB. I am still testing how this sounds, and may
also try the alternative "ontological correlate".
JA: The sign "@" marks a node, often called the "propositus",
corresponding to a possible entity or a potential object
of discussion in a certain kind of ontological hierarchy,
one where the objects that are related to the propositus
as its "properties" or "qualities" are incident above it
in the hierarchy, and where the objects that are related
to the propositus as its "instances" or "exemplars" are
incident below it in the hierarchy.
JA: These incidence relations are 2-adic relations that may
initially be regarded as "free", in other words, having
no additional "relations" (in another sense of the word
"relation" that is established in algebra and not about
to change). Thus, they begin by being analogous to the
set-theoretic membership relation in its intransitivity.
However, we can always impose any relations that appear
to be demanded by the application at hand, for instance,
a "law of transitivity" that would make these relations
more analogous to the set-theoretic inclusion relation.
These are the sorts of considerations that often arise
in various kinds of applied empirical contexts, where
one is often forced to start gathering data about an
empirical relation without always knowing all of the
laws that it will be discovered to obey in due time.
JA: Next time, I will consider the significance of this
ontological picture for the classification of signs.
BM: Yes Jon, I think this is at the core of the matter.
In my view the classification in ten kinds of signs is
relative to your @ node. The second way of classifying is
related to the {^-@-v }'s taken as a whole (that is to say in
Peirce's terminology to phanerons). The relationship between both
of them relies on the @ itself and I suspect that this relationship is
nothing but the illiative one. Moreover in order to pass from @ and its
parts to its whole there could be a transformation the role of which would
embed the dyadic links into a genuine triad. From this view @ appears to be
the ground (in its technical sense from CSP). Does this make sense to you?
(I remember that you were quite critical about part-whole relations in some
message that I have forgotten).
Bernard,
Yes, I have not forgotten our recent discussions on the classification of signs --
in fact, I have them all recorded in this very same work file -- and I have been
trying to keep these issues in mind as I work through the 1870 Logic of Relatives,
but I will hold off saying more until I can see any chance of throwing fresh light
on this already very well examined subject. One does, of course, oscillate between
exiliration and exhaustion in actually reading what Peirce actually wrote, actually.
The paradigm hinted at above is just my very rough attempt to integrate the
pictures of semiotics as it appears from several different points of view,
not all of them my personal bests by any means. In particular, it seems
necessary to establish dialogues with some of the "ontological" POV's
that like to work in hierarchies and the "systems engineering" POV's
where the "agent interpreteur" (AI), provocative or otherwise, is
actually just the "representative point" of a dynamical system
that one hopes may one day become a more intelligent system.
As I have remarked many times, the interpretive agent is best understood
as being arrived at via "hypostatic abstraction" from the phenomenology
of semiosis, as it is experienced by that very "hypostasis" or "person".
Further, the best way to understand what the interpreter is in its own
right, or maybe only in the "information-equivalent" sense, is to view
the interpreter as identical with the whole of the sign relation itself.
This is the point of view that was expressed in the very first paper that
Susan Awbrey and I wrote on the subject:
http://www.chss.montclair.edu/inquiry/fall95/awbrey.html
In these connections, it is very instructive to study the standard recipe
that Peirce gives us for transducing to and fro between "interpreter talk"
and "interpretant talk", to which I have adverted many times, and that is
now recorded at these two sites:
http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg04548.html
http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2003-February/001609.html
The thing that we have to do to put Peirce's semiotics into action,
in a genuinely dynamic sense of the name "action", is to relate the
hypostasis of the interpreter and the severed abstractions that are
the signs and the interpretants to an underlying dynamical system.
I think that Peirce's SOP-transformation supplies us with a hint
as to how to do this in a more general dynamic setting, and this
has been what my dissertation work -- ten years and still going
& going & going -- has been all about, as introducted here:
http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/awbrey/inquiry.htm
Sorry about the retrospective, but sometimes you
just have to look back in order to remember what
the end was in the first place.
Where was I? Oh yes, here@ (= hereat). Again, this is all very rough
because it has to bring together currently conflicted points of view on
the subject of semiosis, the movie. But I intended the amphora "@" to
mark the place of an "object" of a sign (not shown in this picture yet).
Sorry, I woke up with my mind on another thread, and did not know I would
write this much when I opened your message, but I think the idea was a bit
like this -- this is all in my dissertation but I will not look at that and
try to start fresh -- that an icon is a sign that denotes its object by virtue
of sharing a property with it -- and again, I am aware of many long discussions
about the "hypo-icon" and the "ground" and I wish I had not tread on this ground,
as it were, all of which I am yet to comprehend fully -- but what I can see @ the
present juncture in time is that the object and the property have their places in
an "ontological hierarchy" (OH), and that is where I have drawn them. Signs and
interpretants are still off-stage, right, in my mind.
In this picture, an icon u is something that
has a property p in common with the object x.
. . p . .
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
\|/ \|/
x u
/|\
v v v
. . .
I was planning to get to the matter of indices later on today,
so I will break now and try to get back to this then, a little
more coherently, I hope.
Oh, if I am critical about part-whole relations
it is usually one of these several problematics:
1. The uncritical use of mereology, which was
founded on nominal thinking and continues
to be infused with that persuasion.
2. The uncritical assumption that when one has found
one analytic-synthetic, part-whole hierarchy that
one has found the only such hierarchy that may be
relevant to the structures of the objects in view.
3. The uncritical assumption that the syntactic domain
is or ought to be isomorphic to the object domain.
This is just taken for granted by many people who
ignore the history of psycho-physical parallelism,
and do not understand the role of morphisms, iso-
or otherwise in scientific models of the world.
Frege himself was not so uninformed, but many
who misapplied his work, say, Russell, were.
Jon Awbrey
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