List, The argument given in Matt's email below is problematic. I will raise a question and make a brief and casual effort to place a Peircian interpretation on symbolic communication in terms of current scientific terminology.
While human language is a very powerful source of human communication, is it complete with regard to expressibility of information? I give two examples of what I consider to be the incompleteness of utterances as the sole source of the meaning of information. 1. Mathematical equations can be read as sentences, but when the number of terms is large, the reader must evaluate the individual symbols as units of the whole and as the unity (wholeness of the equation) for the message to be communicated. This is NOT the usual linear process extracting meaning of a written or spoken sentence. 2. A chemical icon (rheme) is even more difficult to interpret. The message emerges from a perception of its components, its arrangement of components and often, it role in the chemistry of life such as "DNA". It can requires a huge number of words (the name of each symbol) and ALL of the individual relations among them (bonding pattern) but also A QUANTITATIVE EXACT NAME for the specific entity. These two examples go to the very root of understanding the unity of human communication among two academic units - mathematics and chemistry. Musical symbols, as units, are less exact as the artist must interpret them, thereby adding information during a performance. Human communication CAN requires icons (in the traditional sense) with a countable number of terms (indices) that are visualizable and interpretable within the logical rules (legisigns) that can be formed from multiple premises (rhemata) and multiple possible arrangements (dicisigns) such that arguments can be made that are consistent with the individual members of a category (sinsigns), their proper attributes (qualisigns), and their common symbols in a symbol system designed for that purpose. (The preceding sentence strives to integrate the nine rather arbitrary terms of CSP into a meaningful thought.) The two examples above are both examples of the perplexity of artificial symbol systems that put exact and extreme requirements on the meaning of expressibility and completeness, the consistency of arguments and the logical soundness for the meaning of signs and symbols. Cheers Jerry On Dec 14, 2015, at 4:08 AM, Matt Faunce wrote: > On 12/13/15 6:24 PM, Franklin Ransom wrote: >> Human languages differ with respect to the rules of construction and the >> things that can be said, and they also develop and evolve over time; the >> development of a language to the point where it can articulate scientific >> terminology is not a development shared by every human language. >> > Can you give your source for this? I remember reading the opposite from two > different linguists. Michael Shapiro is one. (I'd have to search for the > exact statements, but the keyword I'd use is 'passkey'.) Edward Vajda writes > > " Human language is unlimited in its expressive capacity." > > "Today, it is quite obvious that people living with Stone Age technology > speak languages as complex and versatile as those spoken in the most highly > industrialized society. There are no primitive languages. Virtually no > linguist today would disagree with this statement." > > -- > Matt > > ----------------------------- > PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON > PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu > . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu > with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at > http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm . > > > >
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
