I perhaps put us back in the pragmatist weeds by using the term "sign". But Glen is right, a sign IS a thrupple .. or whatever that lovely word is, and no sign has been identified until all three elements have been specified. To get an intuitive idea of the idea of sign, one might take the example of a monkey "predator call". A predator call (the sign) is is a sign of the presence of a predator (the referent) to from the point of view of (the interpretant) another monkey. But the concept of sign, in pragmatism, is much, much, much broader. (And more confusing ... to me.) And Glen is correct also that all three elements of a sign are themselves signs. Thus every sign is embedded in a web of signs. The final crucial element in pragmatist philosophy (in case you-re still with me) is that all experience is in signs. So Pragmatism treats us as living in a stream of experience, in which each experience leads to expectatons of other experiences which may or may not be confirmed. Through confirmation and disconfirmation of these expectations we (i.e., all of us, together) erect structures of experience such as, you, me, object, reality, true, false, etc, which are, themselves, experiences in good standing. The square root of two is one of those structures of experience, richly confirmed in “our” experience.
Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of glen Sent: Friday, March 04, 2016 11:19 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and square roots On 03/03/2016 11:16 PM, Russ Abbott wrote: > I find myself confused about what you mean when you say they are > "signs that stand in a rigorous, systematic, and extensively confirmed > way to ... mathematical relationships". A sign is not (in your > view) a thing (other than itself) is it? I would have thought that a > sign it's a reference to a thing. The thing itself is only brought to > mind (in the mind) when looking at and thinking about the sign. A sign is one of 3 objects in a 3-tuple. The set of 3 is the subject of this conversation, not any single member of the set. Any one of the 3 things can be handled as itself, separate from that particular 3-tuple. I.e. any given referent object (the thing the sign signifies) can have multiple signs; the sign can signify other objects (be part of a different 3-tuple); and the thing interpreting the sign can interpret other signs. E.g. multiple signs: √ versus x^.5 multiple referents: • any x such that x*x=2 • ½[x_n + 2/x_n]|n→∞ multiple interpreters: ZFA versus ZFC The important point is that if you remove any of the 3 objects, you no longer have a sign. > So let's say we take a paint > color strip and ask people to select from a list of five color words > (along with non-of-these as an option) the best match to the color > experience they have when looking at the strip. Let's say there is > essentially universal agreement. Is that good enough to confirm that > they all have the same color experience? That sounds more empirical > than mathematics and should satisfy your requirement for an > experimental experience -- although I'm not sure what you mean by > "experimental experience". You keep isolating the machine from its I/O. If they all get "the same" input and give "the same" output, then they are all "the same", up to the strength of whatever equivalence is considered. Any variation that is undetectable is just that... undetectable. Sure, you can _speculate_ on those undetectable differences... the differences that don't make a difference. But why? To what purpose? We've already talked about hypothesis formulation. So, perhaps the purpose is to formulate a new equivalence relation that will detect the differences undetectable under the old one. But you're not talking that way. You seem to want to promote speculated constructs up to a significance that's unwarranted ... to talk about thoughts and feelings as if they exist, without any similarity measure with which to falsify them. -- ⇔ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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