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Article 1296 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Is semiotics an "informal logic"?
Message-ID: <LmVaBB1w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
Date: 12 Nov 91 13:07:08 GMT
References: <1991Nov11.024611.12312@nuscc.nus.sg>
Lines: 71

(Michael Moriarty writes:)
>The most important thing I have learned about semiotics is that the
>lexeme /semiotic/ has encyclopedic denotations and connotations.  I'm
>puzzling my way through the labor of building a tree to illustrate
>this. At this point in the discussion, I believe that a variety of
>semiotics are in play.  Mathematical semiotics, logic semiotics,
>linguistic semiotics, and the rest of it.
>
>A healthy semiosis makes me move to another part of the discussion.  I
>wonder what various discussants mean by the following lexemes:
>
>1. /rhetoric/ = ?               4. /monotonic/ = ?
>
>2. /logic/ = ?                  5. /code-decode/ = ?
>
>3. /informal logic/ = ?         6. /inference/ = ?

I agree.  Especially for column 2 (items 4,5 and 6).  Even a
reference to an easily available text would help since, for all I
know, these terms and their associated notions may be well-known
in some discipline with which the ordinary educated layperson with
an interest in AI should be familiar.

Although I've perused it carefully, I can't really understand Mr.
Waterworth's post:

john@mango.iss.nus.sg (John Waterworth) writes:
> Semiotics seems now like a hangover from a bygone age, since it is
> basically a code-decode approach elevated to the level of a general, if
> vaguely stated, theory of communication. These days most linguists would
> take the line that code-decoding processes are subservient to
> inferential processes. The latter are autonomous and don't need, though
> they work better with, the former. (not that I can speak for most
> linguists, or indeed any linguists, but this is the trend in several
> recent and paragmatically-oriented works). The code-decode and, hence,
> the semiotic model depend on the idea of shared knowledge, usually
> called mutual knowledge. But in reality, there is little, sometimes no,
> mutual knowledge. Communication is risky and error-prone, often largely
> erroneous. Semiotics is intellectually bankrupt, it simply cannot say
> anything significant about language use, which is why there are no
> semiotic laws.             

Since I view each word in an utterance as a bundle of semes and
therefore inherently a fuzzy construct, I believe it is an
"empirical" or observational fact rather than a necessary
postulate that there are usually enough shared semes in P's and
O's lexicon to make communication approximately accurate.  But I
think usually there are.  What I don't understand is how the
inference can _replace_ the coding and decoding (if these terms
mean what they seem to mean on the surface) when "logically" (or
common-sensically) an inference could be made or communicated only
_after_ the "meanings" of the terms have been "decoded" -- or
whatever.

Perhaps thinking of the "signified" for any word ("signifier") as
a collection of semantic elements of greater or lesser
articulation and completeness depending on the sophistication of
the speaker is so different from expecting each "word" to have
some definite and delimited meaning for everyone (like a kind of
phenomenological essence, except that linguists and logical
analytical philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition wouldn't
be familiar with Husserl's theories and so wouldn't be aware that
they had exemplified some of his notions in their unconscious
"pre-understanding"), that I just literally can't understand what
the Anglo-American language theorists are doing or saying.

--
Richard Carlson        |    rc@depsych.gwinnett.com
Midtown Medical Center |    gatech!emory!gwinnett!depsych!rc
Atlanta, Georgia       |
(404) 881-6877         |


