Pragmatic Semiotic Information • Comment

[Jon Awbrey]

Pragmatic Semiotic Information • Comment 1
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/03/18/pragmatic-semiotic-information-comment-1/

All,

I remember it was back in ’76 when I began to notice a subtle shift of
focus in the computer science journals I was reading, from discussing “X”
to discussing “Information About X”, a transformation I noted mentally as
“X → Info(X)” whenever I ran across it.

I suppose that small arc of revolution had been building for years but
it struck me as crossing a threshold to a more explicit, self‑conscious
stage about that time.

Regards,

Jon

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[Jon Awbrey]

Pragmatic Semiotic Information • Comment 2
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/03/20/pragmatic-semiotic-information-comment-2/

All, continuing from previous post ...

I was at the time working as a “scanner” in the High Energy Physics
Lab at Michigan State, sitting in a darkened room measuring tracks of
particle interactions projected on a lighted scanning table from reels
and reels of bubble chamber photographs gathered at CERN in a massive
mad dash accelerator experiment some years before. For my part it was
a menial job, 4pm to midnight every worklong day, but even a minion can
imagine himself sharing in a hunt for the Ω⁻ particle, or whatever the
Grail or Questying Beastie was at the time.

Meanwhile, in another part of the grove, I was spending my daylight hours
checking off the final boxes for my Bachelor's degree, the main thing being
to get my paper on Peirce, “Complications of the Simplest Mathematics”,
approved as a substitute for a field study requirement. That had taken me
two years' work in MSU's media library, poring through the microfilm reels
of Peirce's Nachlass in search of enlightenment about a single puzzling
paragraph I tripped over in his Collected Papers.

To be continued ...

Jon

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[Jon Awbrey]

Pragmatic Semiotic Information • Comment 3
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/03/22/pragmatic-semiotic-information-comment-3/

All,

Memories persist in coming back to me more through the association of
ideas than the confines of chronology. I can sense, almost touch a
tangle of thoughts tied up together — the information first approach
to things, the arrows only, element‑free angle on category theory,
Peirce's relativity of generals and individuals dispensing with
nominalism once and for all — but there is a hard knot of ideas
so tightly wound it makes it difficult to articulate the links
or see the untying if there is one to make.

To be continued ...

Jon

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