Cf: Sign Relations • Discussion 10
http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2020/07/09/sign-relations-%e2%80%a2-discussion-10/

Re: Cybernetics • Klaus Krippendorff • Bernard Scott
Re: Ontolog • Mihai Nadin • John Sowa • Alex Shkotin
Re: Peirce List • Helmut Raulien • Edwina Taborsky

Dear Colleagues,

While engaged in a number of real and imaginary dialogues
with people I continue to owe full replies, I thought it
might be a good time to stand back and take in the view
from this vantage point.  I summed up the desired outlook
a few days ago in the following way.

“The important thing now is to extend our perspective beyond
one sign at a time and one object, sign, interpretant at a time
to comprehending a sign relation as a specified set of object,
sign, interpretant triples embedded in the set of all possible
triples in a specified context.”

If we now comprehend each sign relation L as an extended
collection of triples (o, s, i), where each object o belongs
to a set O of objects, each sign s belongs to a set S of signs,
each interpretant i belongs to a set I of interpretants, and the
whole sign relation L is embedded as a subset in the product space
O × S × I, then our level of description ascends to the point where
we take whole sign relations of this sort as the principal subjects
of classification and structural analysis.

Once we adopt a whole systems perspective on sign relations
we begin to see many commonplace topics in a fresh light.

Agency
======

That Peirce remodels his theory of semiosis from speaking
of interpretive agents to speaking of interpretant signs is
a familiar theme by now.  By way of reminder, we discussed
this transformation just recently in Discussion 4 and
Discussion 5 of this series.

But we have to wonder:  Why does Peirce make this shift,
this change of basis from interpreters to interpretants?
He does it because the idea of an interpreter stands in
need of clarification and the way he advises to clarify
ideas is to apply the pragmatic maxim.  The result is an
operational definition of an interpreter in terms of its
effects on signs in relation to their objects.

It would seem we have replaced an interpreter with a sign relation.
More precisely, we are taking a sign relation as our effective model
for the interpreter in question.  Now we must not take this the wrong
way.  There is no suggestion of reducing the hypostatic agent to a
particular sign relation.  It falls within our capacity merely to
clarify our concept of the agent to a moderate degree, to construct
a model or a representation capturing aspects of the agent's activity
bearing on a particular application.

With that I’ve run out of time for today.
The topic for next time will be Context ...

References
==========

Pragmatic Maxim
https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2008/08/07/pragmatic-maxim/

Sign Relations • Discussion 4
https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2020/06/15/sign-relations-%e2%80%a2-discussion-4/

Sign Relations • Discussion 5
https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2020/06/16/sign-relations-%e2%80%a2-discussion-5/

Sign Relations • Discussion 8
https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2020/07/02/sign-relations-%e2%80%a2-discussion-8/

Regards,

Jon
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