[Inquiry] Re: Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems

[Jon Awbrey]

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PRO.  Note 34

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1.2.2.3.  Pragmatic Theory of Signs (cont.)

One characteristic of Peirce's definition is especially critical in supplying
a flexible infrastructure that makes the formal and mathematical treatment of
sign relations possible.  In briefest terms, the definition allows objects to
be characterized in two alternative ways that are substantially different in
the domains they involve but roughly equivalent in their information content.

To be specific, objects of signs, that potentially exist in a reality that
is exterior to the sign domain, insofar as they fall under this definition
of a sign relation, are able to be reconstituted in nominal terms or to be
reconstructed in rational terms as various "equivalence classes of signs".
In particular, it is possible to recognize several different systems of
equivalence relations on signs, among which the so-called "referential"
and "semiotic" equivalence relations come in for special notice.

Attending to these sign-theoretic equivalence relations has the effect
of transforming the actual relation of signs to objects, the relation
or the correspondence that is preserved in passing from initial signs
to interpreting signs, into the membership relations that signs bear
to their referential and semiotic equivalence classes, respectively.
Metaphorically speaking, this transformation of a relation between
signs and the world into a relation that is interior to the world
of signs may be regarded as a kind of representational reduction
in dimensions, like the foreshortening and planar projections
that are used in perspective drawing.

Jon Awbrey

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