Azamat, All,
Of course it's not that simple. I called it a cornerstone
not a whole building but it gives us a starting point and
a first approach to a pragmatic semiotic architecture
still being built as we speak.
There is more detail and a trace of semiotic's later development in this paper:
• Awbrey and Awbrey (1995), “Interpretation as Action : The Risk of Inquiry”
https://www.academia.edu/1266493/Interpretation_as_Action_The_Risk_of_Inquiry
We began by quoting the founding paragraph from Aristotle:
<QUOTE>
Words spoken are symbols or signs (symbola) of affections or impressions (pathemata) of
the soul (psyche); written words are the signs of words spoken. As writing, so also is
speech not the same for all races of men. But the mental affections themselves, of which
these words are primarily signs (semeia), are the same for the whole of mankind, as are also
the objects (pragmata) of which those affections are representations or likenesses, images,
copies (homoiomata). (Aristotle, De Interp. i. 16a4).
</QUOTE>
We used the following Figure to highlight the structure of the triadic
relation among objects (pragmata), affections or impressions (pathemata),
and symbols or signs (symbola, semeia) as given in Aristotle's account:
• Figure 1. The Sign Relation in Aristotle
https://inquiryintoinquiry.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/awbrey-awbrey-1995-figure-1.png
The triadic nexus marked “R” in the Figure is what graph theorists
would call a node or point of degree 3 and it provides a graphical
picture of a relational triple that can be taken in any convenient
order so long as we keep it constant throughout a given discussion.
For example, we could take Aristotle's object, sign or symbol, and
impression in the order (o, s, i), mostly just because I find that
convenient in later developments.
Diagrams of that sort, whether triangular or tri-radial in form, have long been
in common use for conveying the properties of triadic sign relations. But the
intervening years have taught me to my dismay that people tend to be led astray
by pictures like that, often getting stuck on square one, or rather triangle one.
That is, they get stuck on single triples of sign relations rather than grasping
them as they should, as prototypical examples of a whole class of ordered triples.
Regards,
Jon
On 9/10/2018 3:23 AM, Azamat Abdoullaev wrote:
> It is not so simple.
> There are generally two kinds of signs: conventional and natural.
> Mental ideas and images are also signs, natural signs, being themselves
> meanings and intentions, or "mental words".
> Natural signs are causally related.
> Natural signs are the source of meaning for conventional signs.
> Thus the mind is the medium through which words signify things.
>
> On Mon, Sep 10, 2018 at 4:55 AM Jon Awbrey <
jaw...@att.net> wrote:
>
>> Ontologists,
>>
>> A question arising on another blog, perhaps incidentally, perhaps of the essence,
>> brought to mind recent discussions in these forums regarding the nature of systems,
>> variables, and the measurements that give systematic state variables their values.
>> My current focus being what it is, I couched my answer in pragmatic semiotic terms.
>>
>> ⁂
>>
>> Measurement is an extension of perception.
>> Measurement gives us data about an object
>> system the way perception gives us percepts,
>> which we may consider just a species of data.
>>
>> If we ask when we first became self-conscious about this
>> whole process of perception and measurement, I don't know,
>> but Aristotle broke ground in a very articulate way with his
>> treatise “On Interpretation”. Sense data are “impressions”
>> on the mind and they have their consensual, communicable
>> derivatives in spoken and written “signs”. This triple
>> interaction among objects, ideas, and signs is the
>> cornerstone of our contemporary theories of signs,
>> collectively known as “semiotics”.
>>
>> ⁂
>>
>> Regards,
>>