List, I'd like to strongly recommend Peter Skagestad's paper, "Peirce, Virtuality, and Semiotic," which seems remarkably prescient despite having been written decades before today's AI systems. But perhaps more important is what it suggests about virtuality in human semiosis. https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cogn/CognSkag.htm
Skagestad begins with Peirce's own definition from Baldwin's *Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology* (1902): "A virtual X ... is something, not an X, which has the efficiency (*virtus*) of an X." Virtuality, in this sense, concerns *functional capability*, not appearance. He then argues that this idea is deeply embedded in Peirce's semeiotic itself: Since every Sign stands in an irreducibly triadic relation to its Object and Interpretant, and every Interpretant usually becomes a further Sign, semiosis is an open-ended, developmental process. *So the meaning of a sign lies not in its present occurrence but in its possible future interpretants and interpretations.* >From this follows what Skagestad takes to be one of Peirce's most radical insights: *Thoughts are themselves signs, and because signs have their being through their possible future interpretants, thought itself is fundamentally virtual*. As Peirce puts it, "the meaning of a thought is altogether something virtual." Mind is not something fully present at any instant but an ongoing developing process extending through time. This perspective also helps clarify Peirce's famous remark that if someone stole his inkstand "the very thoughts would not come to me." Skagestad makes clear that Peirce isn't saying merely that writing records thoughts. Instead, pens, paper, diagrams, logical notation, and other *symbolic media* *participate in the production of thought itself*. As argued in other related threads, human intelligence has always depended upon such external symbolic technologies, from alphabets and books to computers and, today, networks which extend -- and I believe that List members agree, not replace -- cognition. Skagestad concludes that Peirce's semeiotic offers perhaps the most promising philosophical framework for understanding both human thought and virtual technologies. Because thought consists of signs, and signs are essentially virtual, and that cognition depends upon external media, then modern computational technologies are best understood as augmentations of human inquiry rather than as substitutes for human minds (read: Douglas Engelbart's IA). I believe that Skagestad's paper deserves renewed attention. Although written before the contemporary AI era, it anticipates many of the questions we are now asking and does so by returning directly to Peirce's own conception of signs, virtuality and, in my view, the growth of inquiry. Best, Gary R
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