Re: Peirce List • Edwina Taborsky

ET:

I particularly like your comment that “signhood is a role in a triadic relation, a role that a thing bears or plays in a given context of relationships — it is not an absolute, non-relative property of a thing-in-itself, one that it possesses independently of all relationships to other things”.

I myself emphasize that this context of the role is made up of relationships (plural) — which gives the triad its capacity for complexity.  Therefore, as we see in Robert Marty’s lattice, a thing is never a thing-in-itself but is an action, a process, composed of complex relations.

Dear Edwina,

Things grow complex rather quickly once we start to think about all the roles a sign may play on all the stages where it struts and frets its parts.  There is no unique setting, no one scene, but concentric and overlapping contexts of relationship all have their bearing on the sign’s significance.

One strategy we have for dealing with these complexities and avoiding being overwhelmed by them is to build up a stock of well-studied examples, graded in complexity from the very simplest to the increasingly complex.  The wide world may always present us with situations more complex than any in our inventory of familiar cases but the better our stock of ready examples the more aspects of novel situations we can capture and the greater our odds of coping with them.

Resources

• Sign Relations
• Triadic Relations
• Relation Theory

cc: Cybernetics • Ontolog Forum • Peirce List • Structural Modeling • Systems Science