[Arisbe] Being Ahead Of One's Sign?

[t.gollier at att.net]

Jon,

    Interesting you would bring this up. Since I've retired I've been
forced to deal with various bureaucratic institutions from the 
outside -- as a claimant or client or even a "member" -- rather
than from the inside -- as an employee. Such institutions are 
semantic fortresses. Each has certain key words -- for instance 
the clerk at DMV objected to my wife saying she wanted to "renew" 
her drivers license when she wanted to replace the one she had 
lost -- and those words interact in specific ways so as to make
certain demands and produce certain results. They also, however, 
are adeptly structured so as to preclude any protest or appeal of
the results, but that's another story.

    Anyway, in reference to those who man their walls -- which I've
always felt requires a substantial amount of internalizing the
semantic categories and relationships --it does make sense that 
they have no concept of this or that. They have  no sign for it within 
the system, no way of working it into their diagrammatic machinations, 
so they lack the concept. Saying so might be a "hypothesis" regarding 
the persons in question, but it is not a "contingent interpretation of 
their signs". At least it is no more contingent than our willingness to 
objectively consider the semantic system as it functions through
them.

    Of course, some of us still try to live in the countryside, outside
the various castles dominating the landscape, but that's another
story too.

Tom

-------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey at att.net>
>
> o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
> 
> speaking of infernal recurrences ...
> 
> we keep running across statements to the effect that so & so --
> or such & such a population -- "had no concept of" this or that.
> 
> short of indulging in psychohistory, which is always as risky
> as it is fun to do, i do not see that we ever have any evidence
> for such statements aside from the circumstance that the agents
> in question "had no signs for" this or that.
> 
> but saying what meanings an agent has signs for is something
> that we cannot do without proceeding relative to a hypothesis,
> specifically, our own contingent interpretation of their signs.
> 
> i see many problems there ...
> 
> not too unlike the problems of
> other minds, turing tests, and
> incommensurable paradigms, oh my ...
> 
> jon