JFS> Scientists who work with animals (AKA rat psychologists) have a short
summary of how their subjects behave: "Under carefully controlled
experimental conditions, the subject will do whatever the hell it wants
to."
Ricardo S> I think this points to the fundamental issue: What is "want"?
Animals vs machines: wanting vs not wanting. My impression is that we use
"want" when the origin of the behavior is mysterious to us. If it is well
known to us -as when programmed- it ceases to be mysterious and then stops
being "wanting". This is an epistemological issue of us as observers. Not a
differential property of the systemus observed
That's an important issue, and I admit that the verb 'want' is rather
complex. But there is a large collection of tests that any life form from
bacteria on up can pass, but no non-living thing (other than a human
invention) can pass.
Simplest example: A bacterium swimming upstream in a glucose gradient. A
ship can go upstream, but only because humans designed it to do so.
But you can't find any phsycial or chemical process in the universe that
can perform the kinds of goal-directed prpcesses that living things do,
Even bacteria do immensely complex processes, especially colonies of
bacteria, such as the plaque on your teeth.
A single bacterium, swimming by itself, is extremely fragile, and it will
be swallowed up by something bigger very quickly. But bacteria in a colony
have very complex signaling systems for protecting themselves against the
toothbrush monster or the mouthwash poison or excesive heat, cold, or
whatever. Some of the outer ones may be killed, but the colony will
survive and recover.
For more about these issues, see "Biological and Psycholinguistic
influences on Architectures for Natural Lnguage Processing",
https://jfsowa.com/talks/bionlp.pdf
Slide 45 has the comment about bacteria.
John
Tom, Jerry, and Helmut,
The fact that I put Semeiotic at the center means that I assume a Peircean foundation. I don't believe that it's possible to show the full implications of that Venn diagram and its interrelationships without a framework such as Peirce's or something very similar.
Tom G> . I can go along with your categorizations, but only if "reality" refers to the reality of Secondness, or more specifically to the dynamic object. Otherwise - if for instance "reality" refers, or also refers, to the reality of Thirdness as in what the scientific community is fated to agree upon - it seems to me we'll have a lot of disambiguating to do with regard to these categories.
By reality, I mean what Peirce defined: Everything that exists independently of whatever we may think of it. That includes the laws of nature that govern the universe. Without those laws, there would be chaos. We couldn't exist, and neither could our thoughts or language. Mathematics is also independent of whatever we may say about it.
Mathematicians discover new kinds of structures. Since different mathematicians frequently converge on equivalent structures, it is reasonable to say that those structures are independent of what anybody might think or say about them
Jerry LRC> What is the syntax of your suggestions?
The three original labels are nouns: Reality, Thought, and Language. I chose nouns or noun phrases for the intersections.
The NP "perception and action" includes all the aspects of reality that are perceived as thoughts or generated by thoughts that trigger changes to reality.
The noun "semantics" refers to those aspects of reality that serve as the referents of words, phrases, and sentences.
The noun "imagination" refers to those referents of language that happen to be referents of thoughts that have not yet been related to reality and might never be relatable to reality. But I have to admit that the semantics of language, as it is normally used, can and does refer to imaginary things.
The NP 'semeiotic"" refers to everything that Peirce calls formal semeiotic. That includes everything might be represented by a sign, including all the formal terms discussed in his theory of signs.
Helmut> isn´t language a subset of thought, meaning, nothing can be said that hasn´t been a thought first?
It's true that the referents of the linguistic signs are a subset of thought signs. But I was responding to the problem that Beziau posed in https://sites.google.com/view/reality-thought-language/mixed-zones .
Perhaps we should discuss the issues that Jerry raised in initial response to that diagram. The three labels on that diagram, lreality, thought, and language,refer to three very different kinds of things. That would imply that all the intersections would be empty.
In my interpretation, I assumed that the word 'reality' refers to everything that Peirce might call real in any sense. The word 'language' includes all the things that language might refer to. And the word 'thought refers to anything that might be thought.
John
My suggested labels for the intersections:
Reality and thought: Perception and action.
Reality and language: Semantics
Thought and language: Imagination
All three: Semeiotic
John
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From: "jean-yves beziau" beziau100(a)gmail.com
We can build a Venn diagram with three circles:
reality, thought and language.
It it not clear what names can be given to the mixed zones:
https://sites.google.com/view/reality-thought-language/mixed-zones
Does anyone have some answers?
Best Wishes
Jean-Yves
>------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof. Dr. Dr. Jean-Yves Beziau
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
https://www.philpeople.org/profiles/jean-yves-beziau
