[Inquiry] Re: Attribute, Impute, Represent -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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AIR.  Discussion Note 11

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JC = John Collier

Re: AIR-DIS 7.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-March/002396.html
In: AIR-DIS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-March/thread.html#2393

JC: Interesting.  My own commitment (as opposed to interest)
    arose from working on Kuhnian incommensurability, which
    I took to be a problem in pragmatics.  The Montague/Kaplan/
    Stalnaker material I had learned was suggestive, but would
    not do what I wanted. I fudged a bit, but mostly adopted the
    approach that Perry and Barwise adopted about the same time.
    (Perry was my supervisor at one point, so the connection was
    not accidental.) Recently I think I have got a much more clear
    idea of what I was trying to do. Perry's stuff, based in a
    Wittgensteinian view, makes some correct moves, but loses
    standard logic in the process. I take that not to be
    a good thing.

I followed the "Situations & Attitudes" developments through
the late 80's and early 90's, and thought that many of their
criticisms of the Frege-Russell-Quine brand of semantics was
more or less on target, and I have more recently looked into
the works on "Information Flow".  And some of these people
have at least looked into Peirce a little bit.  All in all,
though, things in that line have not really progressed too
far beyond "Aristotle's Approximation" to sign relations
in De Interp, the reason being the lack of appreciation
for the irreducibilities of 3-adic relations and what
that all means.  For instance, Quine could recognize
the "Radical Indeterminacy Of Translation" (RIOT),
but fail to see that the reason for it is that
translatability in respect to an object domain
is really a 3-adic relation, one which will
seem "indeterminate" so long as you try to
determine it in terms of 2-adic relations.
Thus, a minimal adequate data set for the
task of translation is a sign relational
data set, and a minimal adequate theory
for translatability is tantamount to
a hypothesis about sign relations,
or sets of triples of the form
<object, sign, interpretant>.

Jon Awbrey

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