Len Yabloko's List: Semiotics

• In the nineteenth century, Charles Sanders Peirce defined what he termed "semiotic" (which he sometimes spelled as "semeiotic") as the "quasi-necessary, or formal doctrine of signs", which abstracts "what must be the characters of all signs used by...an intelligence capable of learning by experience",^[7] and which is philosophical logic pursued in terms of signs and sign processes.^[8] Charles Morris followed Peirce in using the term "semiotic" and in extending the discipline beyond human communication to animal learning and use of signals.
• Peirce's definition of the term "semiotic" as the study of necessary features of signs also has the effect of distinguishing the discipline from linguistics as the study of contingent features that the world's languages happen to have acquired in the course of human evolution.

• A sign is something which depends on an object in a way that enables (and, in a sense, determines) an interpretation, an interpretant, to depend on the object as the sign depends on the object. The interpretant, then, is a further sign of the object, and thus enables and determines still further interpretations, further interpretant signs. The process, called semiosis, is irreducibly triadic, Peirce held, and is logically structured to perpetuate itself. It is what defines sign, object, and interpretant in general.^[10]

• As Derrida would put it,  perception is always already representation. 'Perception depends on coding the world into  iconic signs that can re-present it within our mind.
• Semioticians seek to identify codes and the tacit rules and constraints which underlie the  production and interpretation of meaning within each code.

• These three types of codes correspond broadly to   three key kinds of knowledge required by interpreters of a text, namely knowledge of: 

    

   
  1. the world (social knowledge);  
  2. the medium and the   genre (textual knowledge);  
  3. the relationship between (1) and (2) (modality judgements). 
   

    The 'tightness' of semiotic codes themselves varies from the rule-bound closure of  logical codes (such as computer codes) to the interpretative looseness of poetic codes.   
• At the other end of the  spectrum are 'the individual and more or less implicit hermeneutics in which  meaning is the result of an interpretation on the part of the receiver'  
• Lee Thayer argues that 'what we learn is not the world, but particular codes into which it has  been structured so that we may "share" our experiences of it'

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• In the context of semiotics, 'decoding' involves not simply basic  recognition and comprehension of what a text 'says' but also the interpretation  and evaluation of its meaning with reference to relevant codes.  Where a distinction is made  between comprehension and interpretation this tends to be primarily with reference  to purely verbal text, but even in this context such a distinction is untenable;  what is 'meant' is invariably more than what is 'said'

• Hall referred to various phases in the Encoding/Decoding model of communication  as moments, a term which many other commentators have subsequently employed  (frequently without explanation). John Corner offers his own definitions:  

    

   
  • the moment of encoding: 'the institutional practices and organizational  conditions and practices of production'  (Corner 1983, 266); 
  • the moment of the text: 'the... symbolic construction, arrangement and  perhaps performance... The form and content of what is published or broadcast'  (ibid., 267); and  
  • the moment of decoding: 'the moment of reception [or] consumption...  by... the reader/hearer/viewer' which is regarded by most theorists as 'closer to a  form of "construction"' than to 'the passivity... suggested by the term "reception"'  (ibid.).  

• Signs and meanings simply do not exist without a codemaker and outside a codemaking process. The codemaker is the agent of semiosis, whereas signs and meanings are its instruments. We conclude therefore that signs and meanings are totally dependent on codemaking, i.e. they are codemaker-dependent entities.

• Codes that Barthes used in his book are:
  
  
  1. Hermeneutic Code:  this code is most important for authors and readers of  detective stories. In the beginning of the story  author attracts reader’s attention describing a mysterious event (murder).  Then reader need to read rest of the story to get answer on natural question – who is the murderer.
  2. Proairetic Code: something similar to previous one but more local in time. If  a character  of a story got a call from his boss in the middle of the night then reader is interesting to see what should be cause of this call and which sequence of events will follow.
  3. Semantic Code: this code relates to so called connotative meaning. For example term 'young girl' has such connotative  meaning as 'life' and term  'old man' has connotative meaning 'death'. These meanings are called semes.
  4. Symbolic Code: this code is based on a structure of semantic codes. For example if we see young girl and old man sitting side by side then we can get sign with 'life-death relationship' meaning.
  5. Cultural (Referential) Code: for example if we see word 'semiotics' in a text we should have a knowledge (external to the text) what 'semiotics' is about to get meaning of the text.
     
  
  To analyze Balzac's novel using these five codes Barthes wrote six times more pages than  Balzac himself. 

• Computational Semiotics refers to the attempt of synthesizing a semiosis cycle within a digital computer. Among other things, this is done aiming for the construction of autonomous intelligent systems able to perform intelligent behavior, what includes perception, world modeling, value judgement and behavior generation. We claim that most part of intelligent behavior in an intelligent autonomous being is due to the semiotic processing happening inside this being. In this sense, an intelligent system should be understood as a semiotic system and studied like that. Mathematically modeling such semiotic systems is being currently the target for a group of researchers studying the interactions encountered between semiotics and intelligent systems.
• A new branch of semiotics is outlined under the designation "computational semiotics". It seems likely to become an important field of research having interesting applications. Computational semiotics can be regarded as a generalization of computational linguistics.

• Another idea that we are pursuing is the idea of cognitive semantics. This  is an old idea which states that the meaning of a sentence is a progam the  speaker wants the hearer to interpret.
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• As John Deely has suggested in his Four ages of understanding, philosophia in practice is semiotic process, an engagement in the world through the action of signs. But this observation leads us to a point of contention with Deely's treatment of semiotic process itself and its connection with the more widely understood notions about language in our time. Specifically, there are major diculties with the treacherous formal and popular nomenclature about the phenomenon of language and its philosophical connection to the ``semiology'' of Saussure and sign theory of C. S. Peirce.
• Indeed, later in the Four Ages, Deely not only equates understanding and language, but also annotates the equation of ``language'' to the formal philosophical construct of ``intellect'', citing refinements from Aquinas that undergird and solidify that association, and additionally suggest a parallel realization of the significance of ``being-as-first-known'' as a construct like Lebenswelt
• However, Deely's broader point here is that intellect exists as an essentially reflective tendency di¤erent from the total sense-perception capacity of the human species. We understand Deely's intention as seeing the Lebenswelt as a construct essentially redundant with ``language'' understood as a modeling system, what we will tag ``language-M'' within our discussion. This makes language taken as a communication system (or ``languageC'') an ambiguous interference throughout the arguments of Deely's book.

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• Or, to put it in more detailed terms, the production of an effect of the sign on the interpreter results from the communication of the form of the object (as a regularity), via sign, to the interpretant. The interpretant then becomes itself a sign which refers to the object in the same manner in which the original sign refers to it (i.e., there is an invariance in the reconstruction of the form of the object by the interpreter).
• as a connection between form and matter, and logically (W 1.276), as the product of extension and intension of a concept.
• That which is communicated from the Object through the Sign to the Interpretant is a Form; that is to say, it is nothing like an existent, but is a power, is the fact that something would happen under certain conditions (EP2, p. 544, n.22).
• Peirce (CP 8.177) writes that a sign determines an interpretant in some ‘actual’ or ‘potential’ Mind (in other passages, a ‘quasi-mind’. See CP 4.536). We take this suggestion to introduce in our analysis a differentiation between ‘potential’ and ‘effective’ semiosis. Potential semiosis is defined as a triadically-structured process which is not taking place, which is only in potency. Effective semiosis, in turn, is a sign in effective action, i.e., a sign which, by being actualized, has an actual effect on the interpreter.

• In sum, the semiotic analysis of the genetic information system developed above leads to the following conclusions:

    

  (i)i.          Genes should be regarded as signs in DNA, which can only have any effect on a cell through a triadic-dependent process (semiosis);

    

  (ii)ii.          This process is genetic information and involves more than just genes as signs in DNA but also objects and interpretants;

    

  (iii)iii.          Genetic information is the process by means of which a form in a dynamical object (a functional protein) is communicated to an interpretant (the reconstruction of a specific sequence of amino acids in a cell) by means of signs in DNA
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• Somehow the one electron seems to ‘know’ instantly what happens to the other; but that would require information to be transferred faster than the speed of light, the velocity physics insists is a true ‘constant’ and not to be exceeded.⁴ So two possibilities remain, both offensive to classical reality: either your observation itself has transferred the information; or the two events (spin-changes or whatever) are in some non-classical sense ‘the same one’.⁵
• Hawkes (1977: 126) suggests that ‘in Peirce’s view, logic exists independently of both reasoning and fact’. But did not the formalists rather suppose that logic was the ultimate guarantee of the possibility of reasoning and fact? Only in this way could logic be expected to obviate the regress to reality. The Einsteinian belief in the self-sufficient existence of an external world matches up to the formalist belief in the self-sufficient existence of a logical world , both worlds being ultimately classical. Now, quantum reality — pushing Einstein’s theories in a direction he never accepted — shows that neither belief can be sustained, and provides a forceful impetus for non-classical models.
• The ‘sum over histories’ model of Richard Feynman (1958) assumes that a single quon takes all possible paths, none of them any ‘better’ than the rest. However, interference comes to the rescue to keep the quon from roaming all over the universe. Every ‘wild path’, such as an arabesque of fantastic loopings, has a parallel path with exactly equal amplitude and opposite phase, and the two paths totally cancel each other. Only the paths of ‘least action” those near the classical trajectory of a straight line, are close enough in phase to produce additive amplitudes and survive. In this model, interference is precisely what saves the quon from utter randomness. So saying that reality is, or is generated by, an interference pattern makes good sense for the Feynman model and suspends the confrontation between the one-world and many-world models. We obtain not ‘the best of all possible worlds” nor even ‘the one most probable world” but a pattern of indissoluble interference among possible worlds. If we could ever cancel an but one (near-infinite certainty), reality could not be under­stood (near-infinite uncertainty). .
• Such considerations indicate that we might do better to interpret a ‘dimension’ not as some measurability for ‘size’, ‘shape’, ‘extent’, ‘duration’, and the like, but as a mode of connectedness. A thing has a dimension if we can plot for it a. trajectory between two or more coordinate values. This interpretation places the focus not on the fixity of dimensions, as in classical science, but on their alterity, the indispensable potential of a value to be other than what may be determined on any one occasion - more fitting for quantum science.
• As Nick Herbert (1985: 249) remarks, ‘one of the greatest scientific achievements imaginable would be the discovery of an explicit relationship between the waveform alphabets of quantum theory and certain human states of consciousness’.
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• The reason lies in the confusion between the causal process and the information flow.
• Ontogeny as a causal process seemed to suggest that the flow of information goes into the same direction, again, in the Shannon sense, hence equating the causality with a flow of messages.
• actualization of the information depends on a third system that is coupled with those two systems, and which infers F from G, which is a movement in the reverse direction than the causality
• This reflects the fact that information only resides in the entire causal chain, and that only the phenotype can be regarded as a sign that points towards that information. This is where inference comes into play.
• Jaynes argued that entropy is a measure of the degree of uncertainty related to the number of possible microstates that corresponds to an observable macrostate.
• That is, the Gibbs/Jaynes version puts the relation between micro- and macrostate into the center, whereas the Boltzmann/Shannon version only concentrates on the microstates, relegating the macrostates to the purely epiphenomenal realm.
• The less certain the information G carries about F, the higher the degree of entropy in the corresponding micro-system.
• the coupled systems can have different entropies, depending on the nature of the underlying causal process of coupling
• we have a substantial modification of the standard conception of causality. This is because the effect of system A on O is mediated by all other factors that determine the proper functioning of O.
• MaxEnt principle serves to generate predictions about the macro-behavior of the system, such that a failure of those predictions implies the need to change the physical theory.
• in a process of natural selection, the MaxEnt principle will also underlie the convergence of functional macrostates with macrostates of object systems.
• selection among observer systems takes place, depending on the degree how far the observations approximate the true physical functioning of system A. In other words, I assume that observations have a fitness value.
• The function implies a certain set of constraints on the macrostates of system A, and it is the possible tension between functional relevance and irrelevance that determines the evolution of constraints
• This process is driven by natural selection, such that deviations from the state of equiprobability trigger further adaptations of the observer system, if they prove to be causally relevant for its proper functioning. Hence, evolutionary change follows the MaxEnt principle.
• Maximum entropy production defines the point of optimal mutual adaptation, hence an equilibrium. In this state, entropyOR and entropyOI converge because the mutual adaptation of constraints removes the contingency involved in observer relative entropy.
• From the viewpoint of the previously presented argument, the increasing selectivity of the evolving networks of chemical reactions corresponds to the Second Law, but simultanously reduces the contingency of entropyOR on the level of the single functions, in the sense of the contingency of the constraints operating in the MaxEnt process. This reduction of contingency is what we perceive as increasing "order," but it does not imply that the Second Law does not hold.
• The information resides in the system into which the genome as a set of functions is embedded. For this system, only parts of the genome carry information, here understood as having a higher level function. From this follows, that the increasing divergence between the functional and the non-functional DNA in genomes just reflects the MaxEnt process over time: All functions evolve into a state in which there is a maximum amount of diversity which is non-functional. In plain, this is why simple organisms can have larger genomes than humans: All depends on whether the system can make use of the genome, which otherwise just accumulates diversity.
• Firstly, the triadic structure reflects the different structure of causality in relating a cause=object to an effect=sign via a function=interpretant. Secondly, we can use the same triadic structure to analyze the function: The object corresponds to the object system A, the sign corresponds to the effect Z in the function, and the interpretant is the embedding function with Z'. The X is the pivot in the sense of being the physical link between the two causalities, one the direct physical impact from A to X, and the other the functional causality involving X and Z...
• we do not need to refer to the category of meaning in order to show that there is an observer relative role of information. Meaning is dissolved into the hierarchy of functionings. In other words, if we ask for a meaning, we just ask for a higher-level function
• the theory of signal selection implies that in the semiosis of living systems, there is an inherent tendency to increase energy throughputs, as a most universal indicator of costs, and this is because the information processed is approximating the true states in coupled functions.
• Evolution with signal selection implies that there will be mutual leveraging of information transmitting signals, such that relative advantages tend to converge (Red Queen principle), with increasing levels of energy thoughput. (Lotka's principle). There is one possibility to directly relate Lotka's principle with the energetics of signs.
• One view states that this naturalization finally has to fail because it cannot deal with the notion of 'consciousness', with which the notions of 'intentionality' and 'meaning' are essentially related...
• systems with nested and networked functions will always develop "meaning" as a category of functioning to refer to themselves, because self-reference entails fundamental logical paradoxes.
• Hayek argues that the brain can be seen as a purely physical network of neurons and their interactions. Such kind of a network, according to Hayek, can never give a full acount of its own operations in physical terms, because that would require to build a copy of itself with larger complexity than its own, which is a contradiction in terms.
• There are two core ideas which clear the ground for this exercise. One is to regard functions as a special kind of physical causation, which connects with the general evolutionary paradigm, which is also central in Peirce's thinking. The other idea is to establish a conceptual link between Jaynes' notion of entropy and functions in terms of observations.
• One main result of this conceptual blending is that I can present a naturalistic interpretation of Jaynes inferential concept of entropy. If I substitute the 'anthropomorphic' observer by a sequence of evolving functions, basically following generalizations of evolutionary epistemology, I can draw the conclusion that functional evolution will end in a relation between function and object system in which the function reflects the constraints of the object system on the macrolevel, corresponding to a state of maximum entropy on the microlevel.
• From this follows, that the evolution of functions obeys to the Second Law.

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