Re: What Is Information That A Sign May Bear It? -- Discussion

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WIS Discussion.  Note 9

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FK = Frances Catherine Kelly

Re: WIS Discussion 8.  http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg05304.html
In: WIS.               http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/thrd19.html#04317
Cf: WIS 1.             http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg04317.html

FK: What motivated my first response to you was your note some time
    back in The Peirce List and also more recently in the Arisbe Site
    on "What Is Information That A Sign May Bear It?"

That would be the note marked 'Cf' above.

FK: To keep this current topic and its threads on track for me,
    let me post a rough summary of your original note as it is
    understood by me.  What is sought by me is a fuller or better
    appreciation of exactly what information is in the field of
    semiosis and in the study of semiotics, and if logical signs
    that carry information when formally reduced to an internal
    relation of syntaxic "subsigns" will still retain their
    trichotic structure while remaining to be identified as
    a polemic relation.  This summary may also address some
    of the queries or points you directed to me in your
    last messages.

At this point, I still do not understand what you mean by such clauses
as:  "if logical signs that carry information when formally reduced to
an internal relation of syntaxic 'subsigns' will still retain their
trichotic structure while remaining to be identified as a polemic
relation".  Perhaps there are some unexpressed assumptions that
go along with your use of such phrases as (1) "logical signs",
(2) "formally reduced", (3) "internal relation", (4) perhaps
also "syntaxic 'subsigns'", though here I'd almost venture
the guess that you mean the compositional structure of
complex expressions, (5) "trichotic structure" -- now,
to my ear, the Greek suffix "-osis, -otic" suggests
"process", while the "-tomic" suggests "splitting",
so I need to ask if you mean a 3-way process or
a 3-way splitting in this case, or maybe both,
(6) "polemic" I like, as if to say that the
poles of polarization are often brandished
as the pales and pikes of 3-bal warfare.

If you see a way to clarify any of these 6 points right away,
it may help to do so before we proceed any further.  Otherwise,
I will pass them by for now and return to the rest of your note
later tonight.

Jon Awbrey

FK: INFORMATION

FK: Information is posited by pragmatism to be what signs convey in the
    initial stages of semiosis and in the first "grammatic" division of
    semiotics.  The topic posited here for debate turns on what Peircean
    information actually is that a sign may bear it.

FK: The modern growth of information theory by most accounts is
    in fact one found to flourish in america roughly during the
    mid twentieth century. Its development as a science there is
    coincidental with the refinement of pragmatism as a
    philosophy during this same period to some degree. The
    following explanation of information theory however is
    perhaps not quite general enough to fully cover what
    Peircean pragmatism had in mind at its inception about
    information being a part of sign theory and semiosis. It is
    nonetheless a revisited start which may blossom around many
    recurring resurrections of information theory that is
    occurring within numerous fields now holding the theory in
    common today. Information theory therefore requires some
    careful consideration within the broader context of
    methodological logics, which should be taken as a subsequent
    normative development of signs from semiological semiotics
    and ontological metaphysics.

FK: There are several important issues to keep in mind when
    considering the relation of information to that of signs.
    These issues can be presented as questions ready for
    discussion.

FK: 1. What is information that signs are able to carry it?
    2. How are signs enabled to contain information?
    3. When and where is information that is conveyed by signs?
    4. Why should we care about information in transit by signs?
    5. Will any value or worth of information emerge on appraisal?
    6. Must information in signs be empowered as a means to action?

FK: The sensible environment for information to exist in signs
    is within the quasi mind of phanerisms, to include the
    pseudo mind of material mechanisms and the proto mind of
    living organisms. This felt sense of phenomenal
    representamen as signs in mind will yield the reality of
    information. While informative signs need not necessarily be
    evaluated or incited in semiosis to be signs, usually at
    some primordial level, the instrumental utility or practical
    context and operational usage of information however is
    finally realized in the communication and signification of
    signs, but this raises the further issues of what
    communication and signification are that the enforced
    information in signs may endure them. In any event, there is
    a difference to note between that of information in signs
    and their likely appraised evaluation and their likely
    incited prescription. In the scientific theory of semiotics,
    this difference is noted between the divisions of signs in
    what can be roughly called informative grammatics and
    evaluative critics and incitive rehetorics.

FK: One way of adequately addressing these issues is to
    initially agree that sign users such as mature conscious
    humans are mainly concerned with their individual lives, in
    regards to the individual being a self or subject or person,
    but that then an external world of facts in the form of
    added information in further signs forcefully obtrudes on
    their own semiosic existence, and so they find themselves
    forced to take up an interest in these newer semiosic
    realities and the nature of that imposed world. In workable
    terms, the original thrust of humans is to survive by living
    and then to thrive by mating; but in this imperative biotic
    act to merely live, the practical act gets transformed into
    a substantive act to really sense. What is then sensed in
    instrumental practice is an outer world other than the inner
    world of the individual self or subject or person.

FK: In both the internal event of inner subjectivity and the
    external event of outer objectivity, the individual operates
    as and by signs that carry information, and at least there.
    The interest that the individual as a self or subject or
    person may have in any external semiosic realities can
    furthermore be mystically phanerical or materially physical
    or mentally psychical. The whole of continued existence is
    therefore one of signs that bear information.

FK: Confronted with this emergent situation, the person is cast
    in the role of being a principle champion or protagonist in
    an external scene of ambiguity and uncertainty. At this
    evolving juncture, a set of options becomes obvious to the
    individual with regard to possible further actions, which
    actions are real and purposive. They can be in the form of
    feelings or willings or thinkings, to include any conduct or
    deed or habit, as well as knowledge in the form of skeptical
    doubts or critical judgements or justifiable beliefs. Faced
    with this hazy vagueness, the problem for the individual is
    whether any regulatory principle has a chance to operate in
    practice, and in fact whether the competency of the self is
    sufficient to make the right choice at all on behalf of the
    subject and the person.

FK: The fundamental basis or initial cardinality of this choice
    is often a selected set of finite options to be used for the
    outcome of some action. This is a minimal sort of setting in
    which any sign of the worldly content can make any sense to
    mind at all. A sign in such a situation has significance for
    a user because its actual "given" presence serves to
    decrease the vagueness and to increase the predictability of
    a decision that the user has to make, whether it concerns
    the objective actions that the agent ought to take in order
    to achieve some sensible goal of interest, or whether it
    concerns the subjective predicates that the agent ought to
    treat as being conceivably true of some perceived object in
    the world. The way that signs come into this situation or
    setting, to make the scene real for the user, clearly
    illustrates a situation of both "given" ambiguity and
    "taken" certainty, with these extreme poles likely bridged
    by "driven" energy.

FK: What is to be avoided however when changing or reducing
    information to other seminal signs that are acted upon, or
    to logical subsigns that are thought about, is any "general"
    notion of global psychologistic subjectivism, mentalism,
    rationalism, conceptualism, or nominalism.

FK: If the outcomes selected make up a set of options that might
    be good to do in order to achieve an objective goal, then
    the signs could be interpreted as advisory indicators that
    signify actions in the situation, relative to the active
    goals desired or umpired or required. If the outcomes
    selected make up a set of options that might be deemed true
    about an object, then the signs could be interpreted in
    being nomens and terms or notions as concepts of a relevant
    theoretic scheme, which serve as predicates and predictions
    of the outcomes. This then is the basic framework for
    inquiring about the represented information found or carried
    in signs with regard to decisions, and the ambiguities or
    certainties that flow therefrom.

FK: The sign or word "sign" incidentally is held here to be
    determined by phenomenal objects that exist in the world and
    that are also in turn represented by those same signs. These
    signs which are objects as signs and of signs then go on to
    determine their own effects. The term "sign" is thus meant
    to encompass all the "data of the senses" that is given to
    users or taken by users as informing themselves about both
    their inner worlds and outer worlds, plus all of the terms
    and ideas that are used by them to act with, which includes
    such behavior as thinking. This kind of action called
    thought is then potentially and ultimately about
    metaphysical beings and phenomenal things, and about their
    own attitudes for any further planned action to be engaged
    with in the world.

FK: Signs themselves are ordinary phenomenal objects that users
    use in some situation to stand for other objects to some
    purpose. The structured growth of phenomenal representamen
    therefore is as objects and signs and users, where users are
    all phanerons or phanerisms or objects that act as users.
    Signs are furthermore categorically structured by pragmatism
    in a trichotic manner, beyond their primitive evolutionary
    stages. At their informative "hermeneutic" or "grammatic"
    stage, signs are hence made up of fundamental forms and
    referential contents and instrumental effects. Within this
    tridential relation, referred objects determine represented
    forms as signs, and signs in turn determine interpreted
    effects.

FK: Here in semiosis, with sense data initially given or taken
    and then acted upon, is one of the places where it is
    tempting to try to collapse the triadic sign relation into a
    dyadic sign relation, thereby eliminating any externally
    referred objects of signs. The problem with this sort of
    attempt is that signs are a tern wherein the sign vehicles
    are made by the referred objects, and the effects in turn
    are made by those same sign vehicles. Semiosis hence cannot
    be explicitely reduced to other than a required tridential
    state.

FK: This attempt however may be somewhat possible, for if the
    sense data or forms as signs are so closely identified with
    objects that users can scarcely reckon how the two might be
    separately inconsistent or discrepant, then it will appear
    to them that one referred aspect or interpretive role of
    users might be eliminated from their picture of the world.
    In this event, the only things that users are required to
    inform themselves about via the inspection of the sense data
    are yet more of the same, whether past or present or
    projected in the future. This is the special state to which
    users frequently find the presence of information being
    reduced, namely as an initial stimulus or original source
    that has nothing better to inform them about than its own
    potential actions or issues, to the exclusion of any other
    objects or effects. In the case users are crude animals for
    example, then the forms as indexic signs are brute signals
    that compel their direct reaction. In the case users are
    learned humans for example, then the forms as symbolic signs
    are exact logons that incite their direct response as
    immediate rational conduct.

FK: The nagging reality of signs nonetheless is the fact that
    all signs, including syntaxic subsigns that signify or
    relate only to other syntaxic subsigns in even objectively
    logicomathematic situations or in subjectively
    psychologistic situations, are still referring to other
    objects, because all objects are dispositionally assigned by
    nature to be signs and then teleonomically reassigned by
    nature or culture to stand for other objects, and of course
    to some purposive effect. The syntaxic subsigns of symbolic
    logic even with only two values may seem to be in a dyadic
    relation, but each value will still refer to an object in
    the form of the other, and thus necessarily render a
    trichotic structure.

FK: If it were possible to identify semiosis as this discrete
    sort of dyadic situation, it would be possible to use
    whatever two poles are determined to be the two poles as a
    syntaxic measure of uncertainty. The initial antecedent pole
    would be the object or content as combined together with the
    form or sign. This dual sort of pole would be reduced to the
    "ground" of representation. The final consequent pole would
    be reduced to being the effect or interpretant. This pole
    would be the "agent" of identification. The dualism here
    however is merely a virtual implied dyad, constructed for
    purposes of vague relational identity. In fact, the relation
    of information in signs is an internal triad, because all
    signs must be explicitly tridential and overtly trichotic to
    be signs, even if implicitely or covertly or obviously or
    seemingly dyadic.

FK: The relation of the dual poles furthermore would operate as
    a multiplicative measure, rather than the sort of additive
    measure that users would normally prefer in a logical
    ground. In many ways, the provision of syntaxic information
    as a dual process that reduces ambiguity and increases
    certainty is also the inverse process to the kind of
    uncertainty augmentation that occurs in compound decisions.
    The "formal language" or "logical medium" here proposed is
    thus a set of mathicological signs or formal logons. On the
    assumption that the initial outcomes whether practical or
    intellectual are equally likely, users can then associate a
    frequency distribution and a probability distribution with
    this language, and thus define a syntax and grammar of
    information, with a channel of its projected and prescribed
    communication for purposes of contact and exchange.

FK: Within pragmatist logic, there are certain key principles
    that nonetheless must be retained. The formal similarity of
    signs and of relations as icons must logically be neither
    false nor true. The causal contiguity of signs and in
    relations as indexes must logically be either false or true
    but not both. The conventional arbitrarity of signs and by
    relations as symbols must logically be only true, because
    their reassignemt even to deceive cannot be denied. If truth
    is to be the sole goal of logic, then all logons must be
    first doubted as icons and then judged as indexes and
    finally believed as symbols.

FK: The most important consideration here is to understand the
    formal conditions under which it is possible for signs to
    make rational sense and reasonable conduct. Once users have
    set up this much syntaxic and grammatic structure for identi-
    fying the raw information that signs bear, they will find
    that they can then begin to construct some rough strands and
    ready threads of theoretic fabric. This potential could
    include the measure of ambiguity and certainty in grounds,
    and the volume of contact and exchange in channels, and
    should especially include the total amount of information
    that can be associated with the identification and
    recognition of a single sign in relation to a single effect.
    The appropriate acceptance of signs as logical entities can
    then be assured to some degree. It is from these
    characterized potentials that the information capacity of a
    communication venue can be defined, and specifically
    explained in regard to the average decrease of ambiguity and
    increase of certainty when a sign is fabricated, expedited,
    transformed, received, and utilized for purposes in
    situations that yield actions.

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http://www.cs.bsu.edu/homepages/mighty/history.html
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