[CG] Re: Stamper's semiotic ladder

Auke, My formal education emphasized math & logic, but I designed conceptual graphs as a logical foundation for mapping computational data to and from natural languages. Languages have always been one of my strong interests. All four of my grandparents migrated from Poland around 1900 to 1905, and my maternal grandmother lived with us. So Polish was the language I heard and spoke all day long while my father was working. When you start with two languages, learning a few more is easy. Peirce's father taught him mathematics, Greek, and Latin from early childhood. I developed my first version of conceptual graphs while I was taking Minsky's course on AI and a course on psycholinguistics. When I came across Don Roberts' book on existential graphs, I saw the parallels between CGs and Peirce's EGs. Since Peirce had also addressed the mappings between language and logic, I adopted similar methods. For the problems and challenges, see the concluding chapter 7 of my book on conceptual structures: https://jfsowa.com/pubs/cs7.pdf . I met Stamper at various conferences, and I found his outlook and methods to be congenial. He addressed the mappings between natural languages and computational representations in a way that could be mapped to and from EGs or CGs in similar ways. I didn't map CGs to his charts directly, but his methods address the issues of choosing rigid formal patterns (graphs or charts) that can approximate flexible informal words and phrases. And by the way, these issues are the primary reason why I am very critical of the claims about LLMs as a foundation for intelligence or cognition. Most of the people who develop them are unaware of (or deliberately ignore) the challenging problems of mapping any kind of formalism to and from natural languages. John ---------------------------------------- From: "Auke van Breemen" <a.breemen(a)upcmail.nl> John, It is a pity indeed that he passed away, he was a scientist of the constructive type. Since I always saw a similarity in your and Ronalds approach in how you deal with Peirce maybe it is a good time ta ask your opinion about this. Both of you differ from the main sentiment on peirce-list, which concentrates on interpretations on what peirce might have ment. So the theoretical fight is about the right interpretation of the masters writings. Concentration on the signs in itself, seems an adequate label. Alternatively, the both of you use Peirce in order to contribute to his goal with semiotics, which is to understand interpretation processes as sign processes. But, the perspectives differ offering different views on the processes. In my opinion you concentrate on the semantic dimension, while Ronald had a keen eye for the pragmatic dimension, the pragmmatic and social layers of his ladder. This shows in his ontology charts in which always society is the most remote root node. Thus it becomes possible to adress the problem of differing knowledge systems in any actual situation, hence also Ronalds heavy interest in 'responsible behavior'. I am curious after your view on the relation between your graphs and Stampers charts. Best, Auke van Breemen PS. In https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-94541-5_10 I elaborate on Stampers take.