From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!samsung!emory!iccdev!gwinnett!depsych!rc Tue Nov 19 11:08:59 EST 1991
Article 1195 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Is semiotics an "informal logic"?
Message-ID: <L9cwaB1w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
Date: 4 Nov 91 17:03:32 GMT
Lines: 48

I've been following the thread on "informal logic" with interest
in the hopes of orienting myself within the current intellectual
milieu.  I came to the Usenet news looking for a newsgroup that
would be discussing semiotics in a technical sense and relating
semiotics to ongoing research in AI.  (I know that in France
Greimas' students are doing something with computers, although the
literary journals in which semiotic research is published in this
country don't go into any detail -- journals like _New Literary
History_.)

(Mikhail Zeleny writes:)
>I consider myself to be a student of philosophy; to that extent I share
>your interest in non-monotonic arguments.  However, I classify them as
>rhetorical, in the non-pejorative sense of this term.  Although my
>professional interest in rhetoric is mostly informal, or, at best,
>morphological (i.e. concerned with the study of *elocutio*), I fully
>recognize the scientific value of formalizing such arguments, even as I
>continue to insist on separating them from properly logical figures.

The notion that there is something called "logic" which is
separable from rhetoric is alien to me.  I think what is called
"logic" is a series of algorithms applied on top of a spatial
metaphor derived from Aristotle and made explicit by Venn and his
diagrams.  The fact that these algorithms can be chained together
to produce very powerful and useful structures of inference
doesn't prove that they "are" something real.

I just made that comment to clarify who I am and where I'm coming
from.  I don't expect anyone will want to re-argue here, in their
"own" newsgroup, what they probably are tired of arguing with
colleagues from other disciplines.

What I am interested in is information.  Most of the writers in
this conference seem to be using the term "informal logic" to
refer to the kind of scientific thinking that Kant would have
called both _synthetic_ and _a posteriori_, i.e., empirical
knowledge which is attained under varying degrees of certainty or
uncertainty:  Induction, abduction, and the like.  What I'm asking
is, is anybody doing work on "structuralist"or "semiotic" logics,
which are from the start necessarily involved with rhetoric?  For
example the relations in Greimas' semiotic square are claimed to
be "neither strictly logical nor strictly a matter of contiguity."

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


