[Arisbe] Definition Of A Sign

[Jon Awbrey]

Pat Hayes wrote:
> 
> >
> > JLA> What the primitive informational unit can be,
> >      if it is not a sign, escapes me.
> >
> > I agree with Lee.  The term "sign" is more traditional and
> > shorter than "informational unit".  Whether any signs are
> > or can ever be "primitive" is an empirical question.
> 
> Maybe I have been misled by the terminology, but
> I take 'sign' in the singular to refer to a simple
> lexical item, or even a single character.  In this
> sense, a sign is rarely a useful unit of information,
> which usually requires a more elaborated structure
> with an internal productive syntax.
> 
> Perhaps Lee or John could enlighten us on what they mean by 'sign',
> and what distinguishes signs from other representational structures?
> 
> Pat

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Pat,

A "sign" is -- surprise! surprise! -- anything
at all that satifies a/the definition of a sign.
For pragmaticians, Peircean style, there are any
one of a number (76 to 88 the last time somebody
took the trouble to count) putative "definitions"
of a sign, but most sensible folks believe that
they all boil down to pretty much the same idea.
The most important feature of Peirce's concept
is that being a sign is not an absolute or an
essential property, but a relational property.
I have been working on the extensional side
of understanding sign relations, mostly just
because less careful work has been done from
that standpoint so far.  Here, one views the
category or the variety of "sign relations"
much as one might view "groups", namely, as
a highly diverse family of 3-place relations,
satisfying an extremely simple definition or
a highly "non-categorical" axiom set, but
by no means being anywhere near as simple
as the definition might deceive one into
believing at the outset.

My personal best explanation so far is here:

| Second, Peirce's claim that his definition of a sign involves
| no reference to human thought means no necessary reference.
| The adjective "non-psychological" that he often attaches to
| this conception of signs and logic is not intended to be
| exclusive of human thought but to expand the scope of the
| concepts beyond it (Peirce, NEM 4, 21).  The prefix "non"
| is better read as an acronym for "not of necessity," and
| is commonly used in mathematical discourse in just this way.
| It extends the use of a concept into wider domains than the
| paradigm cases upon which our original intuitions were formed.
|
| A definition of signs and their processes which is not limited
| by prior restriction to human psychology can be used to investigate
| human thought as a species of natural process.  There is considerable
| power in this naturalistic viewpoint.  It allows us to put human thought
| in a context of other sign processes, to ask what might be the specific
| differences that distinguish it, and to consider its evolution through
| different orders of complexity. 

Full paper at:

http://www.shss.montclair.edu/inquiry/fall95/awbrey.html

I began to introduce these ideas to the SUO List here:

http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg00815.html
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg00829.html
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg00894.html
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg01111.html
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg01112.html
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg01113.html

Just to extract the core from my personal
favorite one of Peirce's definitions:

| A sign is something, 'A',
| which brings something, 'B',
| its 'interpretant' sign
| determined or created by it,
| into the same sort of correspondence
| with something, 'C', its 'object',
| as that in which itself stands to 'C'.
|
| CSP, NEM 4, pages 20-21, & cf. page 54, also available at:
| http://www.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/bycsp/L75/L75.htm

A punctuation mark, space, character, sentence, paragraph, book,
rock, painting, sculpture, building, person, whole person's life,
the entire cosmos, and so on, can all be signs, of some "object",
that is, "objective" or "pragma", to some interpreter.  Or not.

Jon Awbrey

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