Pragmatic Semiotic Information • 4
•
https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/03/08/pragmatic-semiotic-information-4/
All,
Sense and Obliviscence —
In taking up a study of signs from a pragmatic point of view
we naturally follow the advice of the pragmatic maxim on a way
to make the relationship between our concepts and their objects
as clear as necessary. When it comes to our concept of the objects
called signs we expand our conception of signs to a conception of
their practical effects, conceiving the manifold of experiments
and experiences involved in the use of signs.
In forming that expansion we bring to light many kinds of signs
glossed over in the more conventional focus on “words spoken” and
“words written”, that is, language in the strictest sense. Signs in
pragmatic perspective encompass all the “data of the senses” (“dots”)
we take as informing us about inner and outer worlds, along with the
concepts and terms we use to reason about everything from worlds of
being to fields of action.
Ironically enough, we have just arrived at one of the junctures where it is
tempting to try collapsing the triadic sign relation into a dyadic relation.
For if sense data were so closely identified with objects that we could
scarcely imagine how they might be discrepant then we might imagine one
role of beings could be eliminated from our picture of the world.
If that were true then the only things we'd need to bother informing
ourselves about, via the inspection of sense data, would be yet more
sense data, past, present, or prospective, nothing but sense data.
And that is the special form to which we frequently find the idea
of an information channel being reduced, namely, to a source with
nothing more to tell us about than its own conceivable conducts
or its own potential issues.
Regards,
Jon
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