[Inquiry] Re: Replicants -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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REP.  Discussion Note 2

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GR = Gary Richmond
JR = Joe Ransdell

Re: http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2005-November/003134.html
In: http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2005-November/thread.html#3134

Gary, Joe, Peirce List,

Before we go spiraling down (or is it up?) into all the
classical paradoxes of inherence and so on, let me just
suggest that this is simply the same sort of issue that
always arises in the use of abstractions in any field,
and so long as we understand the issue in structural
terms, it doesn't really matter all that much what
words we use.

One of the most important insights to achieve here is that this is a relational matter.
In other words, so far as the 2-adic approximation goes, elementhood or instantiation
is a relation between two entities that are distinguished only in that relation and
not in any absolute terms.  Nothing but regress will come about from attempting to
treat the status of generals or the status of instances as absolutes.

Peirce, in some of his most groundbreaking early work, took this insight
one step further, making the distinction between generals and individuals
relative to yet another explicit participant, namely, the interpreter.  In
this way he side-stepped most of the futilities of the 2-adic thinking that
would waste the strength of 20th century thought.

Jon Awbrey

JR: We will need to get clear on what exactly
    is meant by "replica", which seems fairly
    easy to do.

GR: Fairly easy in one sense.  But we may have at least to distinguish his use
    of "replica" in semeiotic analyses apart from existential graphs as such
    (for example, those which occur in consideration of theoretical grammar)
    from his use in EGs where graph-replica has perhaps a technical meaning
    (as well), and where "graph-replica" seems ultimately to be replaced
    by "graph-instance" (see the marginal note that concludes Joe's group
    of excerpted passages).  This last terminology seems to have been
    adopted by Sowa's Conceptual Graphs community.  Here is an example
    of its use in CGs (this was Googled at random and I refer to it
    here only to make this single point).  See, for example:

GR: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/pclark/working_notes/009.pdf

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