Or Dylan Thomas ... | In the beginning was the three-pointed star, | One smile of light across the empty face; | One bough of bone across the rooting air, | The substance forked that marrowed the first sun; | And, burning ciphers on the round of space, | Heaven and hell mixed as they spun. | | Dylan Thomas, “In The Beginning”, Verse 1 | http://web.archive.org/web/20110612002235/http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg04290.html
Regards, Jon On 4/19/2017 10:36 PM, John Collier wrote:
I suspect you are right, Jon. I think this means that you would disagree with Terry Deacon’s approach, which starts with icons and has the rest evolve. Perhaps the origin of the first third is the beginning. Nothing is outside of that. That would be a bit like some gnostic views. Best, John From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:jawb...@att.net] Sent: Wednesday, 19 April 2017 7:00 PM To: Gary Richmond <gary.richm...@gmail.com> Cc: Peirce-L <peirce-l@list.iupui.edu> Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Triadic forms of constraint, determination, and interaction Gary, all ... I have every reason to suppose triadic relations are the very fabric of the universe, and for all I know every triadic relation has the potential to serve as a sign relation in one measure or another. In this view triadic relations do not evolve from lower species but are present from the beginning. So I do not believe symbols emerge from icons and indices so much as icons and indices devolve from their generic precursors in the triadic matrix. Regards, Jon http://inquiryintoinquiry.com On Apr 19, 2017, at 6:22 PM, Gary Richmond <gary.richm...@gmail.com<mailto:gary.richm...@gmail.com>> wrote: Jon, List, Nice post, and rereading it, quite helpful. However, I don't think that a consideration of sets and subsets fully does the trick. Or rather, it may for mathematics, but it does not do so sufficiently for semiotics, at least in my opinion. So the notion of 'constraints' has got to be fleshed out much further for semiotics. I earlier commented on the richness and originality of Terrence Deacon's Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. For Deacon constraints are seen in relation to what is absent, much like the hub of a wheel is a hole which yet allows for its functioning (as a student of the Tao, I know that this is no news to you!). More importantly for one of the key ideas of his book is that those constraints which bring about emergent processes are in their nature more complex than the constituents of a process because the complexity of such absential constraints is tied to their not being physical things: take away the spokes and the tire and the hub just disappears. Gary Furhman has done some interesting work as well in consideration of the organizing power of constraints in his book, Turning Signs http://gnusystems.ca/TS/TWindex.htm, a work which I've highly recommended in the past and have been recently re-reading parts of, esp. it's penultimate Chapter 18, which Gary referred to recently in another thread. (I should note that for both authors discussions of constraint include but go beyond semeiotic science, although perhaps not beyond semiosis itself.) In the light of thinking about constraints, I especially liked this comment in your message as to the complexity added in consideration of what you termed "mutual constraints": JA: There are by the way such things as mutual constraints, indeed, they are very common, and not just in matters of human bondage. So, for instance, the fact that objects constrain or determine signs in a given sign relation does not exclude the possibility that signs constrain or determine objects in that sign relation. I think that this is quite true, and that much more could be said regardomg it. Fuhrman, referring to an earlier book by Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain, gives an example of such mutual constraints in this sniippet. As Deacon (1997) points out, languages have adapted to human use. ‘The brain has co-evolved with respect to language, but languages have done most of the adapting’ (122) in Fuhrman, Turning Signs, Chapter 13. Best, Gary R
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